Hey guys I LOVE Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and this game is looking great! Keep the good work!
If I may suggest a few features to put on your issue tracker:
1) An undo command. One thing that really irked me on RCT3 was that sometimes while building a coaster I would terraform the terrain by accident and couldn't undo the terraforming.
2) The way that rides are rated should be more dynamic: Reducing excitement over time to incentive you to keep your park with new rides and remove old stuff. New rides are naturally more exciting than old ones! Two rides of the same type on the same park should diminish the excitement. Of course there should be a lower ceiling for this reduced factor based on the ride type. Food sellers could also have these ratings, a nice looking scenery around your hot dog seller should make people more excited to eat there (see below my restaurants idea).
Another thing about rating the rides, the 'test' ride stage should have a slider that you can move to track the values of G-forces, excitement, nausea, intensity (and maybe a new scenery rating?) ratings in each point of the ride, that way I know where to change my ride. While moving this slider the "car ghost" and the indicator on the charts would follow.
3) Make a GAME with a sandbox mode, not a sandbox with a game tacked on. RCT3 had no challenge whatsoever, RCT2 was great in its timed objects and challenging maps. I loved this one for example:
[video=youtube_share;OHA6rEmrVCM]https://youtu.be/OHA6rEmrVCM?t=2m7s[/video]
It made making coasters really challenging. Tune the economy/staff so you can actually go bankrupt if you just press the fastforward button without fixing the park. Another great old simulation game that you guys can draw inspiration from is Theme Hospital, on its hardest levels that game was so hard that you needed the actions per minute of a starcraft2 pro player to keep up.
4) But keep the sandbox mode! Some people and even me sometimes just want to relax, but allow it to use any maps available, for some reason the sandbox mode in RCT3 gave you an empty green boring lot.
5) Merge benches and trash cans into a single prop, the most boring part of RCT3 was placing those damn lights, benches and trash cans all along the paths. Add an option to customize your path so the game automatically puts lights and trash cans and chairs every X units. Check out Open Transport Tycoon, it has a very intuitive ui placing signals along train lines: You place the train line, then you select the signal tool, this tool has a counter that you can set the distance between each signal, afterwards you drag it along the train line and the signals appear.
6) Allow me to save paths configurations (tiles, colors, props) so I can reuse them more easily. I HATED having to set the color for the paths lines of each ride individually, mostly I just did not bother with it and left on the grey/black default. Disassociated line color from the ride UI, if I want the line color to match the ride color I can just do it on my own.
7) Park staff should have a smarter AI, remove the option to give areas for each staff individually, that was so annoying to set and never worked right on multiple level paths. Make each type of staff to be smart enough to be distributed evenly while also focusing on the more populated areas.
8) The scenery tool you guys showed looks awesome, maybe make some tables with built-in benches props so we can build our own restaurants? Pre-built restaurants are lame in my opinion (as matter of fact, all pre-built stuff is intrinsically more lame than the rides you have to actually build).
9) Save feature creep for expansions! I don't want fireworks if I the UI for building them is horrible, I don't want 10 different themes for scenery if the UI to place them is bad (like in RCT3). I don't want pools if there are no cool props to make them interesting. Making a waterpark in RCT3 was not fun, even though there were pools in the Soaked expansion you could not make the water rides drop off in a pool.
10) Allow coaster tracks to seamlessly dig through scenery buildings. In RCT3 if you wanted a coaster to go inside a building you needed to make a very ugly square hole in it, make the wall simply not draw on the parts that collide with the rides. When removing the ride the scenery should appear back.
12) Allow me to create zones in my park like in Cities Skylines, so I can assign staff to each zone and see detailed information about that zone (like peep thoughts, profit and so on), maybe choose scenery theme per zone? Maybe be able to choose artificial flooring on the zone? Like colored artificial grass or dirt or sand so I can create a beach in the corner of my grassland terrain.
13) Ok this is a little of a personal pet peeve, but I always wanted a way to make two twin synchronized roller coasters. But I can not think of a good way to do that in the UI.
14) Do not make only DLCs, make proper expansions with new features and better UI.
15) Give me a way to "evacuate" an area, in RCT3 I had to remove peep by peep individually when I wanted to mess around with the terrains and paths of an area.
I can not stress this enough, UI is the single most important part of a simulation game, unlike an FPS or a platformer, the user is ALWAYS interacting with UI in a simulation game, please put the right amount of effort on it.
