Art Stream

Hey, there’s a second art stream happening this month! As usual: on Wednesday, Garret creates some nice new Parkitect art live on his Twitch channel. We’re starting one hour earlier this time though - 12pm to 2pm.

Devlog

This week, we worked on hedges and fences.

You build them similarly to paths using click & drag:

They automatically snap to the closest tile edge.

At first we tried implementing them tile-based, like we did with the park fences, so there’d be one model for a flat fence, and one model for a sloped fence, and it’d place the correct one and rotate it depending on the terrain elevation. However, with hedges it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the best approach, since they need to follow the terrain shape pretty closely to look good, and we would have needed to create and manage quite a bunch of different tiles.

So in the end what we did instead is to have just one single flat hedge/fence model and warp that to match the terrain shape.

We got a nice selection of hedges/fences now, and adding more is pretty simple.

(The hedges are custom-colored by the way, just like the trees)

We also added these topiaries. They can be build off-grid, but sometimes you want to build them on-grid, for example when placing one precisely next to a hedge. We made it so you can hold a button to snap them to a grid:

You can build some nice gardens now :)

And we improved last weeks zone visualization to more clearly show the boundaries:

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 :)

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!