Update 48

Art Stream

Garret is going to stream some art again! Come join us Wednesday from 1pm-3pm PST on his Twitch channel to chat while watching some new art being created.

Devlog

A good amount of time this week has been spent on calculating a bunch of statistical numbers for tracked rides. They’ll be used for determining how much guests enjoyed your ride. The balancing is still entirely off and it’ll most likely take lots of tweaking over a long amount of time to get it right, but it’s a start.

Gordon delivered the first set of sound effects for flat rides this week! Each ride got at least 3 unique sounds, so Gordon won’t run out of work soon and getting them into the game takes some time as well, but there are finally some motors, pneumatics and metallic clicks and creaks to hear.

And we’ve added a Topple Tower ride:

It’s pretty big and slightly weird, but also quite interesting :)

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Parkitect

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