Garret spent a lot of time this week on money balance. As usual with balance it’s nothing final, but you can actually build some profitable parks now. Feels better and is a good first step towards a working economy :)

There’s been a suggestion over on our subreddit recently to allow connecting paths to the ride entrance/exit from the sides instead of just from the front that gained a lot of support, and we were able to make it happen:

And we added a toggle for looking through scenery:

Scenery can’t be clicked in this mode, so this allows to access shops, rides, paths or whatever else was hidden behind scenery, and you won’t accidentally delete it.

Community Update

You might remember H-POPS as the guy who added the first custom flat ride to Parkitect a while ago. He’s been very busy since with creating a fantastic looking modding tool that allows bringing custom objects into the game without requiring any code. It also has some other helpful features like setting up collisions on objects, which has been tricky to do for mods so far.

And most of all it has really great tools for animating rides with just a couple of mouse clicks:

It’s making use of the games code for ride animations, so ride animations created with this are able to perfectly match the feeling of our own rides.
We also gave him some of our internal tools for integration into his modding tool.
This is not available yet, but it looks like it’s progressing nicely :)

Luuk Holleman from ParkitectNexus released a nice Billboards mod recently:

These billboards can show your own images, and it even stores them in the savegame, so you can easily share them with other users of this mod!

Hey! It’s been a short month for us due to Pre-Alpha 6 being a week late, but here’s Pre-Alpha 7 anyways!
As usual, 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

Garret created a new Star Shape ride during the last art stream (which you can still watch here), and here it is done and in the game:

I’m really happy with how the animation turned out, especially with these physics-driven seat beams. I was also more careful with taking measurements for rotation speeds etc. from footage of real versions of this ride instead of eyeballing it (although my estimates weren’t too far off). I should go back and do the same for some older rides.

Pre-Alpha 7 Changelog:

- added Star Shape ride
- added deco builder categories
- added Ambient Occlusion (can be disabled in graphics settings)
- added some new deco objects, stone bench, new dirt path platforms
- added visualizations for the remaining person stat values
- added some more people outfits, hairstyles & hair color variation
- reduced people walking in circles on wide paths
- improved builder window loading times
- overall performance improvements
- fixed workmen dropping crates when loading savegame
- Linux: fixed decimal number input fields not working properly with a non-english locale
- Windows 10: fixed empty coaster/transport ride tabs when installing the game to C:/Program Files

Art Stream

We had another fun art stream this week - and to get back on our normal schedule there’ll be another one next week! :D
As usual, it’ll be on Wednesday, 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel.

Counting Down To

Devlog

The deco builder window received an overhaul this week. We added object categories to organize everything a bit better, and the window also opens faster again because it doesn’t have to load everything at once.

The categories themselves aren’t finalized yet.

Garret set up this style guide for wall pieces to make sure all of our wall sets (and modded ones) will somewhat fit together.

We also released some objects for modders as scale reference. You can get them here.

He also reworked the existing castle walls to fit this style and added a bunch of nice new objects :)
Raised dirt paths turn into these shaky wooden constructions now.

We also added some SSAO. It’s really subtle and hard to see in a side-by-side comparison, but it does make a difference in the game and works well with our art style. Some closeups, first without SSAO:

And with SSAO:

If you properly want to see the difference, open the images in new tabs and switch between them.