Yesterday, while I was pointlessly trying to sleep, I started thinking about functionalities in Planet Coaster that would be cool to see and would for a nice gameplay experience.
These are the several points I’ll be discussing:
Time
It bothers me that a day passes and the peeps have done 2 rides, have to wait 2 minutes in line for the most popular rides while it should last 45 minutes and have moved through 1/8 of the park. I’d like to see realistic days where it takes a whole in-game day for peeps to do as many rides as they can, and leave at the end of the day.
If we see the current games like RCT3 and RCTW handle “time”, I see three problems that are linked together:
Real-life VS in-game time
Now, peeps in installments like RCT3 or RCTW spend about 2 real hours in your park to visit every attraction and go home again. 2 hours in real life is about 720 days in-game in RCT3. So peeps spend about 720! days in a park, which isn’t realistic. Peeps should arrive in the morning and leave in the evening.
Queue-time
Another thing that bothers me with time is that peeps don’t spend a lot of time “queueing”. In about 2 minutes in real life, they get to ride the most popular coaster where only 30-40 peeps are queuing. This isn’t realistic; there should be about 200 peeps queuing at popular rides. It’s a big difference between having 40 peeps in line for a coaster instead of the realistic 200. That makes queue-times much longer and realistic.
So, peeps should spend more time queuing, which can be done by increasing the number of peeps in your park.
Amount of peeps
Which brings us to the amount of peeps. Based of the number of visitors per day of Walibi Belgium, there should be around 7.000 - 10.000 peeps a day in your park on record-days.
In RCT3, there are only 1000 peeps in a popular park, which is way too few to fill a good park.
Conclusion of problems
The in-game time doesn’t make sense: peeps spend 720 in-game days in the park, while it should be limited to 1 day. But with the way RCT3 for example works, we can’t really make an in-game day last 2 hour so we can really see what the peeps are doing. The queue-times are unrealistic, with 40 people queuing for popular rides instead of 200. People should spent more time in queues There aren’t enough peeps in the park to be realistic and make long queues. There should be 7.000 - 10.000 peeps instead of 1.000
Solutions
So, how do we solve this? Simple: time sliders.
We make the park fill with 10.000 peeps, make time queue 40 in-game minutes for popular rides and make an in-game day the same as a same day.
But we don’t have to wait for the day to pass if we have good time sliders.
We could implement multiple options for time to pass:
So, when you would want to really watch your peeps and immerse yourself, you could set it to 1m/1m and watch them stroll through your marjk. If you wanted to get a general view of what peeps do during the day, you could set it to 1m/2h.
This way, a whole day of 7 hours could lasts 7 minutes or 7 hours. Your choice to pick up the pace or slow it down; and have a realistic sense of time passing and a real living park.
But why would we want to pass 2 months in one minute, that would just be pure chaos and skipping over the gameplay. Which brings me to the next idea: building rides.
Building rides
If we look at RCT3, rides just spring out of nowhere and are build immediately. This isn’t really realistic at all. Rides are often built during the closed season of a park, which is from december till march when there are no peeps in the park.
We could do this too, and not have to wait that long for rides to be built with the time slider which make us pass 2 months in 1 minute. And while you wait for the rides to be built, you could micro-manage some smaller things, like shops, so you can set them up for next season.
Designing rides
If you wanna design a ride, you can do so while a ghost-image of the ride appears in your park. You could even test it and get ratings and get your ride perfect while your park moves on at a 1m/1m pace. You could even adjust paths for the ride with a ghost image so everything works perfectly and you don’t interrupt your peeps in the park
When the ride is built, you just press “build” and the next time the closed season starts, construction workers and machine arrive at the park while they built the ride with the parts that are delivered at the entrance of your park and move to the building site through your park.
If you want to build a new ride over an existing ride, you could just delete the current ride and it would disappear when you are building your new “ghost-image” ride. When the closed season starts, the demolition of the old ride would begin and the construction of the new ride would start.
Paths
If we look at the paths of theme parks, we see that they don’t really consist of straight lines or only big parts of paths. They consist of organic paths that form around coasters and squares where peeps gather and eat their lunch at the restaurants.
Here is a path-study I made of Walibi Belgium, explaining my point.
http://imgur.com/nbKE3Mh
The best way to emulate this, according to me, is to let us paint on the paths. If we look at the landscaping tool of RCTW, we see that it’s a freeform tool; like we’re painting on the hills.
If we could do the same thing with path, it would be easy to make small paths, big roads and bigger squares to fit everyones need without being limited to squares. The way RCTW implemented in their beta wasn’t very well done, according to me, because it was impossible to make big squares (or even let the paths connect). A Path Paint tool wouldn’t cause these problems. And by looking at the peep-simulation we’ve seen from Planet Coaster, it seems like an achievable system.
