- The aim is to build a theme park, placing down paths and shops and rides and giving visitors places to line up for them. Parks have to be entertaining, yet expertly designed to extract as much.
- Featuring Hollywood props, movie set backdrops and action-packed animatronics, the Studios Pack unlocks an all-new theme park adventure. Action-Packed New Scenery & Building Sets Build Hollywood sets and backlot tours with new studio-themed scenery and wall sets.
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Theme Park Studio is a product built for the community where players can truly build the amusement park of their dreams. Theme Park Studio features include: Steam Workshop Integration.
with 50 posters participating, including story authorA few weeks before the launch of the Planet Coaster closed alpha—a perk for those who bought the 'Early Bird Edition' of the game—Frontier Developments' Jonny Watts is scolding his team. Rather than work on squashing bugs in the game's complex path-finding system, or making sure that the tiny details on flat (pre-made) rides were correct, they were making roller coasters and theme parks. Some of them had been at it for days, obsessively chipping away at their creations using tools like environmental deformation and coaster editing that wouldn't even be in the alpha.
'We still have jobs to do,' he told them.
Deadlines or not, how better to show a game works than a group of people who can't stop playing it? At the very least, there was plenty to show on press day. There are wonderfully complex roller coasters that slide effortlessly through the sides of hills and across other rides, and parks with a slick pirate theme made up of carefully placed wooden barrels and caged skeletons. Most impressive is a coaster that twirls around a huge tree in the middle of a park, a product of careful track placement and the game's pre-production environmental deformation tools.
These are just a glimpse of what's possible in Planet Coaster. As a spiritual successor to the Frontier-developed RollerCoaster Tycoon 3—itself a sequel to ex-Frontier employee Chris Sawyer's RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, Planet Coaster is suitably deep; a hardcore strategy sim for those with a penchant for clowns over conflict. The aim is to build a theme park, placing down paths and shops and rides and giving visitors places to line up for them. Parks have to be entertaining, yet expertly designed to extract as much cash out of customers as possible.
Everything is based on the first principle that customers have a particular amount of money in their pockets, which they use to buy entrance to the park, burgers from food stalls, and riding rides. Planet Coaster doesn't approximate this. If there are 50 people in the park, then there are 50 people rendered on screen, each with their own wants and needs and cash supplies. Success is about intelligent design. Sure, you can plonk down a few rides and a few paths and you might make a few quid. But placing the best rides at the back of the park to lead guests past gift shops, or placing toilets near a overly quiet ride can give it a boost: these are the expert techniques that turn a Blackpool Pleasure Beach into a Walt Disney World resort.
This is the sort of thing that gets Watts up in the morning. Despite spending nearly every day making a game about roller coasters and theme parks, Watts is a self-confessed theme park addict; a super-fan that has taken his family on a tour of nearly every major theme park in the world. 'My kids love me,' he says, before waxing lyrical about his two favourite roller coasters in the world: the Grand National at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, a wooden mobius strip roller coaster built in 1935, and Shambhala: Expedición al Himalaya, a 'hyper coaster' in Spain's PortAventura park that sports a 78-metre drop, and speeds of up to 83mph. Watts even keeps a picture of the coaster as the background on his iPhone.
'I love the coasters,' says Watts. 'But I also like the theming and the layouts, because we're making a coaster game. I actually don't like the fast passes because I'll stand in the queue so I can't just look at all the theming and figure out where things are placed.'When we did Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, we worked with a guy called John Wardley who built [Alton Towers'] Nemesis and Oblivion. One of the things he taught me was that whenever people queued up, he'd always make sure the queue was near where people got on the coaster, so they could learn how to put the harnesses on. That meant he got a 10 percent throughput increase, which resulted in millions of extra pounds. That's the sort of 'nerdicity' I'm challenging our designers to put into the game.'
And challenged they are. With each visitor to the park needing to be rendered on-screen, and given some form of AI to lead them around paths and in and out of rides, the development team created an extremely sophisticated path-finding algorithm in order to stop the park from descending into chaos.
Visitors all have unique tastes too, some preferring the gentle rise of a ferris wheel, while others want to experience the mind-numbing thrills of a proper roller coaster. Even how you decorate the park, and what themes you use—so far just 'Pirate' and 'Planet Coaster' themes have been announced, but more are promised—affects the happiness of visitors.
