We added an option for hiring a second research team, for a fee of $5000.



$5000 (and the monthly research cost!) is a lot during the beginnings of a scenario, but once the finances have stabilized this will speed up the second half of playing a scenario a bit where money is coming in fairly steadily but new rides are needed for attracting more guests.

And we finished the German translation. This helped with checking whether all text in the game is translatable, and since German text is fairly long it also helped to uncover some spots where the UI needed to be adjusted a bit to better fit the text. Other languages should probably fit as well now without too many further changes. Wunderbar!



We’re waiting a bit longer with getting more translations done because the text for the campaign and tutorial is still changing a bit but as soon as that’s final it’s all ready to be sent off to translators.

Hey, we’re finally working on something again that can be shown without spoiling anything! Nice!We started working on the tutorial, which will also be the first (skippable) scenario of the campaign.It will take you step by step

through the most important features of the game and give some explanations, so we started with getting a system in place for this.

Beta 9 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.


Doing an Art Stream wasn’t possible this month, but we got a new ride for you anyways! Here’s the TopScan:



We also added three new basic default terrains to pick from when starting a new park so you got at least something more interesting to choose from than just the flat terrain until the campaign is released without having to generate a terrain using the scenario editor.
The new maps are Lake:



River:



And Hills:



The park entrance for all default maps has been moved towards the center as well.


All submissions can be found on the Workshop - thanks for everyone participating!
These are the 5 winning entries:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1431562314&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430340520&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430468466&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433833013&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430714639&searchtext=


For Beta 9 the new Build Challenge is to build a Powered Coaster!
The top submissions get included in the next game update as default blueprints.

• added Top Scan
• added some more default sandbox scenario terrains
• added guests can puke into trash bins
• added guests are annoyed by employees resting on benches
• added tunnel frames for shops and ride entrances built into vertical terrain
• reduced game load time when having many blueprints installed by ~10-60 seconds
• reduced how much park entrance fee guests are willing to pay if rides have high entrance fees as well
• reduced congestion near the station ends of boat rides
• improved loan balance
• fixed objects having wrong prices when placed on half-unit high terrain
• fixed being able to build path attachments without having enough money
• fixed being able to remove trees that have been marked as indestructible in the scenario editor by building paths through them
• fixed cases where shops would not receive shopkeepers
• fixed being able to build underwater friction wheels on splashdown sections
• fixed terraformer going crazy when used from a top-down view
• fixed tower rides using wrong light colors
• fixed Janitors cleaning paths despite being too tired to work
• fixed guests could get stuck when trying to sit on a removed bench
• fixed guests complaining about long ride times of boat rides
• fixed guests playing walking animation while riding elevator
• fixed shopkeepers spawning in wrong locations when closing and reopening shops

Guests gained the ability to puke into trash bins. This can help with keeping cleanliness ratings under control in difficult areas, but since the bins need to be emptied eventually it can still keep the Janitors pretty busy... maybe even busier than before if the next trash dump is far away!



Guests will also have a negative thought now and lose some immersion when seeing an employee resting at a bench. Don’t forget to build staff rooms!

And we’re back to doing polish + campaign work once again. Campaign testing is at 75% complete now.

Shops and ride entrances received tunnel frames if needed, so building them into vertical terrain works as you’d expect now:





The main menu screen (the one you get immediately after starting the game) was always meant to be temporary, and we’ve been working on its replacement this week. Initial work to figure out what it will be like started a year ago actually, but over the past few weeks a lot more time went into it and it’s really coming together now.

I also started working on the credits, so you can probably tell that we keep inching towards leaving Early Access. Still so much left to do though that there is no date in sight yet, but one step closer!

Beta 8 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.


We got two new rides this month:



The Hyper Coaster is a high-capacity coaster capable of 60m+ drops. It can’t invert, so it’s all about speed and airtime!

The Plane Carousel is a nice calm ride that slowly spins around a central axis like a carousel, but guests have control over the up/down movement of the planes.


All submissions can be found on the Workshop - thanks for everyone participating!
These are the 5 winning entries:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1403069070&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1406058340&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1404676642&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1403053352&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1408970912&searchtext=


For Beta 8 the new Build Challenge is to build a Water Coaster!
The top submissions get included in the next game update as default blueprints.

• added Hyper Coaster
• added Plane Carousel
• added some new fences
• added deco score graph to market research
• added deco score scenario goal
• added inner glass roof corners
• added new sound effects
• added lowest transparency setting when hiding objects hides them completely
• changed research so you can research calm rides/thrill rides etc. instead of flat rides/coasters
• improved queue building to not remove path attachments when dragging in parallel to paths
• improved wooden supports
• improved decision making for when to enable underground view when placing ride blueprints
• made it easier to see which parts of an object are below/above ground when building
• some UI improvements
• lots of small game balance improvements, most notably: 
  * improved popularity of calm rides 
  * increased overall guest count again 
  * changed guest spawn speed 
  * changed advertisement effectiveness 
  * reduced park advertisement cost 
  * increased toilet capacity 
  * guests get annoyed by trash less quickly 
  * slightly reduced vandalism 
  * adjusted research times 
  * slightly increased guest money 
  * adjusted how long guests stay at the park 
  * guests leave earlier if they run out of money 
  * adjusted flat ride intensity ratings 
  * increased tracked ride maintenance costs
• fixed guests not using newly bought umbrellas
• fixed parts of concrete walls not being recolorable
• fixed camera not following guests when they are on rides
• fixed a case where Twister wouldn't stop when it should
• fixed guests disappearing when deleting benches/rides
• fixed path builder switching into underground mode on sloped terrain
• fixed remove button in path builder sometimes not working as intended
• fixed a case where guests could immediately leave the park instead of staying for a while
• fixed a case where trash could get stuck on trash bins and never disappear
• fixed research unlock rewards for completing scenario goals sometimes not getting awarded
• fixed goal rewards being awarded a second time after completing all goals
• fixed an error when subscribing to mods
• fixed objects built below wooden supports being hard to click
• fixed a case where scenario editor UI would stop working
• fixed a case where guests could not despawn
• fixed guests naming the wrong intensity when complaining about no rides of a certain intensity being around
• (hopefully) fixed not being able to build track segments sometimes due to location being occupied

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channelon Wednesday (June 27th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.


