Pre-Alpha: out now!

Hey!

The first public Parkitect pre-alpha build is available now! If you backed us on Kickstarter or pre-ordered on our website (which you can still do by the way!) you can now grab this build from Humble! 

If you don’t own a Humble account or the game isn’t listed there, all you have to do is enter the mail address that you used when backing us/preordering over here:

https://www.humblebundle.com/resender

And you’ll be sent a link to the download page.
If you changed your email address or something else isn’t working you can reach us at: themeparkitect@gmail.com

Archipelago Park by Lord Gonchar, from Parkitect Nexus

We hope you’re having fun with the bits of the game that are there already and are looking forward to our future updates :)

Also don’t be afraid to send us a mail with your feedback or participate in the discussions over at our subreddit!

Pre-Alpha 2 Changelog

- added “hired” date to employee info tab
- added “Opinions” tab for attractions, shops
- added indication for toilets that need cleaning
- added confirmation window before going into edit mode of an opened tracked ride
- added: people can walk across terrain now (if they’re not on a path anymore for some reason)
- balance: reduced guest dirt tolerance
- reduced coaster friction a tiny bit
- lowered guests interest in re-visiting the same type of attraction depending on how often they’ve been on this type of attraction before and how long ago the last visit was
- made guests not leave queues if it starts raining
- made sure guests don’t walk past dirty toilets if they really need one (but they won’t like it)
- made janitors/handymen drop trash/crates if you pick them up
- improved terraforming performance
- disallowed raising tower rides through objects placed above them/raising underground towers out of ground
- increased minimum loop size
- started working on wooden coaster sounds
- fixed dent at the top of loops
- fixed camera not properly following trains anymore since 1.3
- fixed a case where a tracked ride train would not properly stop in the station
- fixed problems with placing water lilies
- fixed: clicking on a shop would sometimes select the shopkeeper inside
- fixed a case where queue lines would get messed up/break after loading savegame
- fixed rotating rides sometimes not stopping properly during low FPS
- fixed Teacups ride behaving strangely if not build in default orientation
- fixed a problem with stat calculation for rotated coaster blueprints
- fixed some flat ride platform tiles not being properly connected sometimes
- fixed puke hovering above stairs
- tracked ride stats should be more stable between different test runs now

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Parkitect

Update 61

Guests learned how to walk across the terrain this week in case they’re suddenly not on a path anymore, either because you dropped them somewhere or deleted the path they were standing on. They’re pretty confused and just randomly walk around until they eventually get back onto a path, but that’s a lot better than getting stuck and not moving at all as they did before.

That means I got to throw guests off paths onto various structures to test what happens - for science! And fun.

(This is what the “parks” I build look like 99% of the time - just test cases for certain conditions.)

Making them able to walk across the terrain was one of these tasks I’ve been procrastinating since forever, and in the end it was neither hard nor a lot of work to do. But I also made use of code originally written for other parts of the game that did not exist a couple months back…sometimes it can be a good idea to let a tricky programming task wait and it might become easier to solve due to other code changes, or you learn something new that helps or suddenly have an idea how to tackle it differently.

Sandbox Pre-Alpha

It looks like we’ll be releasing the pre-alpha later this week! It’ll be available to everyone who backed our Kickstarter or bought the game from our website. We’ll post here, on our subreddit and Twitter once it’s been uploaded.

If you’ve been following this devlog you already know this, but here’s what to expect from this release anyways:

This will be an early WIP release and not quite representative of the final game, so you’ll surely run across some bugs. We’ll be putting out updates fairly frequently, and some will contain major changes (new features, systems, overhauls, etc). That said, the game is playable, though there is no goal or challenge yet. Money has no impact at the moment, but the guests act more or less as we want them to. Right now the game is about building cool stuff and trying to keep people happy and ratings high. Money will become an important factor soon, as we’re working on the resource system and staff system that are major factors of it. These updates will be free, in case some were wondering.

