It’s been a pretty crazy week :)
We released a new trailer and announced the Steam Early Access launch date (scroll a bit further down if you missed it!). Reactions to that have been really positive, and woah did we get a lot of reactions! We’ve been really busy answering questions about the game all over the internet. Add to that the release of Pre-Alpha 9 and all the feedback for that and you can imagine there’s been a lot going on.

The remaining time this week was spent on getting the Giga Coaster into the game that you might have seen Garret model during one of our previous monthly Art Livestreams:

It can go higher and steeper than any other coaster in the game currently (although we’ll probably enable the steeper slopes for some of the other coasters too).

The coaster support code had to be a bit updated for it to allow these square supports and the angled ones that are slightly offset from the top, and after a certain height it turns off the angled side supports entirely. Some of the older coasters should benefit from these changes too.

While I was already working on supports anyways, ground-level tracks finally spawn supports if you terraform below them as you’d expect:

Pre-Alpha 9 is now available for download!

Grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.
Use the key resender if you lost your download link.

The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We finished the UI for creating and building blueprints:

Building raised objects has been improved to be faster and easier:

And we spent some time on performance improvements. Especially guest performance is much better now, so we increased their spawn rate too :)

Pre-Alpha 9 Changelog

- added Tourbillon
- added general purpose blueprints (can contain about anything now)
- added cobblestone and gravel path styles
- added changing fence style of flat rides
- added Tilt Shift option to graphics settings menu (disabled by default)
- added options for hiding paths, attractions
- added renaming people
- added new settings screen (+ changing resolution, rebinding keys)
- added a few missing scenery structure pieces
- guests without a map can also head for specific locations like shops and rides etc. now, but less frequently
- did a tracked ride excitement rating balance pass
- made it possible to raise fences
- changed rocks to be recolorable
- improved raised object building
- improved save/load dialog performance
- improved people performance
- overall performance improvements
- increased guest spawn rate
- improved error handling when encountering problems with loading modded objects
- fixed people sometimes getting stuck
- fixed ride entrance/exit sometimes rotating towards a path it couldn’t connect with
- fixed a case where deleting a bobsled coaster station would crash the game
- fixed a case where guests would never leave a coaster
- fixed round settings of some flat rides getting reset
- fixed zoning tools and other mouse tools deleting objects when right-clicking
- fixes issues on Linux with Nvidia GPUs

Art Steam

Time for another Art Stream! Join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

It’s almost exactly 2 years this week since we started working on Parkitect, so we thought we’d do something different for the devlog: let’s take a look back at some pictures from the very beginning of development, from before this blog started :)
Alright!

It all started out as an experiment on simulating coasters, so naturally the first gif shows some early coaster physics. The tracks are just lots of boxes placed along a curve. This must be from the first couple days of development.

A few days later there are multiple trains, a station, banked segments, and the tracks have been cleaned up to get an idea how properly looking coaster tracks could be done.

Fast-forward a week and there are guests who can ride the coaster, get some food and sit on benches. That hot dog is the only programmer art that’s still in the game! I’m somewhat proud of that.

Another week later we got some very basic terrain and path building tools. Until this point there were no building tools, everything from the previous tests was placed in the game from code. The first terrain experiments were voxel-based, but it was clear very quickly that this wouldn’t work very well from an isometric camera perspective and it would be too ambitious for a single programmer considering with how many other systems (paths, coasters, water) it would have to work.

Coasters learned to derail, although they didn’t always behave like you’d expect.

With some very basic coaster building tools it was now possible to sort of build a park!

Balloons have been in the game for a very long time.

Garret joins the project mid-April and creates this mockup for what the “final” art might look like.

Around the end of April the first proper art is being put into the game.

And the work on flat rides begins - the first one is an exciting square beam to sit on!

By the end of May a lot more art has been done, including some rides and shops that are still in the game.

The long and tiring process of searching for a name for the game begins, and we start working on intuitive building tools that normal players can actually use.

Near the end of August we have enough of the game working in a very basic but presentable state to have an idea what it’ll take us to finish it. It gets Kickstarted and this blog begins :)