We are currently doing our first full playthrough of all campaign levels to see if they are beatable and fun and making the necessary changes to improve them. It’s going really well and we made good progress, so the first third of the campaign scenarios are pretty much finalized :)

We’re also improving all the tiny things we’re noticing that feel off during this playtest, so in the past week alone we made ~70 small balance changes and fixes. These will release with Beta 8 next week.

And since this is Devlog 200, here’s a sneak peek at another one of the campaign scenarios - this is Broadmoor Beach by Joshua:



Fitting coasters into this long and narrow strip of land along a beach can be very challenging. Most of the pre-built blueprints are probably not going to fit in there, so you’ll definitely have to come up with some custom coaster designs to beat this one!

We released a patch for some smaller problems late last week, but overall the update went fairly well and there don’t seem to be any major problems caused by the big underlying changes. The changelog for the patch is at the end of this post.
There are however some rare cases on Mac and Linux where the game is running much slower than it should be for no apparent reason. We’ve contacted Unity about it since it seems to be an engine issue, so hopefully we’ll know what’s going on there soon.

GOG released a new tool that allows us to upload and release new updates by ourselves, which will speed up how fast new game versions appear on their store a lot. We’ve integrated their tool into our release pipeline so releasing updates on GOG is a single click for us now, just like on other big stores.

We’re also getting closer to getting some professional translations done, so I’ve improved our translation tools last week. We had a limitation previously where certain words would be impossible to translate into some languages - for example we have small umbrellas guests can buy from shops and the big ones available as deco that provide shade. Even though these are two very different things in English they are both called “Umbrella” but other languages use different words for each of these, so we needed to add the ability to have multiple different translations for a single English word depending on context.

Changelog (Beta 7a):

- added highlighting trash as source of bad scenery ratings in scenery rating visualization view
- added clicking on a thought marker opens the info window of the person belonging to this thought
- improved behaviour when placing a queue tile next to a ride entrance that is already connected to a path that isn't a queue
- should fix some severe performance issues on macOS
- fixed prices in deco UI not updating when scaling deco objects using hotkeys
- fixed ride light color button being shown even if ride has no custom light colors
- fixed a case where people would sometimes not know how to get somewhere even though there's a path
- fixed a problem with color palettes where colors would be invisible
- fixed rare case where staff couldn't leave staff room
- fixed weirdness with wooden supports when placing rotated blueprints
- fixed edge scrolling being active while game isn't focused
- fixed weather not getting saved/loaded properly


We’re back to working on the campaign once again, so you know what that means by now - not much that we can show currently and most of the stuff going into the next game update are smaller tweaks.

Many of these were small UI improvements. There are per-category buttons for marking objects as available/researched in the scenario settings now:



The handle for extending boat ride stations should look better and more like something that can be interacted with:



Scenario descriptions are visible from within the park now:



Some event notifications got a progress bar so you got a better idea how much longer the event will go:



And fire deco objects emit some flickering light now:

Beta 7 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.


Garret added lights to the Transformer:



And we added the Gyro Drop Tower from last weeks Art Stream:




All submissions can be found on the Workshop - thanks for everyone participating!
These are the 5 winning entries:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1375060271&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1375586700&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1383458480&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1376734869&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1375495229&searchtext=


For Beta 7 the new Build Challenge is to build a Junior Coaster!
The top submissions get included in the next game update as default blueprints.

• significantly improved guest performance
• significantly improved performance when running game at x2/x3 speed
• significantly improved park loading times
• increased overall guest count (some parks might see less guests; depends on what the park contains)
• added Gyro Drop Tower
• added Calm ride music track
• added sound effects for recently added props and rides
• added scenario goal requiring a certain amount of coasters with a certain rating
• changed coasters to attract significantly more guests to the park than other types of rides
• changed how park rating is calculated
• adjusted money balance to account for higher guest numbers (might need further tweaks)
• improved guest flow to attractions
• improved some more building pieces to be recolorable (walls, pillars)
• improved performance when zooming in/out of crowded areas of the park
• fixed guests being able to see bad decoration below paths
• fixed raised paths not blocking rain on paths below
• fixed some pavillions not blocking rain
• fixed guests sometimes exiting boats immediately instead of riding them
• fixed not being able to build some track pieces after curved slope-to-flat transitions
• fixed exit gates not waiting for all guests to leave the ride
• fixed a case where trains could get stuck when leaving the station and cause lag
• fixed a case where the finance overview could get stuck
• fixed an error when using object pipette on modded objects
• fixed path supports not appearing until game is unpaused
• fixed red build preview when dragging fences even though fence can be built
• fixed duplicate resolution entries in graphics settings

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channelon Wednesday (May 30th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.


The multithreading stuff seems to be fairly stable right now! We will still be running a bunch of tests this week, but it looks like it will be possible to release it with Beta 7 already.Having more guests messes with the financial balance of the game quite a bit, so we started adjusting that. As usual it will take many tiny tweaks over a longer period of time to get that feeling right again, so don’t expect that to be perfect just yet with the next update.

A more reasonable amount of guests for this test park

The audio team delivered a few hundred new sound effects, so all the props and rides that were added in the past half year or so got their sounds now!Gordon also finished a new calm ride music track which will be very nice for the most low-intensity rides.