Yes! That big milestone is finally close - we’ll be releasing Parkitect on Steam Early Access on May 5th.

Our Steam store page is live already, so don’t hesitate and put the game on your wishlist! :D

We prepared a cool new trailer over the past few months for this occasion, made by Marlon Wiebe and Gordon:

And we also revamped our website and updated it with a bunch of recent screenshots!

The beautiful parks in these shots and in the trailer have been created by the awesome Silvarret and TheDeeGee.

So what’s changing now that the game will be on Steam?

Not too much for now for you guys, really! We’ll keep up our regular development schedule, so the weekly devlogs and monthly Art Streams and new game versions continue as usual (although - we hope we’ll be so busy talking to all the new players on Steam during May that we’ll have less time for development, so don’t expect a huge May update).

We’ll finally change the game’s label from Pre-Alpha to Alpha, so the next release will be called Alpha 1. The plan is to release this to everyone who owns the game on Humble a few days before the Steam release, just so we got a bit of time to iron out any last-minute bugs.

And we’ll also finally bump up the price slightly from $15 to $17.99, starting on May 5th (only applies for those of you who haven’t bought the game yet, of course). As was the case with the current price we expect this to stay stable for quite some time, with another small increase once significant amounts of new content and features have been added again.

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 :)

We remade the settings screen:

Apart from looking nicer there’s now a proper way to rebind keys and we’re adding a bunch of new hotkeys. This is also open to modding, so mods can make their controls configurable through this and register their own hotkeys.
The Graphics tab gained options for changing the resolution, which means we can finally disable Unitys default configuration launcher that opened before the game.

Guests now properly head for certain parts of the park even if they don’t own a map, but less frequently than if they have one.

Fences can be raised now (and there’s a new one), rocks received some coloring options, and we added some missing roof pieces:

(Couldn’t think of a proper building to showcase these, heh)

Flat rides can use the “spooky” platform fences that were only used by the Haunted House so far, or you can disable them entirely for easier theming:

We also changed the approach how we’re calculating the excitement rating of tracked rides since the old one didn’t work for dark rides like the Ghost Mansion Ride. We did a balancing pass that should result in some more diversified and fair excitement ratings, but as usual with balancing we’ll see how that works out once everyone gets to play with it.