COASTEROID

As a someone with a passion for theme parks who has grown up playing a lot of the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon games, it should not come as a surprise that I've been wanting to make a theme park building game of my own for a long time.

Over the past years I have been thinking of several different ideas to make my concept stand out from competitors in the genre, even those with a significantly more ambitious scope. Concepts such as a story-driven campaign, fairground builder and more have been considered, but none of them seemed to click just yet. One day then suddenly an idea popped into my mind: theme parks in space.

For me it felt like a Eureka-moment: it's a concept that has barely been explored before, yet the possibilities are endless. It has a completely unique aesthetic from any other game in the genre, and the setting in space also brings along possibilities of unique gravity mechanics and spherical worlds that distinguish it in the gameplay department at the same time. Add onto this the narrative implications of colonizing entire star systems to build theme park resorts where guests quite literally step into other worlds, and it could just be the recipe to something great.

I then decided to experiment with the idea right when it was still fresh in my mind and started making a quick and dirty prototype later that same week with a free spline asset I had just come across. After a week or two I had basic functionality up and running to build coaster track on a sphere, and then send a train around it that would be affected by physics. While it obviously still had a lot of room for improvement, it did to me prove the viability of the concept.

Since then I've continuously been refining the coaster builder in incremental steps, and currently I'm progressing towards a first demo release that will let users play around with the coaster builder. Once the framework for this is set, I also want to expand the game besides its coaster editor and introduce flatrides, scenery, park management, scenario's and more.

As could perhaps be imagined however, these are longer-term goals that will likely still take years before they are all fullfilled. Nonetheless, I'm very thrilled for what else this rollercoaster of a project will still fly through, and ready for the ride.