Steve

• Offline
• United States

All right, I (regrettably) don't post much these days, so big post incoming:

Before I say anything else, I have to give a huge shout out to the squad I assembled to help me out in testing the map to get it in ship-shape form: Brian, Josh, Justin, Leon, Matty, and especially Andrew. With Xtreme also building for the contest we were pitted against one another, and I often turned to Andrew to keep spirits high and keep me on track. I appreciate all you guys so much, and we are all lucky to have you around for being not only exceptional builders, but just outright exceptional humans.

Otherwise, I am overwhelmed by the response this has received. While building this, I ebbed and flowed from thinking "this is pretty good, it might be the best thing ever" to "this is dog water and I will get a 84.5." When looking at something for so long day after day, I tend to doubt myself. So to finally unleash it and to see what you all have to say here and on Discord... I'm so grateful. After about 22 years (!) of playing this game on New Element, to get to this point is just absolutely wild. You guys understandably give me a hard time for the laughs (I hope) and keep me humble, and I appreciate every one of you and what this community has done for all of us. Despite whatever ups and downs we have had together, I never want it to be lost on me and will hold it close.

I guess this map has a bit of a story behind it for only being a few months old, or at least I feel like it has some explaining to do: I was immediately smitten with Justin's layout and how it invoked early aughts-style beemers and thought it was ripe for a Busch Gardens-type map. I wanted to straddle that line of heavy theming with a level of realism. Kind of in the vein of Disney with a big coaster. I enjoy pulling things from real life, too, and there was buckets of concept art of a new Animal Kingdom area being planned out:

 WDW_Tropical-Americas_Aerial-scaled.jpg (147.65KB)
downloads: 65

I didn't copy things here entirely one-for-one, but I think the inspiration was pretty heavy. Took some of the broad stroke ideas and removed the Disney IP's and introduced my own macro.

And the macro was something I wanted to get right from the beginning. After years of working on parks like Lemuria and Glow Worm and H2H maps otherwise, theme park design and the sight lines for points of interest were what I really wanted to nail down. That meant I had to place this "area" in the larger "park" in the right way. The coaster lent itself to being in the back right corner of a larger overall park, so I designed it to have two "entrances" to the area and then complete a loop around. This also allowed for more context in the back of the park for employee services and such and cement that feeling that this area exists in the back right corner of a larger map. And with the coaster placed, I knew the station was going to be a set piece and should be a main sight line along a main primary pathway, with a secondary or tertiary pathway offshooting from there. This ultimately "forced" me to build the layout of the area into a triangular shape, allowing me to put the bigger dark ride facade as another set piece for guests to be drawn to. And then, from there, allowed me to place the carousel in a central location to give me the sight line from the other area's "entrance." With my own macro in place, different from the concept art above, I was able to include the rides there comfortably of my own accord and let the pieces fall from there. It sounds confusing but it works for me in my method of madness. Basically ever since I heard nin talk about sight lines years ago, and CP6 talking about primary/secondary/tertiary pathways in parks... I always try and emphasize those to hammer home that theme park design inspiration. Here's an old screen with some of the early macro planning:

 Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 11.22.01?AM.png (215.66KB)
downloads: 75

Outside of the build process itself, a lot of you have kind of touched on why I didn't submit in time. I basically built on this every day in the last three months, and the deadline approached more and more and I got more and more nervous. I jokingly asked for an extension and I legitimately didn't expect it to happen. When it did, and I realized I was still a way off from finishing... I felt awful. With the deadline arriving, I had to make a decision to rush it and submit or keep it, and do it how I wanted. The answer felt easy but somehow like I was letting myself down or the community down. I think I made the right decision in the end, because this allowed me to expand the map from 60x60 to 80x70 and spend hours in the minutiae of meticulous detailing, and redoing things, and adding things and perfecting things. It that last month after the deadline it felt grueling knowing that I had a vision and needed all these extra tiles to execute it, but I think it was for the benefit of the map. I will always and forever say that a parkmaker's greatest tool is patience. To have the patience to expand or refine or wait for a bug to be fixed, is a far greater skill than placing some trees or creating a layout. It's what's going to challenge you to become the best you can be, and I think that goes for probably most things in life (I'm a dad, I think I have some authority to make that call). Here's where the map was on deadline day, and I had a handful of facades to do still and some queue line stuff and the carousel, etc:

 Screenshot 2025-06-18 at 11.01.51?AM.png (1.4MB)
downloads: 68

Anyway, I guess that's all I could share for now. Again, I am beside myself with all the love and support you guys have given for me and this release. It means the world, and I hope to keep going and excited for whatever is next.

Not bad for DKSO.

The Barnacle Boy to my Mermaid Man.

hell yea, nerds.

I'm really glad you decided to use this really great idea that I came up with but I'm really not glad to see you totally screw the pooch on the execution.