#lily blogs about rct

[lily-sinful]

karts & coasters complete!

so i know this looks kind of like a horrible spaghetti mess, which is good because it's supposed to! it took me a long time to come up with a good theme for this scenario - it starts you off with a pair of nice wooden coasters and a couple of oversized go-karts tracks, and my instinct is to lean into that and the heavily wooded landscape and go for an out of the way park with older designs. unfortunately, the actual ride selection you get is actually pretty modern, and frankly vanilla rct1 didn't have quite the right selection to go fully old-school with things, so i went a different way with it.

the coasters it starts you off with have some pretty striking visuals, but stat and design-wise, they're solid but not spectacular. it put me in mind of smaller local theme parks that have a good custom coaster, and enough to keep you entertained for a day, but not enough to be a big tourist thing outside of the immediate area. between that and the fact that the starting map is a monotype forest, i aimed for a "small park purchased and run into the ground by large chain" feeling. i diversified the forest outside the park area to make it look more natural, while getting rid of most of the trees inside the park. i focused entirely on coaster type variety, while keeping the actual coasters to as similar of a design philosophy as i could - everything has a large footprint and focuses on speed and curves, with minimal special elements. i also tried to minimize building additional paths and just hooked everything up to the basic network. i think the end result came out pretty close to what i wanted - all of the coasters are good but not great, and there's a very deliberate lack of coherency to everything. as a bonus, the park was so full by the end of the scenario that the game was starting to lag, and i'm pretty sure if i weren't using openrct i would have hit the sprite limit.

i think the thing i'm proudest of with regards to my design goals for this is the way that the wooden coasters just kinda fade into the background in the screenshot. at the start of the scenario they completely dominate the park and at the end of it they're almost hard to spot. everything that made the park what it is at the start is still there physically, but not in any recogniseable way.

...that last line made me feel a bit of grim existential dread so i'm counting this as a success

[lily-sinful]

Millennium Mines complete!

while white water park is one of my least favourite scenarios, millenium mine is probably my favourite vanilla rct1 scenario. the landscape is really fun to work with and theme, it's got a nicely varied ride selection, and it's got a high base level so it's easy to build underground stuff. i took advantage of that last fact for this - every single ride in the park (with the exception of the go-karts and junior coaster) are at least 50% underground, and i'm extremely pleased with how most of them came out. the things i'm probably most proud of are the bits of the wooden coaster that poke out of the main hill, the swinging coaster wrapping around the train tracks (that took over an hour to design!), and the inverted coaster along the southesat end - it's got 6 total inversions and a 9.99 intensity rating.

[lily-sinful]

mel's world complete!

really really proud of this one! decided to interpret "mel" as being an alien mascot, so i reworked the landscaping within the park to try and give it a bit of an out-of-this-world feel, which i think i did a pretty okay job with! because the starting coasters (the bobsled and the inverted) are both pretty high intensity, with lots of nice swooping curves and large footprints, i decided to lean into that with the ones i designed. i also tried to aim for high air time, and for the most part i think i was pretty successful!

also: changing the water colour is neat, since it actually changes the colour palette completely - anything with elements painted with deep/dark/light water will have those change to match the new scheme! a good example of this is the "futuristic" supports i used (from rct2's time twister expansion). by default, they look like this:

but, with the water colour changed to pink, like in this playthrough, they look like this:

it's kinda rare to find default things that change this way, but it's neat to see it in action.