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 :|

Garret will be doing another art livestream next week. Watch his Twitch channel on Wednesday from 1pm-3pm PST to see him create some new Parkitect art.

This was pretty much the least interesting week imaginable for the devlog, since we spent it entirely on testing the game and fixing bugs. Amongst others Garret brought the game to Full Indie to let people try our most recent version. The area requiring the most fixes turned out to be the savegames: there’s a lot that could potentially go wrong when trying to restore the state of thousands of objects, and failing to restore one single object properly can oftentimes cause a domino effect that makes others load wrong as well. Made some good progress here though, and we also got some new tools that should help with debugging savegames in the future.

The only truly visible progress this week is this list showing all the tasks that need to be completed by your staff:

This one started out as a debug tool as well, but it turned out to be useful for players too.

I got myself a Mac Mini this week for testing Parkitect on OS X. It needed some fixes as well, but is working fine now :)

We decided to submit Parkitect to IndieCade. The deadline is May 1, so next week will probably be spent on similar tasks as this one to get the game into the best shape we possibly can by then.

And we made ourselves a long list of everything that needs to be done for the Early Access release. Lots to do!

We’re working towards the release of the second pre-pre-alpha build for our $100 tier Kickstarter backers now, so a significant amount of time is spent on fixing bugs and finishing/improving unfinished stuff. Overall I’d say we’re in good shape though, it feels like there’s less to do than for the first build. I’m really glad we’re doing these small intermediary releases before the big public Early Access one…it forces us to have a somewhat stable game at all times, which should help to reduce crunch times.

The log flume received its conveyor belt lifts:

We finally added the ¼ height slopes to the track builder. We can also put seperate limits on up/down slope heights for tracked ride types now (notice how the log flume can have steep down slopes, but not steep up slopes). And we can put minimum size restrictions on slope transitions - the high and medium slopes in the back are the smallest possible sizes you can build, but the high slope transition is a bit longer.

I‘ve started turning last weeks water graphics test into water that you can actually build in the game:

Could use some splash effects, but this’ll do for now.

Garret made these nice replacements for the placeholder wooden supports:

And here’s some new scenery - and path tunnels!

Garret had some fun with all the new stuff and built this nice little swamp park :)