Park / [H2H8 R3] A Year in Winkelheim

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  Liampie Offline

  
  

  Heaven's brand has been a tad formulaic. Perhaps starting with Ruishi, then containing all of Atlas' parks, and all the Gallery parks so far, there's been a pretty simple pattern: pick a relatable, atmospheric setting and add roller coasters. 
  
  Granted, other teams have done this too. It's arguably the reason behind the success of DS4 and Forgotten Mekong. It's just the way Heaven's brand continuously approaches this concept makes it feel like a kind of trademark.

   

  I think "atmospheric setting with roller coasters" added is so broad that you can hardly call it a formula. I think the parks you mentioned are indeed also examples of this supposed 'formula', as well as Wit's End. You also conveniently leave out the parks that do not follow this formula. Feira do Flamengo, Calico Canyon, Asteroid Fields, ColorFlood and Atlantean Ark if you want to go that far back. There's definitely some recurring qualities in the Heaven's parks but it's more in the background than 'atmospheric settings with roller coasters'. The Heaven's brand perhaps is more about what kind of parks we DON'T build. That may be what sets us apart, not the atmospheric parks with roller coasters that you can find on any team.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #61
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  inthemanual Offline

  Wit's End was not a very relatable setting, and it had more than just roller coasters added, which confused the concept. 
  
  Asteroid Fields is exactly the formula I'm talking about, but taken in a riskier direction. It's a sci-fi space setting plus roller coasters. Feira and Calico still fit the general formula even though they're realistic parks, and the formulaic normal is more rooted in semi-realism, because they're set in places both a bit unlikely for a real park, and with a rich setting, although they do feel a bit different than the others. I specifically picked out Lijiang alone from HK, because I don't think the formula had really been established back then. Le Reve, Corsair, Colorflood, and Atlantean Ark were all very different, took huge risks, and made HK one of, if not the single, most memorable H2H team ever.
  
  Formulaic is not bad. It's a very winning strategy and it obviously works quite well. The only issue I really have with it is that I've been missing a "wow" factor because of how safe it is.
  
  @Six Frags: (Edited in because I missed your comment) It's not that the concept is the same as another, it's that it follows a similar pattern. Pick a interesting, familiar setting (time and place) and add theme park elements. You did that in a clearly unique way, made an astounding park with tons of atmosphere, and won the match and my vote, so don't take this the wrong way.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #62
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  robbie92 Offline

  Do you guys mean Lijiang? I don't know if you could count Pac's non-H2H design as a Heaven's Franchise creation.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #63
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  inthemanual Offline

  
  

  Do you guys mean Lijiang? I don't know if you could count Pac's non-H2H design as a Heaven's Franchise creation.

  
  
  Whoops, gunna go edit that now. 

  posted 7 years ago

  • #64
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  G Force Offline

  I think there is definitely some sort of formula, just like there is for other styles and approaches to building.
  
  When it comes to building parks with multiple builders, is far easier to say "hey let's build this real life place" than it is to build an idea or concept that is only theoretical or doesn't actually exist in physical form in real life. It also avoids IPs or some ideas which might only appeal to certain people.
  
  If you build pagodas everyone recognizes and can form some sort of connection with them, same thing with asteroids or Classical Rome. Everyone knows what those are and has probably seem them referenced a lot in everyday life for their entire life.
  
  People are probably far less likely to connect with a park based around Shrooms, or a specific style of amusement park, or even a specific pop culture icon.
  
  A few Heaven's parks have definitely stepped outside of that mold, and many many non Heaven's parks have entered it... But at this point it definitely seems to be the most successful H2H approach there is.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #65
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  Six Frags Offline

  I get your point ITM, but I still don't see how that's a Heaven's formula. If I approach it with your assumption, then let's say for example Forgotten Mekong 'stole' the 'Heaven's formula', as it also used an

  interesting, familiar setting (time and place) and add theme park elements

  . As well as almost every other park, because it's a rollercoaster building game and we create things we saw in real life (because that's our frame of reference).

   

  Also, it's not like Liam said, 'you have to build like this or it won't be a Heaven's park'. Well, he advised what concepts he didn't want to see actually, now that I think about it .. Hmm, you might be on to something now that I'm typing this! Haha

  posted 7 years ago

  • #66
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  Turtle Offline

  Yeah I wish Liam's teams would stop building beautiful, atmospheric parks with great rollercoasters in them, god I hate that. 

  posted 7 years ago

  • #67
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  G Force Offline

  I get your point ITM, but I still don't see how that's a Heaven's formula. If I approach it with your assumption, then let's say for example Forgotten Mekong 'stole' the 'Heaven's formula', as it also used an . As well as almost every other park, because it's a rollercoaster building game and we create things we saw in real life (because that's our frame of reference).
   
