Gustav Goblin

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Huge congrats to you for proving you're still Elite-level sixteen years after Zippo's! What a delightful park to return with, Lake Anachronism notwithstanding. It's very much in tune with the modern meta but still very quaint and not overwhelming.

The main street is adorable with a cozy feel and a teetering-on-small scale. Kelpie is a really great layout and that dual interaction over the path is iconic. I've never seen the air-powered cars used to represent the beams on the other end of a top spin before! Very novel. The Craigdenarroch house at the end of Kelpie's side hits a perfect blend of detailed and gritty yet small and quaint, the standard most of the archi in this park reaches.

Going to the other side of the park, the highlights are the castle with the garden maze, the backstage area and Ghillie Dhu. It is very funny to me that we have had two British NE legends go on an extended hiatus and return with a coaster named Ghillie Dhu in a mountainous setting with ruined churches. The angle where Ghillie Dhu interacts with the the waterfall is an all-timer. Phone wallpaper material. I'm also a huge fan of the bike hire! For some reason NE just knocks it out of the park with those. Patagon by Terry, Sonnental by the Dambusters, and now Creag Mhor joins the fray. Logjam is also very charming and the dripping water below the lift is very authentic.

I will say I have not been as excited to dig into and dissect the landscaping in any park since Salinity by FK years ago. Shades of a modern RRP. It's incomprehensibly dense and crunchy when needed yet not afraid to be completely open without as much as a sprig of grass, all with a very smooth and painterly quality. The open sections like the dirt road near the back especially get to shine due to the contrast with the dense forests. I am also smitten by the riverbanks. The sound design in this map really accentuates the level of effort and detail you've put into the landscape. It really does feel alive.

I will say the landscaping does falter near the back of the map, almost to a level where I question if it's properly finished. The "grain" of the Tolsimir rocks (as Liam puts it) fades into full-tile rocks and the foliage gets a little spammy. When zoomed all the way out it looks fantastic, but at a normal zoom it definitely pales compared to the other side of the map. I also feel like the level of custom supports in this park is inconsistent, although custom supports are the devil so I don't blame you for not supporting a few coasters.

I really did not have The Zippo's Guy Becomes One Of The Best Landscapers In The Game on my bingo card but I can't say I'm mad for it. We're so lucky to have you back and we hope you stay around!

Don't know how much energy I have for this round, but I love the theme to bits and I have the first week off. Down to ideate and support build for this one, I think I'd do well on a fantastical high-concept entry.

I would have probably enjoyed that movie had it looked more like this.

Off my GOAT, Terry. 

This blew me away when I first saw the preview in the thread. The lighting effects really inspired me to try something like that out myself which led to my bonus entry. Would love to see you do something like this on a full scale!

And it is revealed! Big props to BallpitWarrior, Bluetiful_Monday, Xophe and ESPECIALLY hypnopompia for having my favorite doors of this year's Advent Calendar. I had no idea hypnopompia was this strong with CSO already, even despite a strong showing in round 2 of TTA. Also Lasketchup genuinely fooling me into thinking he was Babar Tapie shows incredible potential. To all of you I mentioned, PLEASE keep building. You guys are amazing. To everyone else who entered, also please keep building. RCT is so cool dude.

And to Version1, this was a hell of a send-off gift. I hope wherever you go you find peace. Keep on working on yourself and find your tribe. It's always an uphill battle.

Now that the builders are revealed, it's time for some director's commentary!
 

Sundial Springs

The theme of sundials and the passage of time came from a very simple yet monstrous ambition. My first idea for the Advent Calendar was based on a movie my parents usually watch on Thanksgiving, but I didn't have the ideas or drive and it went under. A shame because it had some cool aesthetic tricks and a cutting-edge yet distinctly Gustav shoestring I'd love to reuse. Already in December with door after door opening, I figured the best choice of action was to make an entire park in a single day.

I had a plan too! I would use Loopy Landscapes to limit my choices of scenery and focus more on planning and less on detailing. I would not use any building hacks or trainers except to renew rides, water flowers, and change the size of the land tool. I also opted to go peepless and focus on macroing out a more semi-realistic park than forcing myself to work with single-wide paths and making everything peepable. Why an entire park? I have no idea, although I think it's for the better as I will soon describe.

I wanted to devote the entire process to Saturday, December 6th, but I got so excited to start that I began the night before. I was really excited for the lake that looked like a sundial (with the rock pointing towards Noonton) and the peeps walking clockwise through each time of day. By midnight, I had cheffed up an entrance and plotted the area for the lake. The entrance gates were going to be past the plaza with the giant sundial at first, but with my limited map size I decided to push the entrance gates back and have the plaza branch out into the main paths.

