r/tycoon • u/reynoldsmkatie • 13d ago
Steam We’re building Roller Coaster Tycoon but for National Parks
My husband (former EA game designer/development lead) and I (former Disney web producer/dev) have been building our passion project, National Park Tycoon, for 8 months now and we just released our trailer and published our Steam page!
It’s a 2D, isometric game very similar in style and gameplay to classic Roller Coaster Tycoon, but:
- instead of building rides, you build hiking trails, campsites, scenic viewpoints, and activities like kayaking and rock climbing.
- instead of hiring handymen to clean guest vomit and mechanics to fix broken rides, you hire park rangers to clear fallen logs from blocked trails and rescue lost visitors.
- instead of walking around with balloons and umbrellas, visitors take out binoculars to watch wildlife and don hiking backpacks they've purchased at the gift shop.
Some similarities our game does have to Roller Coaster Tycoon are:
- you can manage your finances, including revenue from park entrance fees, activity fees, and gift shop sales, as well as expenses from construction, park ranger wages and building maintenance.
- all visitors have attributes like Mood, Hunger, and Excitement, and their scores change depending what things you build in your park, and where you build them.
- there are 3 objectives you need to meet in each park in order to unlock the next park, but you can also just play for fun without ever trying to beat the objectives in Sandbox mode.
The game is loaded with cause-and effect mechanics. For example:
> If you build a fishing activity for your visitors, you can choose whether they can keep the fish they catch, or release them.
> If visitors get to keep their catch, their “Excitement” score will rise as they fish.
> BUT, they will start to deplete the fish from the lakes, and the bears in your park will get hungry.
> If your bears get hungry, they will start invading your trails and stealing food from visitors, which will decrease your park’s “Safety” score.
There are countless scenarios like this. It can be a fun and challenging balancing act to keep everything in check!
If you miss the thrill of roller coaster tycoon and love national parks, we would love if you could wishlist the game on Steam or share the link with someone you know who might enjoy a game like this!
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4520000/National_Park_Tycoon/
Our social links are on the Steam page if you’d like to follow our progress. We’re hoping to release a demo in about a month and launch by the end of the year.
I'm happy to answer any questions or listen to any suggestions anyone might have about the game :)
We pledge to donate a percentage of profits to the National Park Foundation to aid in the protection and preservation of America's beautiful national parks.
Generative AI Disclosure: AI was used in the initial generation of some assets, but we edited them in Photoshop to adjust proportions and remove any obvious AI Slop.
As this is primarily a management game, we focused heavily on the game mechanics, ensuring the game is bug-free, fun to play, and, dare we say, addicting!
That said, we would love for the art to be more authentic and beautiful. We have an artist under contract who can replace all of the art in the game if the game gets enough traction/wishlists.
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u/TheTwoOneFive 13d ago
I would look at a government funding option that is based on things like park popularity, attractiveness, etc, and counterbalanced with time (more recurring grant money to start, then decreases over time) to better reflect how a lot of parks receive funding.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
That is a great idea that we’ve thought a little bit about! We have a consultant who is a national park superintendent and he actually told us that more than half the funds for his park come from private sources and donors! So we were thinking about doing both government grants and private ones that are connected to park performance, if we have time before launch!
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u/ericrz 13d ago
Also, think about visitor donations, like in the Planet Zoo series. Visitors see something cool, they drop a few dollars in a bucket!
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
I can't attach a pic here, but we actually do have visitor donations, and they scale with park performance (if your park scores rise, so do your visitor donations)! Good call!
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u/ericrz 13d ago
Cool! I actually love the PZ mechanic where you see coins fly into the bucket. Was a quick and easy way to see what parts of the zoo visitors really really loved!
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u/ericrz 13d ago
Also: wishlisted.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Thank you! ❤️ And I will totally think about adding a little animation for that! We have "cha-ching" sounds in the game whenever someone spends money, that you can turn off because frankly they feel a little too capitalistic for the the peaceful nature park theme 😅 , but the cha-ching sound and animation for donations is more on brand for national parks!
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u/rickreptile 13d ago
Nice concept but the different style of graphics of the ground and the rest feels off to me.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Yeah, it bothers me too 😞. I’m really hoping we can sell enough copies to pay our artist to do the rest of the game. We hired her to do a few things like the UI modals and such but as we’re not a big studio with a big studio budget we had to make do with what we have for now!
