Parkitect early build available

For the $40 Kickstarter crowd, the authors have released a preview build of the game. Looking forward to your impressions. If there are warm fuzzies, we'll create a new forum for it.

Looks like a more modern more cartoonish version of RCT2. But is it as customizable as that game? That's what'll make or break it.

I dunno... at this point they're working more on the engine than the gameplay, as I would expect. It's a little rough, as I would expect, but it's not impossible to start making stuff...

What improvements does this game have to offer from RCT2? It almost looks like the same game to me.

I'm going to create a brand new game from scratch. It's going to have a yellow round man with a big mouth eating pellets in a maze with no dead ends. In the middle of the maze will be a box in which four different colored ghosts will emerge from. These ghosts can kill the yellow guy if they touch him, and they will chase him around the maze trying to catch him. There will be four larger pellets in the maze that will give the yellow guy the power to turn the ghosts blue so he can eat them. The object of the game is to get the yellow guy to eat all the pellets in the maze before the ghosts kill him. When he does so, he will get a brand new maze to try. There will also be different fruits that pace across the maze at different times, giving the yellow guy extra points if the eats it before it disappears. He will start the game with three lives. A certain amount of points will get the yellow guy an extra life.

I will call this game "Yellow Ballman." I will ask for money on Kickstarter to be able to make the game. I do not expect to get sued by the owners of Pac-man because I made this game from scratch, and was funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

That was a little douchey.

Krause: Timber-Rider called. He wants his post back.

I know. I don't know how effective the excessive douchiness will be in making my point. Hate on the post all you want, but please don't hate the point I'm trying to make. I tried. :)

Here is a less amusing version: The similarities are so close between RCT2 and what I've seen so far from Parkitect that I don't see a difference. The roller coasters even have the same rough angles, and the queues even have the same color stripes. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Parkitict creators used some code from RC2.

Is this game going to be what everyone wanted from RCT3? Is that the point?

Key difference – there's a Mac version of Parkitect.

Definitely a bit rough at this point.

Looks like they're riding with the buzzbars up. Doesn't anyone care about virtual safety anymore? ;-P

Richard Bannister just made me completely change my opinion. I just realised that I haven't played RCT2 since I bought my Mac six years ago. I am suddenly excited about this game. Sorry that I caused a ruckus. :)

The rides do not have the same 'rough angles', as the coasters have a means to change the banking by degrees in several different directions, as well as more options for steepness of hills.

The DevLog is really great with showing off what this game will do that isn't like RCT2.

After spending a little time with it...

TONS of potential, but frustratingly incomplete at this point. I can't even get a first half of a steel coaster built without running into some sort of glitch where if I start really editing the track, it leaves phantom track pieces that should have been deleted.

The whole key to opening up coaster design is the ability to set the bank angle of any track piece. Equally important is the sizing feature with the +/- buttons. Such simple ideas that completely break the old idea of fitting pre-fab pieces together. Between the two, coaster design is on a whole new level.

There's a long way to go still. I have to admit that I'm initially a little taken aback at how incomplete it is. Once they get this thing up and running for real and it gets familiar, I think it could be a lot of fun.

Building is still pretty unintuitive and lacking some helpful features. (All of which may be user error at this point - so help if you can)

For the life of me, I can't even get close to building pathways on raised, tight-fitting structures. Like in something like this:

Building the pathways to the entrance and exit is flat out impossible. There's no visual cues to show me where I'm trying to put the path or if it's even really possible.

Also another peeve based on the way I work, you can't build backwards. I tend to do the last part of a coaster building backwards from the station and that's not possible as far as I can tell.

So yeah, lots of little quirks and things to be worked out and still the sheer openness of building options is a tad overwhelming. There's just too many possibilities. It's gonna take some time to fully wrap my head around as far as what works and looks good - the little 'go to' tricks, so to speak.

And little glitches like where the track runs through the tunnel in that screenshot. There's no collision detection for the track and tunnel, just for the track and track which allows visual glitches like that.

Honestly, these guys should take on Gonch as a QA consultant. I hope you didn't pay $40 for the privilege of QAing their game. It really should be the other way around.

Yeah, heights are a challenge. Right now if you turn them on during construction (of rides only, not paths), they only appear where you mouse-over, which isn't helpful for figuring out how you're going to go over or under something not near your mouse. I submitted that feedback already. Agreed with the rest of your feedback.

I'm not sure I'll bother with the feedback at this point - honestly hadn't really thought about it. It seems so early in the process that I'm working on the assumption that some of these things just aren't there yet more so than they're broken. Someone should just point them to this thread, I'm sure I'll have more to say the more I mess around.

Well they're now watching this thread, so consider your feedback noted. :)

LostKause said:

I will call this game "Yellow Ballman." I will ask for money on Kickstarter to be able to make the game. I do not expect to get sued by the owners of Pac-man because I made this game from scratch, and was funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

Now that you mention it, even the weed-growing aspect of uncut park grass is carried over into this game

Here's another one I noticed that I forgot to mention earlier.

If you build entrance paths next to each other, if the ends (the last piece that attached to the main path that has the sign) of both are beside each other they connect to each other rather than each connecting to the main path. The logic that makes an entrance stay together and place the sign at the end wants to use the same rules to connect to any entrance pathway ending to create one entrance path.