  Also, it's not like Liam said, 'you have to build like this or it won't be a Heaven's park'. Well, he advised what concepts he didn't want to see actually, now that I think about it .. Hmm, you might be on to something now that I'm typing this! Haha
  

  Just because it's not explicitly stated as a Heavens strategy doesn't mean the majority of the parks don't fit that description.
  
  All three parks so far this season have (though Flamingo less so) as did almost all the teams parks the last few seasons. Doesn't mean it's a bad thing... Just means that that's the prominent approach many of the members have happened to take. Just as many members outside of Heaven's team have happened to take because that's usually how people build, because it's just easier to do so that way.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #68
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  alex Offline

  I'm still astonished Forum wasn't built by Liam I was 100% certain. Well done to the builders of both parks, it really could've gone either way for me.

   

  I owe Wilnkelheim a review:

  I loved the park idea and that you took a big (and positive) risk in focusing a park around a cool trick. Many others would've said 'this is H2H it isn't enough, we need to add lots of extra content'. Of course there were plenty of storytelling details but I'm glad you didn't see the need to overload the map with rides or anything. Like any illusion it's also fun to work out how it was pulled off and this aspect should also be considered a feature.

  It was a really close match though and I enjoyed exploring Forum Caeleste slightly more. Maybe my RCT tastes are more conservative than I would like to think. Great to see a risk here regardless.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #69
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  Julow Offline

  *future detailed review here*

  posted 7 years ago

  • #70
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  Sulakke Offline

  First of all, I want to thank for Tolsimir, Faas and Saxman for the fantastic opposition in this matchup. I remember Tolsimir proposing this idea during H2H7 in the Heaven’s Atlas team forum. I’m glad he was finally able to realize his idea as it’s an amazing concept. I haven’t seen the park in-game yet, as Open is not working for me on my current laptop. I wasn’t able to open any H2H8 park yet, which is really frustrating, seeing all those fantastic parks passing by. I can’t wait to have my own laptop back in three weeks and be able to take a look at all these amazing parks. This H2H season seems to have been really solid up till now.

   

  My team showed me some screens of Winkelheim. I don’t think screens do this park justice though, as the gimmick and the rotation shock is kind of gone that way. I wasn’t able to explore all the little things and details, but those seem to make the park. All interiors are stellar and I can’t wait to open the park and explore those a bit more. The architecture itself was also very good and did what it had to do, but was not mind-blowing. I think you could have done and maybe should have done more with that to make up for the small map size. Judging from the screens, my main complaint would be that the coaster looks kind of awkward the way it is. I understand that you wanted to add rides, but it feels forced this way, with the coaster raging through buildings. I do love the spinning cups ride though. The way you used the snowman version in the winter angle is really clever. The autumn foliage didn’t look that good; especially those yellow hanging willows don’t work. The orange coloured cedar trees were lovely, though. The winter angle was the most interesting to look at it and looks really nice with those new snow objects. All in all, I think you executed the concept really well and produced a memorable H2H park.

   

  Six Frags already said most of what I wanted to say, but I’ll provide you guys with some more background information and comments on our park. During this season’s brainstorming period I was visiting some prehistoric and ancient roman graves not far away from my hometown and that’s where this park concept popped up in my mind. At first, I had the idea of building a park set in a past time era. After sharing the idea with the rest of the team, we decided to go with Ancient Rome, as the Romans were real epicureans and the Roman Empire was very advanced and wealthy, and it would make kind of sense that the Romans would have spent money and energy in constructing a theme park. I was actually quite surprised that no one came up with this park idea before, as it is quite an obvious concept. We’ve seen parks set in the future before (e.g. Asteroid Fields, the RCTAvenged timeline competition), why did no one build a park set in the past? To really set the Ancient Rome atmosphere and make this park believable, it was evident for us that we had to go for a city park.

