Planet Coaster is a spiritual successor to the Roller Coaster Tycoon games. It’s made by Frontier, who also made RCT3 a very long time ago. You build and manage an amusement or theme park, from editing the terrain to creating scenery, placing rides, designing rollercoasters, managing guest needs and staff, etc.
We talked about it a bit in this thread. There are some links there to video from the earlier limited releases of the game. Here’s the launch trailer.
The scenery tools are very flexible. You can use a grid or ignore one, snap things however you want or replace them completely freely, put any prop in any orientation, and other than the actual motion paths of the rides, there’s no clipping between any objects, so you can stick things together however you think looks good.
The game has a fun, cartoony look with really expressive characters and animation. It’s fun watching the animated park goers have fun on your rides and generally move around like real crowds would.
It’s really easy to share your creations on the steam workshop. You can create blueprints out of scenery to share with others, coasters and other tracked rides, or even entire parks. If you’re not that creative or don’t like to do intricate scenery, you can put together really high quality stuff that other people have created into a cohesive park.
I actually haven’t played enough yet to give much of an opinion - there’s been an alpha for early supporters and a beta for people who preordered recently, but I decided to just wait until the finished product was released to start. But I thought I’d start the thread to get discussion going and maybe some sharing with links to the workshop.
I’d be interested in this game if it has a good single player experience. I’m not that into sand box games. It’s the reason I can’t get into Kerbal Space Program, even though I really like the concept. Does this game have a good campaign mode, where you start with a very basic park and grow your empire by managing more complex parks each level? Or is it just one continuous mode?
There is a career mode (build up your park, accomplishing goals as you go) and a bunch of scenarios (something’s wrong with this park, fix it).
The big draw, though, is designing the roller coasters yourself. The park management part of it just gives you a backdrop to work against, and is a little lacking. If you want to go up against other theme parks in a management sim, I’d have to dial the WayBack Machine for early 1990s and suggest Theme Park (which you can get on GOG).
The campaign mode is fairly straightforward - you get a half finished park with some basic objectives like build a coaster with X excitement level, get 1000 guests, get a certain park rating. It’s definitely more of a sandbox creating game than a challenging scenario management game.
I started my first big project which is a pirate themed river rapids ride. I decided to have a big cave section with a pop up kraken monster but because I was told terrain features wouldn’t store in a blueprint I decided to make the whole cave out of rocks. Which ended up being a way bigger undertaking than I expected. It’s simple enough creating rock walls, but to create big domes requires hand-placing hundreds of rocks to get them to look decent and not just an obvious set of copied ones. I didn’t have any performance issues until close to the end, where I guess having hundreds of rocks on screen at once when riding the ride started bogging it down. So after 2.5 hours of tedious hand-placement of rocks I might have to scrap the whole idea. Although it doesn’t seem to sink the park - it runs reasonably fast outside/above the cave - just bogs down while you’re in there.
Still, I’ll finish it up and it’ll probably be the first ride I share. It’s a lot of work putting out a heavily scenic ride.
Yeah, the park design is way ahead of what RCT3 would offer in terms of building and scenery. The RCT3 grid system was kind of a pain in the ass and made everything look plain and boxy unless you put in a ton of work, but you can create very organic realistic looking designs in PC. Extremely flexible. Look at some of the workshop images to see the sort of stuff people are creating and sharing.
You might like the coasters in PC - the design tools are much easier and more flexible than RCT type games, makes it less of a chore.
I really really want to buy this game, but I can’t justify the expense of AU$60… I’ve been getting my fix watching some of the better designers on YouTube, and now I’m even more anxious to try it. Maybe I can call it a Christmas present…
After weeks of anticipation, my better half surprised me with this game for my birthday yesterday. As a long time fan of the genre, I’m pretty astounded. I hated everything about RCT3, especially the lack of an undo button, but this game addresses almost every issue with previous versions and, so far, it seems to run just fine on my laptop.
The only thing I have yet to find any information on is adding your own graphics to signs in the park. I used to love creating signs in Photoshop, then importing them into RCT3 (at least, when the feature worked), but it isn’t clear yet whether that is possible with this game. I did see online that someone created an amazing replica of the Tower of Terror at Disney’s California Adventure, including the sign, but I haven’t a clue how they created it. I’m also curious to see if they implemented any weather into the game, particularly rain.
