Ride Design Livestream

Garret will be doing another ride design livestream next week!

If you want to watch how he models a new ride for the game and maybe give him some instant feedback or talk to us you can tune in to his Twitch channel on Friday 21st at 12pm PST. It’ll probably take until ~2pm PST.

We’ll upload a timelapse to our YouTube channel afterwards.

This weeks progress

Alright, on to this weeks progress! As expected it’s all about UI and will stay so for a while. Since most of the UI looks about the same these next few devlog entries might not be the most exciting but anyways! It’s gotta be done :)

The first priority for now is to get the UI working at all. We’re using Unitys UI features that are brand new in the 4.6 beta version, so we’re still learning the best ways to solve things and are figuring out the workflows for putting everything together. Also, since we’re working with a beta version of Unity we sometimes stumble over some bugs, but the Unity team is pretty good and fast with ironing them out.
Then, once we figured out how everything should work and it is functional we’ll do a second pass and figure out how to make it look better.

I started the UI implementation with the shop builder since that’s a fairly uncomplicated and self-contained component. It’s really just a list of items with an icon and label:

Good enough for now!

Next I started creating the track builder which is probably one of the more complicated UIs we have to create. It’s still missing tons of features but apart from that it probably looks pretty much as you’d expect:

We had to design and implement a custom UI element for the banking level controls. Here it is in action!

It snaps to angle increments of 5° which should be fine-grained enough (anything less would make it really finnicky to use and would not add much value). When holding the shift key it snaps to increments of 45°.

Besides UI work, Garret redid the paths this week. Before they had more geometry (left), now they are just a flat quad (right) which is a bit cheaper to render and looks the same in game.

The new paths have some additional tiles for wider paths (not used yet) and there’s an extra piece for connecting to shops:

They should also be easier to reskin for different types of paths.

And he redesigned the game logo!

The new guests are in the game!

We only got a handful of different clothes and hairstyles, but that already gives us lots of variety:

And we can easily add more in the future.

Female guests are still missing, but that should mostly just be a matter of modeling them.

This week was all about replacing the old guest animations and adding some additional new ones. Here are some impressions!

ಠ_ಠ

Did a bit more UI work this week - here’s the start of what’s supposed to become a menu:

And we’ve added a height indicator for raised building previews:

Getting the new guests into the game took more planning and work than expected but we finally got them into a somewhat usable state today.

This weeks update was a bit late because I hoped I could show them ingame, but we’re not quite there yet - here’s a screenshot though of a couple of randomly generated ones from the body parts that Garret made so far:

Obviously the hair is still missing and the skin and cloth colors aren’t right yet (but hey, at least they HAVE skin color now) :)

Also, they don’t only look much nicer and can be more varied but are more efficient than the old ones as well, so we should be able to have more on screen at once than before.