If I may suggest a few features to put on your issue tracker:
1) An undo command. One thing that really irked me on RCT3 was that sometimes while building a coaster I would terraform the terrain by accident and couldn't undo the terraforming.
2) The way that rides are rated should be more dynamic: Reducing excitement over time to incentive you to keep your park with new rides and remove old stuff. New rides are naturally more exciting than old ones! Two rides of the same type on the same park should diminish the excitement. Of course there should be a lower ceiling for this reduced factor based on the ride type. Food sellers could also have these ratings, a nice looking scenery around your hot dog seller should make people more excited to eat there (see below my restaurants idea).
Another thing about rating the rides, the 'test' ride stage should have a slider that you can move to track the values of G-forces, excitement, nausea, intensity (and maybe a new scenery rating?) ratings in each point of the ride, that way I know where to change my ride. While moving this slider the "car ghost" and the indicator on the charts would follow.
3) Make a GAME with a sandbox mode, not a sandbox with a game tacked on. RCT3 had no challenge whatsoever, RCT2 was great in its timed objects and challenging maps. I loved this one for example:
[video=youtube_share;OHA6rEmrVCM]https://youtu.be/OHA6rEmrVCM?t=2m7s[/video]
It made making coasters really challenging. Tune the economy/staff so you can actually go bankrupt if you just press the fastforward button without fixing the park. Another great old simulation game that you guys can draw inspiration from is Theme Hospital, on its hardest levels that game was so hard that you needed the actions per minute of a starcraft2 pro player to keep up.
4) But keep the sandbox mode! Some people and even me sometimes just want to relax, but allow it to use any maps available, for some reason the sandbox mode in RCT3 gave you an empty green boring lot.
5) Merge benches and trash cans into a single prop, the most boring part of RCT3 was placing those damn lights, benches and trash cans all along the paths. Add an option to customize your path so the game automatically puts lights and trash cans and chairs every X units. Check out Open Transport Tycoon, it has a very intuitive ui placing signals along train lines: You place the train line, then you select the signal tool, this tool has a counter that you can set the distance between each signal, afterwards you drag it along the train line and the signals appear.
6) Allow me to save paths configurations (tiles, colors, props) so I can reuse them more easily. I HATED having to set the color for the paths lines of each ride individually, mostly I just did not bother with it and left on the grey/black default. Disassociated line color from the ride UI, if I want the line color to match the ride color I can just do it on my own.
7) Park staff should have a smarter AI, remove the option to give areas for each staff individually, that was so annoying to set and never worked right on multiple level paths. Make each type of staff to be smart enough to be distributed evenly while also focusing on the more populated areas.
8) The scenery tool you guys showed looks awesome, maybe make some tables with built-in benches props so we can build our own restaurants? Pre-built restaurants are lame in my opinion (as matter of fact, all pre-built stuff is intrinsically more lame than the rides you have to actually build).
9) Save feature creep for expansions! I don't want fireworks if I the UI for building them is horrible, I don't want 10 different themes for scenery if the UI to place them is bad (like in RCT3). I don't want pools if there are no cool props to make them interesting. Making a waterpark in RCT3 was not fun, even though there were pools in the Soaked expansion you could not make the water rides drop off in a pool.
10) Allow coaster tracks to seamlessly dig through scenery buildings. In RCT3 if you wanted a coaster to go inside a building you needed to make a very ugly square hole in it, make the wall simply not draw on the parts that collide with the rides. When removing the ride the scenery should appear back.
12) Allow me to create zones in my park like in Cities Skylines, so I can assign staff to each zone and see detailed information about that zone (like peep thoughts, profit and so on), maybe choose scenery theme per zone? Maybe be able to choose artificial flooring on the zone? Like colored artificial grass or dirt or sand so I can create a beach in the corner of my grassland terrain.
13) Ok this is a little of a personal pet peeve, but I always wanted a way to make two twin synchronized roller coasters. But I can not think of a good way to do that in the UI.
14) Do not make only DLCs, make proper expansions with new features and better UI.
15) Give me a way to "evacuate" an area, in RCT3 I had to remove peep by peep individually when I wanted to mess around with the terrains and paths of an area.
I can not stress this enough, UI is the single most important part of a simulation game, unlike an FPS or a platformer, the user is ALWAYS interacting with UI in a simulation game, please put the right amount of effort on it.