Theme Park Studio Torrent
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with 37 posters participatingYour goal in Planet Coaster, to create a theme park that entertains and dazzles the masses, is a daunting one. It sounds simple enough—but this can't be just any old park. To truly succeed in the eyes of both you, its creator, and the visitors that come through its gates, this theme park needs to be remarkable. It needs to be the kind of place that brings smiles to the faces of every single cartoon customer that walks through its gates: wonder-filled child, skeptical teen, and cynical adult alike.The countless creation and design tools in Planet Coaster offers that make this possible are fantastic, encompassing everything from the weird to the wonderful; from Western themed saloons to swashbuckling pirate coves. It is a truly engrossing experience, one that hides all of its complexity—and trust me when I say that Planet Coaster truly is complex—underneath a vibrant veneer of bold colour, charming characters, and ingenious details. More than anything, it feels like just what 2016, the most miserable year on record, truly needs. Over my 17-hours playing Planet Coaster, it's made me smile more than perhaps any other game I've played this year.
Designing, customising, and managing theme parks is hardly a new concept, but we've had a break from them in the past decade. The Sims, Theme Park World, Rollercoaster Tycoon; the rise of consoles into the mainstream saw these kinds of PC exclusive games slide into the fringes, despite their popularity. Therefore, it's no surprise at the response Planet Coaster received when it entered beta, and people saw just how deep its raft of different tools made it. But perhaps the Planet Coaster's greatest feat is how it ties its community of creators and designers directly into the game's DNA. This is something that Frontier Developments has capitalised on so smartly with its persistent space sim, Elite Dangerous, and uses the same approach here.
Planet Coaster is one enormous user-driven content machine—and it's brilliant.
Good artists borrow, great artists steal
Theme Park Studio Freak Out Ride At The Fair
Not only can you download and copy other people's creations for your own use, but you can spend hours browsing through them in search of inspiration without ever actually opening them up. After booting up Planet Coaster for the first time, I spent the first three hours gawping at the number of items I could customise, the way that I could terraform any number of the biomes that you start with as a 'blank slate,' and the sheer depth of how you can design almost every inch of the park, from how it looks, to how it sounds, to how it moves. Planet Coaster is surprisingly user-friendly considering how deep you can go, but there is something of a learning curve while you get to grips with how things work.
There are three different modes: Career, Challenge, and Sandbox. While it's tempting to head straight into the Career mode, this, sadly, is where Planet Coaster is the least compelling. Career places you in one of several different pre-made parks, and gives you some basic objectives to complete. The first, for example, is a surprisingly enticing looking pirate themed park where you have to attract a certain number of guests through the gates, and build some more rides to entertain them.
The latter is super easy: all you have to do is select a ride from one of the dozens of pre-made blueprints, place your new ride in the park, and then connect an entrance and an exit to allow access. The former is just a case of having enough rides to entice more visitors through the gates. As you progress the objectives get incrementally tougher, but they don't ever become particularly meaningful or interesting.
However, they do teach you the basics. The main takeaway is that paths and walkways are everything to the success of your park. Visitors will only go where there are pathways, which means that every shop, toilet, and ride must be connected properly, or it won't make any money. At first, this can be confusing: many of Planet Coaster's build-and-create mechanics are well designed, but pathways can be fiddly, frustrating beasts when they want to be.
It took me a few hours before they properly clicked, but occasionally I still had to wrestle with the game's often over-sensitive controls in order to get paths to sit just how I wanted them to. I'd find that paths wouldn't quite connect how I wanted, and I still find it odd that there seems to be no ability to create open spaces for people to congregate, like town squares where you can create hubs of activity that then splinter off in different directions.
Universal Studios Theme Park
The same fiddliness fortunately doesn't apply to Planet Coaster's other design tools. Terraforming terrain can be tricky, particularly to get things to look natural, but I soon found that I could quickly fix any errors I made, using the smoothing and roughening paintbrushes to make hills look like hills, and valleys look like valleys. The same goes for painting surfaces. Each of the biomes you choose at the main menu has a basic theme, so you decide whether you want your park set somewhere hot and tropical, or crisp and alpine, but you can then paint surfaces depending on what you want to create. Beaches, rocky plateaus, and meadowy stretches of grass require a subtle touch to get them looking organic and not artificial, but practice truly makes perfect.