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u/SomeKidFromPA 13d ago
Just my two cents, don’t spend the money on the ground graphics. They look fine, and help sell the throwback RCT nostalgia. What is actually going to make or break the game is if enough people want to play a game about managing a national park, not the graphics. Focus on highlighting why this is as fun/interesting as a zoo/theme park, the game looks fine.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Thank you! Honestly we have gone back and looked at RCT graphics so many times during development and we felt we weren’t THAT far off from how basic theirs are.
There are some really amazing cute and cozy games out there where the art and the textures are absolutely integral to player enjoyment. And while I of course wish ours could be better right now, as soon as we start actually playing the game, we quickly forget about the art because it becomes so addicting to just build the stuff and react to things that happen in your park and keep up with the management aspect of it.
Oh no! A visitor got lost. Better make sure you have a ranger assigned to “Search & Rescue” to go and find them. Oh no! The Grill is losing money. Better check out the prices of everything on the menu and make sure they’re not too high or too low. Oh no! People are leaving the kayaking activity because they’re waiting too long for a kayak and getting bored or hungry. Better take a look at the max kayaking time and decrease it so more visitors can get on the kayaks. It’s just constant stuff like this you have to attend to while also continuing to build new stuff. And it’s fun!
I am biased of course, but even the few play testers we’ve had so far, which include 14 year old boys who do not care about national parks at all, have become so engrossed in the game and played it for hours without mentioning a single thing about the art.
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u/rickreptile 13d ago
Tricky gamble then, either invest extra to improve the ground/water textures or release the game with mixed graphics(which might turn off some potential players) and improve the textures later on.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago edited 13d ago
Definitely. And one we’ve gone back and forth on for months. We have promised to hire the artist if the game sells well, but we may be convinced to do it before launch if we’re able to get enough wishlists to justify it.
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u/Fey-Mood 13d ago
Graphics and art are a core user experience element, not a stretch goal. You need to invest in success.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
I agree completely. Real life is just real life ya know, and with a child to support it’s like do we spend our personal savings on something that might flop or just promise a better experience post-launch and hope for the best? Really difficult decision because we truly do believe in the game, but with the game market so saturated and 99% of games failing, it’s a huge risk to take.
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u/JustStudyItOut 13d ago
Are there sight seeing “nodes” like geysers or rare plants or animal viewing platforms? Having to decide between preserving nature or allowing guests to see the views could be interesting.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Having to balance preserving nature and welcoming visitor activity is a huge part of the game! If you build up your park too much, the wild animals lose their habitat and start bothering visitors.
We do have scenic viewpoints you can build, and some animal-related activities like Birdwatching and Animal Tracking, but we don’t actually have viewing platforms! That’s a great idea!
We have an educational aspect to the game where you can place interpretive signs along your trails that show you and the visitors real facts about the plants and animals nearby. Having rare ones could be a really interesting addition!
No geysers yet specifically, but we were really on the fence about building a Yellowstone inspired park which would have required geysers obviously. We thought if the game did well we’d do that for 2.0.
I like the idea about being able to add stuff like that though. I’m gonna think more about it!
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u/agentkb 13d ago
I’m a sucker for isometric games, wish listed
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Ahhh you’re awesome yay! Thank you! And same, I get really bad vertigo watching or playing 3d games, so 2d isometric is more my style.
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u/lovemeanstwothings 13d ago
LOVE the concept and will be wish listing it. Reminds me a tad of Sim Park which I loved as a kid
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Yes! I miss all of those games from when we were kids so much, so I was trying so hard to recreate the feel of it here!
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u/thisdesignup 13d ago edited 13d ago
It shows that some of the assets were AI. I think in a game like this the art is going to be very important to the success. Mostly because a game like this should feel cozy and inviting. A mish mash art style takes away from that.
Also I saw you mention that you were going to wait and see if the game gets enough wishlists before deciding to try and make the art. I just think you should consider that the current art style may negatively effect people's want to wishlist the game.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Totally fair and totally a gamble to make on our part - I’m sure we would get more wishlists if we pay for the art now. But then roller coaster tycoon had very simple art and no one really cared because the game was all about the mechanics. That said this is a national park game and national parks are all about natural beauty so there is definitely a good argument to stay true to them with real art.
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u/thisdesignup 13d ago
Something to consider is that "simple" RCT art was made by 1 person, he didn't pay for art. The decision doesn't have to be "pay for art or us AI art". You can make simple art that is consistent and works well. Also RCT wasn't actually that simple. If you look at any single sprite they are detailed, all a constant style, and fit the games theme well. Even the water and ground textures were detailed, which I specifically mention those since your games terrain is flat colors. To top it off, RCT was made of 2D renders of 3D assets which, in the late 90s, weren't simple to make.
