Update 57

We finally added some extra wide stations for the wing coaster:

…which required some bigger changes, but the positive side effect is that tracked rides don’t need an entrance at every station anymore, as some of you requested.

Garret made a couple new generic scenery items:

He also did a first balancing pass on food, so resource and production costs of food items and their effects on guests should make more sense now.

There haven’t been any major new bugs popping up in the current testing phase, so we moved on to fixing a bunch of smaller stuff. Keep an eye out for a new build within the next 1-2 days if you’re in the testing group.

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Parkitect

Update 56

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.

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Parkitect

Update 55

Art Stream

It’s time for an art stream again! Garret will be streaming the creation of some new art on his Twitch channel on Wednesday from 12pm to 2pm. He plans to start working on a Carousel!

Devlog

It’s been a busy week! We’ve added some new food stalls:

This is Bubble Tea, Chinese Food, Mini Donuts, Popcorn and Ice Cream.

And we added a Mini Coaster:

It’s supposed to be used for fairly relaxed rides through some scenery, so its building options are rather limited.

We put the guest names from the $50 Kickstarter tier into the game, so these uniquely named guests come to check out your park every now and then.

I spent the majority of this week on a rather big feature though - tracked ride blueprints! That means you’ll be able to save your tracked ride for placing it in another park or for sharing it with someone. It’ll also allow us to ship the game with some pre-designed rides eventually (which we’ll also need for the $500 Kickstarter tier).

I initially didn’t write the code with the idea in mind that coasters will ever be moved or rotated around so some bigger changes were required, but it’s almost working now:

I tried to finish it for this weeks $40 tier build, but there’s still a couple things left to do and due to the bigger code changes that had to be done we decided to leave it out for now and properly test and finish it later.
The build still got delayed longer than initially planned due to this, but it’s done now and we sent it off to Humble! It’ll probably take another couple days until they uploaded it though. You’ll receive an email once it’s available :)

Gordon bought a Concertina last month.

He’s still learning but already used it for a song!

It’s another one that’s supposed to play in the background while building stuff.

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Parkitect

Update 54

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! 

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Parkitect