This week has been more of the work we did last week, except in crunch mode - fixing bugs, adding a splash and loading screens, making screen transitions work…not the most exciting stuff to talk about in a devlog I’m afraid!
The pre-pre-alpha builds are done and out now though (Edit: for the $100 “Early Prototypes” tier Kickstarter backers, you should have received a mail if you’re in that group), so we should slowly be returning to our regular work schedule soon.

Gordon got this catchy preview of song #2 for you this week:

It’s stuck in my head since a couple of days.

Garret redesigned the logo once more. It’s now a mix of the last two versions. We gave animating it a try:

He seems to be pretty satisfied with it so this one might stay.

Earlier this week he also spontaneously decided to do a quick impromptu art livestream. It somehow turned into a much longer session than planned and included the following results:

If you want to watch the entire thing there’s a recording of it available on his Twitch channel.

Hope you all had a good start into 2015! This should be a pretty intense year as there’s a bunch of exciting milestones ahead of us!

My work this year started with a simple thing - a sidebar menu. It only contains one button that opens a placeholder window for hiring staff so far…

…but it’ll grow eventually. It’ll contain some tools that you’ll probably need a bit less often than the ones in the bottom menu bar, so you can hide it to have it out of the way. Of course it should still be hidden the next time you start the game, so then I worked on saving settings like this one. This led to saving the positions of windows so they’re placed in the same position in which you closed them the next time you open them again (both while playing the game and after restarting it).

Next up was yet again more work on coasters. Since the coaster builder is working fairly well it was now time to give them some settings, and the most important one was allowing to change the train length and the number of trains running on the track.

For this it was necessary to figure out the maximum train length and amount that the track could support, and to determine that it’s necessary to know where it’s even possible to spawn trains. Here’s a debug view showing the possible spawn locations…:

(The blue one is a block brake section.)

…and with that the other tasks were easy to solve and we finally have proper support for multiple trains. Having multiple stations like in the screenshot above actually doesn’t fully work yet, but this is somewhat of a first step in that direction.

…aaand it’s possible to change coaster colors now:

(I’m bad at picking nice colors :/)

With that we can check off a good number of things that we wanted to get done before the first pre-alpha build for the “Early Prototypes” tier KS backers later this month. Still lots left to do though!

Hope you all had a nice christmas!

We took it a bit slow this week due to the holidays, so progress has mostly been bug fixes and minor things.

We talked a bit about having different types of terrain this week, like grass, sand, rocks…the tricky part with that is getting the transitions between arbitrary terrain types to look nice, so I experimented with creating a shader that does that.

It didn’t work too well:

We’ll have to find a different approach.

Another experiment was this UI element with a tip for pointing at something:

This one works really well and is now being used in the coaster stats view:

That’s it for this week. See you all next year!