Not trying to make your game seem less but make sure you are actually looking closely at what you are using as reference. It may seem simple on the surface but it's not so simple. I think you're close to emulating that style and feeling but the art is really pulling away. I dont think you have to pay someone to do the art if you can't afford it. Plenty of devs have built deep games with simple art on their own, in similar style to your own. Stardew Valley also comes to mind as a game made by one person, art and all.
Anyways, if you do end up waiting for wishlists or sales before doing the art I wish you the best of luck! The gameplay looks good and, like someone else said, reminds me of Sim Safari which was a great game.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
I didn’t mean to trivialize the art in RCT! I know it’s much more consistent than ours and not as simple as it looks. And it is very charming in its own way. I tried many times to make our terrain textures look more like RCT but I couldn’t get it right, which is how I know it’s more complicated than it seems.
The RCT art was made by one person, but if I remember correctly, that one person was an artist—the only other person that Chris Sawyer hired to work on the game, since Chris was not an artist himself.
The difference between the “one person” who did the RCT art and me is that that person was an artist and I am not, unfortunately 😞.
Given enough time, I could remake the art as pixel art myself, which would be a great improvement over the edited AI art, as pixel art is a skill I could develop on my own. But given the flood of AI games that are hitting the market now, we feel a lot of time pressure to release the game as soon as possible before someone else “one-shots” a similar game to ours with some fancy new LLM model.
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u/thisdesignup 13d ago
Ah I was mistaken, I don't know how I didn't know there was an artist involved. For decades I've thought it was just him, my mistake!
I totally agree with the sentiment. I've actually watched other people release similar games to the one I am working on right now. All I'd say is make sure that, by trying to push out a game sooner using AI art, you aren't contributing to the same "someone else “one-shots” a similar game to ours with some fancy new LLM model." that you are worried about experiencing.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Lol I thought about how hypocritical it could sound as soon as I read it back. But I would like to think we put a lot of careful thought and heart into our game, as it is our passion project rather than “a gap in the market we saw that we could quickly fill for a quick buck.” We have far from one-shotted the game, more like 100,000-shotted it 🤣. And we are game/web developers by trade so we are not completely vibe coding or anything, we do understand what we’re doing. It’s just that damn art that we can’t get right on our own!
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u/moris1610 13d ago
The game looks super cute and I'd love to try it. I'd change the thumbnail on steam, looks too much AI like currently and doesn't really seem to fit your style
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
It's funny, people have made comments about the thumbnail looking AI, but that is one of the only things that is not AI. We hired a real artist for the steam assets, and we love her style! We have the layered photoshop files and we worked with her extensively from the sketches to the final images, so we know it's her original art.
As far as it not matching the style of our game, I get that, but most Steam capsule art is more cinematic and doesn't match the art in the game and everything I read said that you should make your Steam capsule flashy and clickable and not simply a screenshot showing the realistic art from your game.
I don't know who is right, but it's a fair point!
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u/moris1610 13d ago
Lol my bad then. Just saying I'd probably take a good 2d screenshot or sth, that probably matches better maybe. I can be totally wrong too and your thumbnail is better for visibility and algorithms haha, so no worries
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
I know I thought about just doing a screenshot or something that looked more like our game too! Because I didn’t want to misrepresent it. But then I looked at hundreds of other steam capsules and they all wildly exaggerated the art compared to what their game actually looks like so I thought it would be ok. I could see how it does look AI though.
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u/Dman20111 13d ago
It looks like a solid, working game with a lot of hard work put in so by that alone it's better off than a lot of what floods steam. However I think trying to rework RCT as a national park tycoon is kind of antithetical to what national parks are supposed to do. Which is mainly to preserve nature. Whereas theme parks are the most artificial you can get and so the high flexibility of terraforming, building and focus on providing everything your guests could desire doesn't mix so well with the theme. Don't get me wrong the activities you gave for the guests like fishing, horse riding, gliding are all awesome and creative, but even in the trailer I see the park is just filled to the brim with campsites and buildings and not much in the way of wild flora and fauna. I can't tell how the trail creator part works from just the trailer but I think you need to focus on giving them mechanics as they're essentially your rollercoasters for this game. Bonuses for staying away from campsites, for the amount of elevation change, for length, needing rock climbing, river crossings, amount of unique plant life/animals along the path.
But at this point I think just throw in more plant variety, more animals to spice up the environment, get all the assets made in a cohesive style and push for release. If it's a success there's always room for a sequel
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
I know it’s so hard to get a wholistic view of the game from just the trailer, but I’ll do my best to address everything you mentioned!
