Dear RCTW Fans,
Hello RollerCoaster Tycoons! As many of you know from my last post, I’m Mattlab, Atari’s Executive Producer on RollerCoaster Tycoon World. Two weeks have gone by, lots of progress has been made on the game, our marketing efforts are ramping up, and it’s time for another production blog post!
As promised, today we’ll be talking about the second of our four main foundations for the RCT franchise: Building. But before I get into the many great things you can build, how you can place them, and tease other amazing innovations we have been able to implement in RCTW, I wanted to take a second to talk to our fantastic supporters from our forums. It has been an absolute pleasure interacting with you, and I, along with the entire RCTW team, hope to make more time to chat. Not only will we make sure to continue posting on the forums, but together with our community team we plan to have live stream sessions where fans will be able to interact with the team in real time! We’ll have more on that later.
Additionally, I do want to say that our design team is in the forums every day. They spend a considerable amount of time reading your suggestions and feedback. Unfortunately, though, as they are super busy making the game, they often can’t respond to each suggestion, but please be assured that they are there reading your thoughts, and tweaking the game based on what they see. We are making the game the community wants, and we are committed to delivering the REAL RollerCoaster Tycoon experience.
Now onto the main event…
The Second Foundation of the Franchise: Building
The Building foundation makes up one of the most complex pieces of the game, so we want to make sure we get it right. Not only do we want to provide new features, we want to make sure that the ones from previous versions of the game are vastly improved and updated.
It all starts with the huge variety of park elements that you can build. There is more to choose from than ever before. In fact, each time I play the game I discover a new ride, scenery object, or coaster type that I did not see last time I played! Not only is there a great variety of objects, we have also added new elements that did not exist before.
With our first new element, restaurants, your peeps now have a place to sit down if they need to relax and enjoy a nice meal. This provides an entire new feature to the simulation of the game and creates an interesting new dynamic, for you as a builder, to consider. Do you want your peeps to simply grab a quick cheap bite to eat at a foodstand or is this the right place to build an expensive restaurant. We have made sure to really do this feature justice and create a number of new restaurants for you to build.
Attractions on the other hand, another new element, are the opposite of a calm, relaxing environment. Once your peeps are done dining they can wander over to this new ride type. Attractions are what we commonly refer to as “indoor rides”. We know that previous games had haunted houses and other indoor-themed rides, but we feel so excited about the attractions we’re building in RCTW that we wanted to make this its own category. Now your peeps can enjoy a game of lazer tag or any number of other exciting diversions! Its an entire new category of ride and we can’t wait to share the list of them in future updates.
In addition to having more building options, we are also making sure that all of our in game objects fall into one of four unified themes: Western, Space, Americana, and Pirate. This way you have more than enough things in each theme to build parks that truly look unique and exhilarating! Your peeps can visit a pirate-filled treasure island or perhaps have a cowboy adventure in the Wild West. Whether you build an entire single themed park or mix and match, your peeps will never want to leave! Each theme is completely thought through from start to finish providing a full experience for your peeps.
But its not all about the peeps – the builder, namely you, matter too! So the rides, objects, and coasters in the game are more detailed than ever before. Of course, everything is hi-res and we’ve packed objects and rides with tons of animations to give your creations a real authentic feel. We have taken full advantage of today’s next-gen technology to make sure that the game is more detailed than ever before. I don’t want to spoil the surprise but its amazing to see how things come to life from the moment you place down your first ride to the time a peep gets on and rides it. Additionally, the new scenery animatronics we have in the game add an immersive and beautiful element that your peeps will enjoy as they plan their next park adventure. The attention to and level of detail in RCTW’s art and animations is unprecedented in the history of the franchise.
The tool used to build everything is easy and powerful as well. Placing and rotating buildings could not be simpler. Easily find exactly the theme and type of object you want to build and plop it down in your park. Paths are simply painted on, lowering the number of clicks required, and everything works seamlessly together with our immersive camera to allow you to be fully in-control of what you are making. Don’t like what you just built? Then move it without needing to bulldoze it! It’s just that easy.
So, we have a ton of new rides, a variety of new park elements, and they all look beautiful. But it wouldn’t be RollerCoaster Tycoon without… Coasters! And luckily, RCTW is jam-packed with new coasters to build! The coaster system is in fact so detailed and has so many new surprises that we feel it deserves its own post and so it will be the focus of part two of the Building foundation dev blog – see ‘next time’ below.
Next Time:
Our next post will focus on coasters – something a lot of our fans have asked about in our forums. We have so much information to share and questions to answer that we felt it needs its own blog post. Additionally, we plan to use that post to announce some exciting developments regarding the grid as its related to coasters that we know fans are going to love. We strongly feel, with the innovations we have made to the coaster and building system, that if you can dream it then you will be able to build it in RollerCoaster Tycoon World!
But Wait, There’s More:
Instead of a screenshot this week, I am happy to take this opportunity to show off one of the pieces of wonderful key art we made to help inspire us all for RCTW. This was partially created using actual scenery and ride models from RollerCoaster Tycoon World and shows off some of the amazing things you will get to build in the game. We love it and are excited to finally be able to share it! Enjoy!