   

  I started with the overall map layout, landscaping and coaster layouts, while SF set the tone for the architecture and details. For the landscaping I took inspiration from the famous Palatine hill in Rome. In the meantime, Liampie made us the fantastic palette. I understand that some people are getting a little bit tired of this palette trend this season, but I don’t think we were able to accomplish the Ancient Rome look without the new palette. I really like how the colour scheme turned out in this park. Six Frags and I started quite rusty on this park. All of our first buildings did not make it to the final version. With every building session we pushed each other out of this rustiness though. I wasn’t sold by Six Frags’ first work on the map, but with every building session his work improved. Especially the last two or three weeks he came in this amazing flow and I loved every building he built in those weeks. That’s also when he came up with the flume/rapids area, which ended up being the best area in the park in my opinion. For me, his work on this map is easily his best.

   

  We suffered from time stress in the last week, which resulted in some rushed parts and unfortunately we weren’t able to implement all of our ideas into the map. The playground area would have been improved first if we would have had some more time and we also wanted to add some more frozen staff and easter eggs. SF and I lived like real cavemen in the last week, sacrificing all of our spare time to finishing the park. I’m really proud that we were able to finish this. I’m also happy with how the macro turned out in the end, without having a proper planning for the map. I had a lot of fun building this park and SF was a good building comrade. CHE and IonZero were also really useful in helping completing the park.

   

  As for the coasters: they are probably not the most memorable coasters, but larger coasters would look out of place, I think. The main objective here was to create an immersive and plausible theme park set in Ancient Rome. But yeah, I agree that they are not among the best layouts I ever maybe, but they are believable in the setting and do what they are supposed to do in my opinion.

   

  Now, regarding to the typical Heaven’s formula discussion, I can see where it’s coming from. The atmosphere is probably similar to parks like Lijang, Technotitlan, Carreira, and DKS, but the concept is clearly different. This park is meant to be a full theme park, while those other parks are ‘atmospheric settings with rollercoasters’. You could even go as far and say Forum Caeleste is realism, as we tried to create a theme park that could have been existed 2000 years ago and stay within the boundaries of what was possible in that time. In that sense, I think this park is quite innovative and refreshing instead of being a park within the ‘standard Heaven’s formula’. But once again, I can see where the criticism is coming from.

   

  Thanks to everyone for spending their precious time on writing comments and reviews!

  posted 7 years ago

  • #71
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  Six Frags Offline

  I would love to hear some thoughts from Tolsimir on this. Anyone know of his whereabouts?

  posted 7 years ago

  • #72
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  bigshootergill Offline

  He's probably enjoying spring in Winkelheim right now, helping Jakob plow the field.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #73
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  Tolsimir Offline

  It's coming, but I need to find time for it!

  posted 7 years ago

  • #74
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  In:Cities Offline

  Who did the readme? Very impressive!

  posted 7 years ago

  • #75
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  saxman1089 Offline

  Who did the readme? Very impressive!

   

  That would be our fearless King Crab. He's our resident readme expert. 

   

  Tols is going to get down into the nitty-gritty on how this park was conceived and built, but I figured I'd document my experience working on this park.
  
  I basically did a lot of the bitchwork on this park, including the thousands of black walls and tiles, and making sure that the park was cleaned up from all the copying. There were tons of supports to hide, and given the height of the four copied maps over the original, it wasn't easy to navigate around. you'll also notice that when viewed on the unintended angle of viewing, some of the seasons have what amounts to random land blocks everywhere. This was to make it match with the bottom level. When you view from a particular angle, you are seeing a combination of both the original bottom map and the upper map (which I think is the reason this park is so computationally intensive). I also rebuilt the coaster 4 times, as it ended up being easier than trying to save it as a .td6 and place it in the correct spot. 
  
  I think my biggest contribution to this park however, was the peepability, which for my standards was pretty terrible. Navigating the tile inspector and trying to make the paths properly connected was an absolute nightmare, mostly because the land tiles were so far below the actual path height. I think this is why there were so few peeps in autumn; iirc most of the paths were above the original map, and that made it really difficult to click on the proper tiles and connect the paths.
  
  This park is the reason why I reached out to Broxzier after the park was submitted for the ability to click on an object in the tile inspector and select the proper tile and object on the tile. This capability has now been merged into OpenRCT2, so you can use it, just ctrl-click on an object when the tile inspector is open.
  
  Regardless of how painful some of the work was, I was happy to do it. I believe I was the first person to actually see the full effect of turning the view and having the season change with all the black walls in place, and it was magical. It was great working with Tols and Faas on this, and I'm really happy with the end result even if we didn't get the win. 
  
  Props to the HG builders for putting out a great park!

  posted 7 years ago

  • #76
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  bigshootergill Offline

  I figured you guys just raised the land and just lowered it before the release. I guess it was way too high for that?
  
