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:

Phew! We got everything into a state that we’re happy with, so our $100 tier Kickstarter backers will receive pre-pre-alpha build 2 early next week. That means next up are the Early Access build around August, and the pre-alpha build for $40 tier backers sometime between then and now.

As expected, this week was pretty similar to last one (test & fix & improve stuff all day long :|), but we managed to also get some new stuff done in the end.

We added a rain effect:

And Garret drew lots of new UI icons, here are some of them:

(I don’t think we’ve shown the experiences tab yet, by the way? Well yeah, it’s just a log list of everything this guest has done.)

Tracked rides received some proper (automatically generated) icons:

Gordon delivered a bunch of new sound effects, and a sweet new track that is meant to play in the background if you’re in a zoomed out view, overlooking your park.

And here’s the timelapse of this weeks livestream:

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!