The $40 backers build went live earlier this week, and we’ve received tons of valuable feedback so far with many good suggestions. Also plenty of bug reports, but finding the problems that we missed so far is the purpose of this build after all, so that’s alright :)

Most of this week was thus spend on collecting and evaluating what everyone had to say. We also released a hotfix patch that fixes some of the worst bugs that had been reported so far.

Some people have built pretty impressive parks - here’s one that we particularly liked:

Garret finished the carousel from his art stream earlier this week, and we put it into the game:

We’ve done more research on Steam Early Access over the last few weeks, and what we’ve heard a lot is that an Early Access launch has to be treated almost identical to a real launch, meaning the game should be as finished as possible. We’re not near that yet, and as you know that’s not really what we planned the Early Access release to be either, so we decided it would be a better idea to do a much smaller launch for now: we’ll extend the current pre-alpha phase and for now only sell the game over our website while we’re working on getting more content and core features done. We’ll still go on Steam Greenlight in August though, which should allow us to distribute builds over Steam. We’ll just do it in a more private way instead of selling it on the big Steam Early Access store yet.

Edit: as we’ve learned we’re not allowed to distribute Steam keys as long as the game is not being available for purchase directly through Steam, so we’ll keep distributing the pre-alpha builds through Humble.

That means everyone who backed us on Kickstarter and preordered will get a build soon just as planned (and everyone interested will be able to get into the pre-alpha too), and we get more time to work on everything so we can leave a good first impression on the huge Steam audience once we finally release it over there.

We finished and implemented the Miniature Railway transport ride:

Compared to the Suspended Monorail it’s significantly slower, but it can transport more people at once.

Rides received a test run mode. Tracked rides received support height limits. And of course there’s the obligatory number of small improvements and fixes.

We should have a build for our $40 tier backers next week. This’ll be the first time a bigger group of people will have access to the game, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes! 

It’s been a rather unremarkable week for the devlog. Garret has been busy trying to keep the craftsmen refurbishing his new place under control. I’ve had to spend a couple days on bookkeeping and taxes. Gordon has been trying to convince a local theme park of letting him do some sound recordings (with uncertain results so far). He also delivered the sound effects for the remaining flat rides that we have in the game right now, and we got them implemented.

We’re approaching another build now, which means the remaining time went into testing and fixing, so there’s not much to say apart from that really. I guess most notable would be that I finally added some checks to prevent you from building rides and shops halfway into the terrain:

It’s been one of the long-standing tasks that I somewhat procrastinated on - in the end it was trivial to implement! You can still build rides/shops underground, but they have to be completely covered now.

I still need to disallow dragging terrain through existing stuff, though….hmm!

Garret did a spontaneous art stream to test his new internet connection! He worked on the beginnings of a mini train. Here’s the current state:

The entire recording is still available for a while over on his Twitch channel if you missed it.