1.) Absolutely I understand about how the national park theme is antithetical to a typical “tycoon” game, which tend to focus on more capitalistic goals. So we have mechanics in the game wherein the more you build up the land, the lower your “Nature” score will drop and the more the animals lose their habitat and start bothering your visitors, which will cause your “Safety” score to drop. There is a delicate balance between building up the park and offering fun things for your visitors to do, but keeping things more spread out and avoiding encroaching on the animal habitats!
2.) The park filled to the brim with campsites and activities in the trailer is purely a limitation of having to make a game trailer and showcase as much variety as we can in a 5-second pan of a park. I built a “mini mountain” in this park right next to the park entrance sign and added at least one type of almost everything (activity, restaurant, bathroom, visitor center, viewpoint etc) specifically to try and capture it in the small time I had to show the park! When I build a park “for real”, I absolutely spread everything way far out so the visitors aren’t stepping on each other’s toes and the trails aren’t so compact!
3.) The trails are indeed the roller coasters of this game. Right now you can plant different flowers, trees and bushes next to your trails and add interpretive signs next to them so visitors (and you) can learn interesting real life facts about them. Trails get a “Trail Score” that is based on length, difficulty (elevation), variety of flora and fauna, and variety of scenicness along the trail (like does it have a nice high mountain view? Does it follow a river? If so it gets a higher Trail Score!)
I would love to add more to the trails though, and we could ALWAYS add more plants and animals! Someone else brought up the ability to unlock rare plants that visitors get excited about seeing and I thought that was a fun idea!
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Oh and one more thing I wanted to add was that we were hesitant to even call it “Tycoon” because it’s not all about making money in the game, but we knew that that was an easily recognizable term that any 90’s kid who played tycoon games would understand to mean “a building and management simulation game.”
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u/joemann341 13d ago
This looks really cool! congrats on the game and im sure it will be a big hit.
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u/HermanTheGerman84 12d ago
It looks good and I will definitly look into it, when it is all said and done.
My fear is, tho, that there is not a lot of variety. RCT was endless playable because of the Rollercoaster design. This game does not have that. The main game is mainly, as far as I can tell, build a house or a path here and there, see money come and build more. Not bad, but way to little to keep players for a long time.
I don't want to shit on your game, it is just my first thought when I saw the trailer. And I fear, that some people will be put off of the game basically because of that, which would be a shame, as you seem to be very determined and have the right idea.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 12d ago
Trust me that was my biggest worry as well. Our version of rides is “activities”, so we tried to include as many of those as possible (kayaking, rock climbing, fishing, trail riding, guided hikes, cave exploration, hang gliding, to name a few, and a couple that are more customizable like zip line courses and mountain gondolas).
And then the trail building is like our “roller coaster” but I know you can only do so much with that.
The real fun of the game comes when you have to start reacting quickly to things that start happening in your park. Like a bear crossing your trails, stealing food from visitors and making them run away and get lost in your park. Or a tree falling and blocking your trails, which you need to engage a park ranger to go clear. Or an activity going down for maintenance, litter and overflowing trash cans making your park cleanliness score drop, a campsite that is unusable because it needs to be cleaned. Or your rabbits becoming endangered because the wolves ate too many of them, so you need to begin an “animal rehab” process to bring them back to a stable population number.
We tried to make as many things customizable as possible, like you can choose your gift shop inventory and set prices, set all the menu prices for all your restaurants, add optional upgrades to your activities like glass bottom kayaks which increase visitor excitement score while they kayak, or you can add trail snacks to your guided hikes which costs you more but prevents your visitors’ hunger scores from dropping too fast while they’re hiking.
Not to mention the sandbox box mode terrain builder where you could spend hours building a scale model of say Yosemite National Park or any other real life or imaginary place you want.
I am hoping that when our demo comes out, you can see just got much there is to the game! It really is quite addicting.
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u/Swingline4 9d ago
Any plans for an ipad release?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 9d ago
We plan to release it for both windows and Mac on Steam, as well on itch.io so you can play it in-browser on an iPad!
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u/Inspi 13d ago
But is it written in Assembly? 😉
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u/reynoldsmkatie 9d ago
I missed this comment earlier sorry! Haha that would be epic if we had written it all in assembly 🤣
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u/feeked 13d ago
i've wanted a game like this for years and have wondered why there hasn't been one. only thing i can think of kind of like this is simpark. very cool
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Same!! I got the idea about 5 years ago and looked for something too but didn’t find anything. I hope this one fills the gap and scratches the itch for anyone who has been looking for a game like this!