Unfortunately I underestimated my building speed and focus as well as how annoying it is to build in LL even without hacks. One and a half days quickly became two and a half. By the end of the weekend, I had mostly finished Mount Morne and gotten High Noon and Wild Horses in place. Still extremely impressive for my slow ass, but not what I wanted. If I had decided to go for a Design, I probably would have finished by the weekend.

Nonetheless, I was having a lot of fun and wanted to continue, so I did. Unfortunately having a full-time job, even a remote one, takes a lot of time and energy out of your day. The goal was now to finish a park in a week, which ended up being kinda sorta doable as I finished on Saturday morning. Sera Shores was done in the last 24-ish hours and was very very rushed, but I absolutely love how it turned out in retrospect.

Even if my initial review was a bluff, it's not completely false. The little tricks I pointed out were ones I really wanted to try out or found myself impressed by. I got the idea for the iron roof for tilled soil from one of Lurker's building challenge entries where he used a similar looking land surface from Locomotion. I also wanted to channel the time of day in each area through visual and color motifs. Hazy pastels for Mount Morne, multicolored buildings and warm colors in Sera Shores, deliberately darker paths and walls with bright accents in Nochtenburg, and bro IDK the coaster is called High Noon let's just do a normal Western area.

I approached this one like half a semi-realistic park and half a scenario playthrough with a carefree attitude. I took a few cues from CP6's YouTube videos and tried to channel the Fundamental Forest ruleset, albeit contrary to my builder bluff I am no SSSammy. I also tried to focus on weenies and sightlines, such as having the drop tower and biggest coaster at the back of the map. One touch I really like is how Crescent looks like a crescent moon from the entrance and riverwalk.

There was a lot of on-the-fly thinking, ideation, and cutting. For instance, Mount Morne didn't come easy despite being the first area I built and I ended up using some LL-style building tests I did in Open as a reference. Bits like a dark ride tunneling through hoodoos in Noonton, a moon bridge using vertical drop track for the reflection in Nochtenburg and a Lilliput-themed kiddie area where everything is tiny didn't make the cut. I also realized after finishing I could have done a medieval area in place of Nochtenburg for the knight/night pun, but I think having an area that just diegetically feels like a night in the city was the right move.

While it took longer than I anticipated, I think Sundial Springs was worth it. I'm so happy I just sat down and made a park. My ass is out here making goofy little dioramas and entering building challenges and going for weird ass concepts and forcing myself to be a permanent supporting player and never finishing anything over 200 tiles. Making a hackless LL park to practice my fundamentals has been on the docket since Head-2-Head Classic, but even back then my attempts would just result in too much yapping and posting unfinished screenshots and ending up with an entrance at best. This was the perfect environment for me to just make a little park under wraps and understand the process a little more. I also got to understand my strengths and weaknesses with a more traditional park. For instance, I felt surprisingly confident planning everything out but I also think my queues aren't interesting and need a lot of work. All in all, I think having a solo park to my name and hopefully a Bronze or Silver is a more lucrative investment to get out of this event than a little diorama.

In retrospect, if I really wanted to make a park in a day I would have done a LL-style park in Open. It is so much faster and easier to just copy and paste four ghost train pieces with SM and instantly give a 2x2 building windows than have to build all that track. It's still something I really want to try, maybe for a future DKMP contest. Can't say I'm mad doing another RCT1 park though! LLLL!

chAsiNg aFteR yOu

Nice review Gustav. Uwow guys, Hex is such a good J K/Hoob impersonator! Come on, y'all had to know it was me. I wasn't sure if we were gonna hit 24 entries so I whipped this up dangerously close to the end. I mean while V1 was waking up on the 24th. I kinda regret it now since we did end up with 24 and it cut into my time- spoiler alert- helping finish off a TTA entry. Sorry partner!

This was a fun little exercise in using some of the new objects from H2HX and working on my detailing after spending a week in LL land. J K and deanosrs were my big influences on the main angle with the interiors. I had a little area of the map I called Gustav's Fun Corner where I'd find cool objects and chuck them off to the side for later use. AmusementParker, Alex and Iretont did most of the heavy lifting here. I was particularly inspired by the way BallpitWarrior used Alex's light objects in his Polar Express entry. This one has more of a backstory and theme than just being cool surreal atmospheric stuff, but it's really hard and stupid to explain and it kills all the aura. Real ones will get it I guess.

Since it's not uploaded to the site yet, I'll unwrap my gift to you all and show you the other angles in this little micro! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays NE!