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 unique selling points that could make my concept stand out in this niche genre. One day then suddenly an idea popped into my mind: theme parks in space.

Space roller coasters are a concept that has barely been explored before in video games, yet the possibilities are endless. Alien planets bring a completely unique aesthetic from any competitor in the genre, and the setting in space also brings potential for unique gravity mechanics and spherical worlds that distinguish it in the gameplay department at the same time. Add onto this the implications of colonizing entire star systems to build theme park resorts where guests literally step into other worlds, and it could 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 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 now the game is expanding its scope beyond just building coasters. With features to place decorations as well as a modular building system, the project is slowly but surely turning into a fully-fledged park builder. In the future, I also want to introduce other ride types, terraforming, management gameplay, scenario levels and more.

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