Update 24

This is Update 24, so I guess this marks half a year of weekly devlog updates. Yay!

The coaster builder received highlights for the currently selected segment this week, making it much less confusing to understand what’s going on:

And it’s finally possible to adjust the speed limit of brakes, so we’re really using every last bit of space in this window now:

Block brakes can optionally act like normal brakes and slow the train down to a specified speed if the block ahead of them is clear or not brake at all.

Shops and flat rides received grid lines highlighting the ground tiles they’re being built on which both adds to the blueprint look we’ve got for build previews and can be helpful for raised building:

Niveks suggested on our subreddit to allow scaling up the rocks from Update 23. Nice idea!

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Parkitect

Update 23

One goal for this month is to resolve the biggest remaining annoyances of the coaster builder - first and foremost on our list was adding the build previews for the initial station tile and the entrance/exit:

It might not seem very exciting at first since these previews look just like those of any other buildable thing in the game that you have seen on this blog a couple times before, but since coasters work a bit differently from everything else they’d been missing here until now.

It also means we can build rotated and raised stations now!

Another annoyance was not being able to modify coaster tracks at any position. It was only possible to remove or add new segments to the end of the track. Not anymore:

The track builder UI got some new options since Update 21 and is still missing a couple more…it’s getting a bit cramped maybe?

Speaking of UI - trees have color variants now:

Unlike rides for which colors can be freely chosen these have a predefined set of colors (since this is a bit easier to use and it wouldn’t make much sense to give them any color anyways).

There’s also a new set of rocks that I like a lot:

I’m really satisfied with this week, it feels like we got a lot of useful stuff done :)

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Parkitect

Update 22

Gordon delivered a bunch of new sound effects this week, which is always a joy. He also made some great progress on the first song for the game. Here’s a (non-final) preview:

The remaining builder windows (terraforming, deco, path items) have been implemented, so everything we have in the game so far is controllable from the new UI system now. There’s still a lot of work left until everything is cleaned up and working as you’d expect but I think we’re slowly switching our main focus back on game features now.

There’s been some progress on the banking angle UI:

We can put limits on banking angles (the grayed out part at the top) which will be needed depending on the type of coaster you’re building. There’s also a yellow fill indicating the delta between this segments angle and the angle of the previous segment. It’s purely cosmetic for now but should become more important later on.

…oh, and here’s some wobbly trees as an excuse for the lack of more exciting gifs this week.

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Parkitect

Update 21

We put the swinging ship from last weeks livestream into the game:

Garret also modeled another ride this week but that one probably won’t go into the game anytime soon.

The old ride platforms got replaced with path tiles (depending on which type of path is connected to the exit):

That small gap between the ride and exit tile has to be removed.

We experimented with giving parts of our models a bit more depth by drawing some shading into the vertex colors:

It’s pretty subtle but we think it’s worth the effort.

And of course there’s also been more UI work this week…

Like the rest of the UI it isn’t final, but the coaster builder is quite useable now. There’s still a couple things missing, but it’s really exciting to finally have an easy method for building coasters :)

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Parkitect