Update 47

This week was all about coasters/tracked rides. Building track segments costs money now. Demolishing a segment refunds a part of the building costs depending on the age of the segment: within the first couple minutes of building it restores the entire costs, so you can experiment with the track layout without having to worry about wasting money. Afterwards it very slowly refunds less and less.

Some janky seams between track segments got smoothened:

We added half loops!

And vertical tracks!

Both were kind of tricky, so I’m glad they’re finally done and seem to work.

I’ve been thinking about how to display height marks on tracks in the least confusing way. The problem is that you can easily get multiple markers occupying roughly the same space on screen, making them hard to read:

I tried scaling them by mouse distance:

Helps!

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Parkitect

Update 46

I’ve spent this week almost entirely on taking a closer look at the biggest performance bottlenecks. Results:

  • up to 15 FPS increase in some places of our test park on my machine
  • ~80% faster load times for the test park
  • got rid off some noticeable lag when building/removing track segments, was especially crazy when demolishing an entire coaster
  • identified 2-3 other things that could result in an improvement

These were the low-hanging fruit at the moment.

We started working on scenery structures. Nothing there to show yet really, we’re just experimenting at this point to figure out how they’re supposed to work.

And we’ve added Umbrellas:

(Yes, the shops colors don’t match yet.)

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Parkitect

Update 45

Bit of a smaller update this week.

So far we only had randomly generated guests. This week I worked on a tool that lets us predefine guests with a certain name/look/traits. We’ll need this to fulfill our $50/$150/$200 Kickstarter tier rewards.

We added a notification bar that’ll keep you informed of important activities inside the park that need your attention. It works pretty much as you would expect - if you receive a notification the notification bar slides down a bit to reveal the notification, then after a couple of seconds it slides back up again to take up as little space as possible.

You can manually expand it to see the last couple messages.

Garret defined some UI style guidelines, so we started cleaning up some of the existing windows a bit.

And we finally got the graphics for wider paths working:

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Parkitect

Update 44

If you’ve checked our website this week you might have noticed that we updated it with a bunch of new screenshots (all taken ingame by the way and without any retouching). Go check them out!

Sam Gibson, one of our testers, built this nice little park you see on the screenshots. He’s not only great at building good looking parks, but also helped us a ton with finding and reproducing bugs - thanks, Sam! :)

This is the first time we’ve seen a park of this size ourselves - it was really amazing for us to see all the new stuff that’s been accumulating since the last time we’ve taken proper screenshots (~August 2014?) in one single picture.
Having a proper park will also help tremendously with performance testing and optimizing.

The second pre-pre-alpha build has been released early this week, which means we can finally add new stuff to the game again without having to be afraid of breaking anything. Quite a liberating feeling, to be honest :)

The Gravitron from the last art livestream is in the game now. As you can see it’s also finally possible to change the custom colors of flat rides.

Also did some more UI work, so it’s possible to set park and ride entrance fees now.

We added a Pretzel stall:

And a Wild Mouse coaster :)

And we did some initial work on a proper savegame picker:

We seriously had to work with copying savegame files around because there was no way to select which one should be loaded until now. Yep :|

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Parkitect