  I had the same job building Asteriod Fields with Tolsimir, he’s not a fan of doing dirty work. Cool you got to work with that crew, great park you guys put together.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #77
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  saxman1089 Offline

  I actually did raise the land for the outer corners of each season, but the inner quarter of each was over the top of the original map, which coincidentally was where the most paths needed to be connected. I couldn’t raise the land there because it would mess up the original map (which is visible in all of the seasons), so it was the hard way or not at all. But really it was so much fun to build on it and try to figure out all these things.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #78
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  Liampie Offline

  Haven't reviewed either park except for loose comments here and there. There's a few things I have to say, I'll try to keep it short.
  
  A Year in Winkelheim
  This was a park that Tolsimir proposed in H2H7, and that was in development for a while. Never resulted in work getting done on a savegame, but we brainstormed for a while and all contributed ideas and it was part of the season schedule, until it wasn't (scheduling issues I think). Leading up to H2H8 I was talking to Tolsimir about how we should try to get that park going again. I was going to pick him second in the draft until ][ took him - brilliant move. I requested Tolsimir to keep the Heaven's Atlas secrets to himself... He's definitely the owner of the idea and it's his right to use it in this contest, I just think it would've been more sportsmanlike if it wasn't against my team. So when I discovered this as trav forwarded us the submissions on Monday, I was appalled. the draft trick was fair and funny, but this was taking it too far. I even saw some of my own conceptual contributions being used against me!
  
  Luckily these feelings largely evaporated in a few days, even before the match went up and our park started to slowly win (which admittedly also helped to make me come to terms with it). I still think it would've been great if Spacecrab didn't put this park against us, but there's no hard feelings towards anyone. I'm glad to see this park and this great idea being realised, it was disappointing that we couldn't make it work three years ago. And guys, you did a great job! While I agree that the coaster was lacking, you knocked it out of the park with the little details. The kites (both of them!), the library books, the 4d coaster as a plough, the pile of snow... There are so many brilliant little ideas in this park. It's not just the overall concept that's highly creative, it's also the execution on a micro level, the object usage. Speaking of the overall concept, I think the long readme added a lot and the story of the timeloop was a great addition. Oh, I love the onion domes on the church. Plaza in front looks great too especially in the winter.
  
  Are we supposed to solve the mystery of the stolen paintings btw? I deconstructed half the map and at some point found what could be a painting hidden somewhere in the village. Did I see that right?
  
  Would've been happy to vote for this park in almost any matchup. Again, no hard feelings.
  
  Forum Caeleste
  LOVE the concept, wish I could've built on it. On the other hand you guys were totally fine without me. It's the most complete Sulakke park ever, and Six Frags going from rusty to better than he's ever been in no time. Lots of beautiful settings, lots of super cool little details. The central area with the steps and all the trees is my favourite in all it's simplicity. Glad you guys kept that open. I wish the corner with the water rides got a little more love, I think it's a brilliant mess. The ships were executed masterfully, but maybe they're hidden a bit too much. I like it this way, anyway. Great job guys. :) My favourite park from our team so far and one of my favourites from the contest overall. Also the best Alpha Legends park ever in RCT2 at least. ;)
  
  
  
  
  This was a good match.

  posted 7 years ago

  • #79
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  AvanineCommuter Offline

  Winkleheim - the idea of changing seasons as you rotate is fantastic. Love the concept and appreciated the creativity of the narrative, and also the time and ingenuity it took to get it to work as well as you guys did. Kudos.
  
  In terms of actual content, this is where the park falls short for me. So many little things that are really cool, sure, and they are there to push this 10-page long readme of a narrative and story that I didn’t care for. What was actually built? A really poor coaster layout repeated four times. Architecture was middle of the road, and I didn’t care for the atmosphere. While I appreciated the unique ideas and ingenuity of the concept, I was completely underwhelmed when exploring the park. The content didn’t back up the greatness of the idea for me. 65%
  
  Forum Caeleste was really beautifully constructed with great atmosphere throughout, thought it did feel very one-note. The atmosphere was some of the best this season though. The concept wasn’t as interesting as I think I would’ve liked, but the execution was great. Coasters were realistic and achieved what you intended to, but as such, they weren’t that exciting to look at. I love the new textures at play here and the color palette is great. Some areas felt a little ambling in terms of composition and could’ve been tighter. The burning building was great, as were all the Roman details in the peeps. Overall it was “nice” and “enjoyable”, but didn’t jump out to me as anything new or innovative. 80%

  posted 7 years ago

  • #80
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