StormRunnerFan

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• United States

Helloooooo all!

Role: player

Games: OpenRCT2
Availability: Currently completely available to play thanks to the lockdown, but if a job happens to line up I’m going to need to reevaluate.
Goals: New Element has always been about having fun for me, so as long as I am, I’m down to party. I’m most comfortable with realism, but happy to branch out if needed. If you need some screenshots of some unreleased work to solidify a decision, let me know.

Hi all, pulling over from the discord:

First, I want to say thank you for all of the kind words on Glacier Cove and for the NE Parkmaker title. Something like Cove has been on my mind for years, and having the skills to make it a reality was a rewarding process. I took some time to compose thoughts about all this. It was a real doozy to get together. I can honestly say I’m thrilled it’s complete, and now I can move on to other shenanigans.

For some context I’ll start with the process:

The first save file for the map is from 2018. From what I remember, I worked on it for 3 or so days and built the hotel, some of the perimeter roads, and a park entrance for what was then called Winter Summerland Water Park, directly riffing off of the mini golf course at the Walt Disney World resort. For whatever reason, I became busy/disinterested/etc. and left RCT to focus on some other life things. Every once in a while, especially once I got OpenRCT2 up and running, I opened the park and just looked at what I had, but no progress really happened until this year in early May according to my save files. During some other doodles I had worked on the curved path tracitecture and finally started seeing things fall into place. Inspiration hit and off I went. I deleted the old entrance area, and this started a 5-6 week marathon of building that ended with the park you see now in mid to late June. The readme was a final flourish, just to add the context of the surrounding area. With a test thanks to Liampie, and a round of touch ups, Cove was submitted, and here we are!

To answer some questions that I’ve seen pop up:

The end of Triple Diamond Drop and the area surrounding was actually one of the first areas that plopped into place on the map. It’s long tube finale was something that I struggled with, but due to the lazy river turn radius, proximity to the Paradise Pier Hotel and knowing the wave pool was going to need space, I had to do something. Looking at similar slides like the Ko'okiri Body Plunge at Volcano Bay, and Leap of Faith at the Atlantis Resorts, I noticed their long straight sections of tube after the main drop, as well as a splash pool at the end instead of the trough splashdown as seen on Summit Plummet at Blizzard Beach. I found myself entranced with the pipeline imagery and went with it.

Overall, the slides proved to be the most interesting part of this, which I guess makes sense for a waterpark. There was a lot of discovery with working waterslides which led to an entire map of ideas that has now gone unused. I’m sure it’ll pop up someday in other parks, as there are some interesting hacking things that just needed more space than the constraints of Cove had to offer.

The surrounding roads were also a challenge, as the landscaping around the Downtown Disney Parking area currently does leave something to be desired. Instead of reworking this, I attempted to lean into it instead of shy away from it, as new additions like Cars Land, Pandora: The World of Avatar, and Volcano Bay all take a very sparse approach to their surrounding areas beyond what’s in the park. However, this leads into the catch for a mountain park in Anaheim, the sightlines looking out over the surrounding area. I had thought of making the park inside of a caldera of sorts, but I felt that that ruled out the believability of a piece like this as I cannot even imagine the logistics for that amount of rock work. So I decided the central mountain with views of Southern California was just something my skiers, tubers, and snowboarders were going to have to deal with, a case only validated by the sightlines from many tall slides at Volcano Bay, Blizzard Beach, and Typhoon Lagoon.

The Paradise Pier Hotel… yeah. It’s something, but I felt it was important to include it and the additional parking structure on the map to better root what I was attempting to do here. Backstage areas were also a challenge, as I scoured over Google Maps to try and figure out what was going on backstage at the theme parks, so I’m thankful that the effort I put in paid off. Foliage has never been my strong suit, but who knows, maybe next round I’ll get it a little better.

In the end, I think there’s very little that I would change about this map. I’m sure if I scrapped it all and started over, there’s some things that I’d rediscover and decide to include, but I’m very proud of what’s here. I’m honored to be in the company of other high percentage gold parks like Six Flags World of Discovery, Geauga Ocean City, etc. etc. etc.  I highly respect these parks and take great inspiration from looking back at them over and over again. I’m thrilled to join their ranks.

I think I’ll be heading back into hiatus again after this one. Doing these 5-6 week projects every few years is all you’re gonna be getting out of me. 

Thank you again to everyone, and happy parkmaking!

Wow ya'll, it's great to be back for another brief stint!

Airtime, the map itself is 144x144, but the usable space is ~110x140.

Cocoa, will investigate, thank you!

Liampie, will do, thank you!

Everyone else, thank you thank you! Hope to get this wrapped up soon...