These are the several points I’ll be discussing:
- Time
- Paths
- Shops
Time
It bothers me that a day passes and the peeps have done 2 rides, have to wait 2 minutes in line for the most popular rides while it should last 45 minutes and have moved through 1/8 of the park. I’d like to see realistic days where it takes a whole in-game day for peeps to do as many rides as they can, and leave at the end of the day.
If we see the current games like RCT3 and RCTW handle “time”, I see three problems that are linked together:
- Real-life VS in-game time
- Queue-time
- Amount of peeps
Real-life VS in-game time
Now, peeps in installments like RCT3 or RCTW spend about 2 real hours in your park to visit every attraction and go home again. 2 hours in real life is about 720 days in-game in RCT3. So peeps spend about 720! days in a park, which isn’t realistic. Peeps should arrive in the morning and leave in the evening.
Queue-time
Another thing that bothers me with time is that peeps don’t spend a lot of time “queueing”. In about 2 minutes in real life, they get to ride the most popular coaster where only 30-40 peeps are queuing. This isn’t realistic; there should be about 200 peeps queuing at popular rides. It’s a big difference between having 40 peeps in line for a coaster instead of the realistic 200. That makes queue-times much longer and realistic.
So, peeps should spend more time queuing, which can be done by increasing the number of peeps in your park.
Amount of peeps
Which brings us to the amount of peeps. Based of the number of visitors per day of Walibi Belgium, there should be around 7.000 - 10.000 peeps a day in your park on record-days.
In RCT3, there are only 1000 peeps in a popular park, which is way too few to fill a good park.
Conclusion of problems
The in-game time doesn’t make sense: peeps spend 720 in-game days in the park, while it should be limited to 1 day. But with the way RCT3 for example works, we can’t really make an in-game day last 2 hour so we can really see what the peeps are doing. The queue-times are unrealistic, with 40 people queuing for popular rides instead of 200. People should spent more time in queues There aren’t enough peeps in the park to be realistic and make long queues. There should be 7.000 - 10.000 peeps instead of 1.000
Solutions
So, how do we solve this? Simple: time sliders.
We make the park fill with 10.000 peeps, make time queue 40 in-game minutes for popular rides and make an in-game day the same as a same day.
But we don’t have to wait for the day to pass if we have good time sliders.
We could implement multiple options for time to pass:
| Real-life time | Gameplay Time |
| 1 minute | 1 minute |
| 1 minute | 30 minutes |
| 1 minute | 1 hour |
| 1 minute | 2 hours |
| 1 minute | 1 day |
| 1 minute | 15 days |
| 1 minute | 2 months |
So, when you would want to really watch your peeps and immerse yourself, you could set it to 1m/1m and watch them stroll through your marjk. If you wanted to get a general view of what peeps do during the day, you could set it to 1m/2h.
This way, a whole day of 7 hours could lasts 7 minutes or 7 hours. Your choice to pick up the pace or slow it down; and have a realistic sense of time passing and a real living park.
But why would we want to pass 2 months in one minute, that would just be pure chaos and skipping over the gameplay. Which brings me to the next idea: building rides.
Building rides
If we look at RCT3, rides just spring out of nowhere and are build immediately. This isn’t really realistic at all. Rides are often built during the closed season of a park, which is from december till march when there are no peeps in the park.
We could do this too, and not have to wait that long for rides to be built with the time slider which make us pass 2 months in 1 minute. And while you wait for the rides to be built, you could micro-manage some smaller things, like shops, so you can set them up for next season.
Designing rides
If you wanna design a ride, you can do so while a ghost-image of the ride appears in your park. You could even test it and get ratings and get your ride perfect while your park moves on at a 1m/1m pace. You could even adjust paths for the ride with a ghost image so everything works perfectly and you don’t interrupt your peeps in the park
When the ride is built, you just press “build” and the next time the closed season starts, construction workers and machine arrive at the park while they built the ride with the parts that are delivered at the entrance of your park and move to the building site through your park.
If you want to build a new ride over an existing ride, you could just delete the current ride and it would disappear when you are building your new “ghost-image” ride. When the closed season starts, the demolition of the old ride would begin and the construction of the new ride would start.
Paths
If we look at the paths of theme parks, we see that they don’t really consist of straight lines or only big parts of paths. They consist of organic paths that form around coasters and squares where peeps gather and eat their lunch at the restaurants.
Here is a path-study I made of Walibi Belgium, explaining my point.
http://imgur.com/nbKE3Mh
The best way to emulate this, according to me, is to let us paint on the paths. If we look at the landscaping tool of RCTW, we see that it’s a freeform tool; like we’re painting on the hills.
If we could do the same thing with path, it would be easy to make small paths, big roads and bigger squares to fit everyones need without being limited to squares. The way RCTW implemented in their beta wasn’t very well done, according to me, because it was impossible to make big squares (or even let the paths connect). A Path Paint tool wouldn’t cause these problems. And by looking at the peep-simulation we’ve seen from Planet Coaster, it seems like an achievable system.