With that out of the way, we’re excited to see what everyone makes with it! :)

Parkitect Nexus

Parkitect Nexus is a fan-made sharing site made by one of our awesome backers, Luuk Holleman. It’s a great place to share coaster blueprints and park saves, and Luuk’s even pulling data out of the saves to display on the site! Check it out, and be sure to share some creations once you get your hands on the game. There’s already a bunch of really cool stuff on there!

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Parkitect

Update 60

Phew. We completed another build, so if you’re one of our $40 Kickstarter backers you should be able to download it from Humble soon. I’ve attached the change log to the end of this post.

As you see that’s a relatively long list including some bigger changes, so we’ll give our testers some time now to find the problems that we missed, while we work on a couple of new things in the meantime.

We had a super fun art livestream this week where Garret modeled this new Wave Swinger ride, and I’ve put it into the game since.

Really happy with how it turned out :)

$40 Backer Build Changelog v1.3

- added Blueprints (saving tracked ride designs)
- added Wave Swinger ride
- added new topiaries
- added a bunch of new build sfx
- added new Entertainer walk animation
- added shop and attraction satisfaction rates
- added Toilets getting dirty if used; Janitors clean them
- added some employee stats
- tweaked coaster physics (increased friction, so some old rides might not work anymore)
- did a balancing pass on flat ride and tracked ride stats
- did a balancing pass on guest happiness and ride preference
- made guests better at judging how much they liked a ride (Ferris Wheel and transport rides are still problematic)
- made terraforming tool and tower ride height changer feel more responsive
- shortened queue signs and lamps to fit into tunnels
- despawning derailed cars after a while; enabled collisions between cars
- increased max. support height on Suspended Coaster
- moved shops back a bit so guests don’t clip into them as badly
- made park visualizations (happiness, trash) respond faster
- guests: tweaked collision avoidance to look more natural, should also result in fewer collisions; better foot placement while walking
- increased attraction builder preview image sizes
- clamping number input fields to valid ranges
- improved the look of wooden supports on some terrain configurations
- fixed terraforming tool sometimes producing weird unexpected results with smoothing enabled
- fixed terraforming flatten tool not properly following the mouse cursor
- fixed cursor jumping around near vertical walls in terraforming tools
- fixed a case where guests would step onto employee paths
- fixed guests getting stuck if toilet they’re using is being deleted
- fixed tracked ride entrance/exit being deleted if adjacent station platform was removed
- fixed some problems with longitudinal G force calculation
- fixed a case where a path tile failed to delete and gave infinite refunds
- fixed park entrance being misaligned
- fixed newly hired employees appearing in the list of whatever employee tab is currently opened in the employee manager window
- fixed wooden supports clipping through the track
- fixed ghost train behaviour and stats for multi-station tracked rides
- fixed people getting confused on stairs (most notably guests on stair queues)
- fixed bench/lamp/bin-builder not previewing correct prices while multi-building objects using Shift key
- fixed fence builder not previewing building costs when dragging
- fixed park info window opened from sidebar menu being slightly different than when opened from clicking on park entrance
- fixed guests not receiving as much nausea on rides as intended
- might fix a bug that caused workers to stop working (blind fix, let me know if it still happens)

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Parkitect

Update 59

Art Stream

It’s the end of the month, so Garret is streaming his work on some new Parkitect art again! As usual, come join us on his Twitch channel on Wednesday from 12pm to 2pm.

Time converter at worldtimebuddy.com

Devlog

Aaand we’re back to fixing and polishing once more :)

This week we fixed the remaining bigger bugs we knew of from the testing group, then went on to taking care of minor problems and visual glitches.

We also did some balancing, so tracked ride stats make more sense now. Guests became interested in a wider range of rides. They were notoriously picky before, which made the game feel very unfair. Coaster physics have been tweaked a bit.

Garret did a spontaneous stream where he worked on some new Entertainer animations. You can still watch it here.

Not much more to say that could be interesting this week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Parkitect