Anyway, overall impression: A
I think that anyone familiar (or frustrated by) earlier incarnations of this game will be very pleasantly surprised.
I think the only customising of signs you can do is add your own text. There are two collections of signs, roof signs and wall signs, and only some are minimally customisable.
I saw those “custom signs.” They work in a pinch but they look horrific. In RCT 3, you could turn your .jpg files into signs. I miss that feature. I have seen some people create signs with custom graphics; I just can’t figure out how they are doing it … yet.
After putting in some serious hours yesterday, I’m really loving this game more and more. What I’m not loving, however, is the lack of documentation or in-game tutorials. There is a bit of a learning curve if you are used to RCT3 or earlier versions, and it would have been nice to get more than three 5-minute Youtube videos from the manufacturer.
Still, fantastic game. Perhaps the best building sim I’ve ever played.
I haven’t even bought the game yet, I’ve just been watching videos of other people playing. Here are a few vids with handy tips from Geekism, and I’ve also enjoyed vids from BDoubleO and Flabaliki.
I’m probably going to buy the game after being paid this week. I have such plans!
I really like the way this game handles lighting. In RCT3 the night was very dark and you basially had to create a grid of lights in order to see your park, which is realistic but ultimately boring.
But in PC, night isn’t super dark - you can get by with having some areas have minimal lighting - which allows you to focus using light in ways that stands out and is aesthetically pleasing. I’d like more actual light models, but the design of the lighting system is really cool. And in case you didn’t know, there are a few kinds of lights that are in the building rather than the scenery menu - I think mostly because they’re meant to be hidden away rather than being scenery - but they’re pretty useful, especially the area light.
I’m about 85% done with my first big project, a pirate/tropical/jungle themed river rapids. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turning out, with the exception that I built a big cave area out of stones (because terrain changes won’t save to blueprints) and it doesn’t actually block out the sunlight - you have to go through it at night to get the effect I intended. If I had to do it over again, I’d make a cave with the terrain tool because hand placing hundreds of rocks is tedious, but I wanted to create something easily re-usable and sharable. I’ll post it in a couple of days when I finish.
I’ve been working on an Australian Outback theme, though it’s going to take a long time because I’m really struggling with the camera controls. They are not intuitive to me and I get flung around all over the place very easily and often.
Yesterday I spent a long time trying to recreate a real-life building, but as the available objects are limited and scattered through the interface, it’s not easy.
You can use shift to speed up in the first person camera.
I’ve released my first piece of scenery, a [waterfall cascade](I uploaded my first scenery workshop item for planet coaster, check it out Steam Workshop::Tropical Waterfall Cascade). You have to sink it a bit when you place it (the acacia trunks should be hidden, but if you want the pools lower to the ground lower it as much as you want). It’s part of my river rapids project that I decided was cool enough to release separately.
I tried to make the water effects between pool varied - from a big waterfall down to a tiny stream squirting out of some of the rocks. I like what I did for the lighting, but if you want to change the colors just lower the pools, find the area light emitter, change the color, then raise the pools again. The skull at the top can be removed if it doesn’t fit your theme.
If you happen to like it, please thumbs up/favorite it. It’d be cool to see other people using my creations. If you use it in one of your parks post a screenshot. More to come soon.
I’ve started to figure out the controls a bit better. I needed to try every setting before I found the sweet spot.
That scenery looks really nice. Has a Secret of Monkey Island feel to it. Most of whatI’mmaking is a bit lame right now, as I figure out the mechanics of it all, but I hope I can make something worthy of uploading soon.
After a surprisingly large amount of work, my river rapids project is just about done and I’m pretty happy with it. I just need to do some final finishing touches and make a youtube video for it and it’s ready to go. I might release it tomorrow although I may wait until the weekend since the winter update will be coming out today and may dominate the attention today.
Snow biome and Christmas themed stuff. Some UI management improvements. Two new (non-Christmas) flat rides, a Christmas sleigh type track ride, and a ski-lift transport ride. Recently used tab in the browser which is nice. 7 new shops. A prestige system where rides are popular at first, then the excitement dies down, and then after a really long time become more popular again as they become classics.