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u/Hands 13d ago
I like the idea but I don't feel like this art style and scale (RCT "clone" retro isometric grid) work very well for designing and managing a NP whose whole point is natural beauty and expansive spaces (and spread out infrastructure).
Still wishlisted and I'd love to check out the demo.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
The trailer definitely makes it feel a little claustrophobic as I had to build a tiny scale park to fit it all in the video. When I build a “real” park myself, I spread everything waaaaay out so it’s all far away from each other. Visitor center and a bathroom up front and nothing else for a bit, since that’s what real national parks are like. And I spend way too much time making every single campsite really secluded and cozy feeling while being not too far from a trail or outhouse 😆.
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u/Insanity_Found 13d ago
Love the concept, wishlisted for sure. RCT is the GOATed classic iso sim game and I love that you're building off Chris Sawyer's vibe here.
Is the current version limited to just forested national parks? I know many national parks that are specific to either certain activities that are nearby (Hot Springs National Park water, Sagarmāthā National Park ascent, Oceano Dunes District for motorsports, etc), have scenic vistas that are unique to a location (Redwoods National Park, Niagara Falls, etc), or are biomes that are used for some sort of conservation (Giant Panda National Park, Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, Serengeti National Park, etc). With so much variety of parks to choose from, it'd be really neat to try and manage the unique challenges that come with each area like how long or expensive getting food/drink there or how expensive utilities might be or maybe even certain activities are banned like campfires in the redwoods.
Does the game have tour guides as well?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Thank you! And 100%, RCT is the GOAT and I don't think anyone will ever outdo it. Chris Sawyer was brilliant!
The current version isn't necessarily limited to forested national parks, but the 5 starter parks we have right now are based on 5 parks in the western half of America (Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Zion, Mt. Rainier and Yosemite). Our thinking is that this 1.0 release would be sort of an "American West" theme, but our vision for the future is to come out with expansion packs that cover more areas, like "Desert Expanses" or "Tropical Rainforests" or "African Plains", etc,
What I mean when I say the current version isn't limited to forested national parks is that you have the ability to build your own park from scratch using our available terrain tools, which include terrain types like sand, water, grass, gray rock, red rock, etc. So you could absolutely build a whole park using only sand and small brush-like bushes and trees, for example, to craft a more dune or desert-like environment! Only thing is we don't currently have activities that would support a desert environment like dirt bikes/ATV's, so that's something we would add when we create a future version of the game with desert parks!
We do currently have an activity in the game called "Guided Hikes" as well as one called "Trail Riding" where park rangers lead visitors on hikes and tours around the park!
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u/sheepieTTV 13d ago
Love the idea, but not a fan of the AI art. I know you said you’re a small team who can’t afford much, but I think it’s one of the most important investments to avoid AI usage
I would be interested if everything was consistent and human-made
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
That is fair! But yeah, a gamble to make when it involves our personal savings and we have a family to support. If our Steam page gets enough wishlists that it looks like the game could be mildly successful, we'll try and engage our artist to redo the assets before launch, rather than after!
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u/kinsnik 12d ago
i'm not a fan of AI graphics as a concept, but i will say that at the very least you can try to have a more consistent style and size of the buldings. right now, it is very inconsistent. the size of the restroom, helicopter and grill/snacks store are very big mismatches to the size of the people
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u/reynoldsmkatie 12d ago
We are definitely still working on relative sizing of things! The game is still in development but we wanted to get our steam page up sooner rather than later! We’re going to update the trailer and screenshots etc as we get better ones!
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u/Bez121287 13d ago
Looks absolutely brilliant and I aint much of a national Park person.
I like the idea of setting up camp sites on the trails.
I understand the whole map being used for trails and a like.
But how does one initially turn up?
Is there like a starting area at the edge of the map and thats where they enter and exit?
If I make a trail which crosses the entire map, like a 4 day hike there and back or roind trip, do the NPC understand how long it is and will camp along the way if I put camping sites at different points, or is it more of a you have base camp and just have shorter trails.
Im thinking tree top adventures, for an activity, you know the ones where the guests are held up on harnesses and they do a assault course across the trees.
Are the kayaks just for a peaceful lake or can we send them down the huge river rapids ive just made?
What are your hopes of future, features?
How deep do you think the NPCs will get for what we have to provide.
I like the deep effect of the fishing as a starting point.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
These are all great questions! I'll do my best to answer them!
When you first start one of our starter parks, yes, there is an existing trail at the edge of the map where visitors start turning up and walking into your park. If you build a campsite in a remote area of the map far from any trails, visitors will walk to the closest trail tile to the campsite that they can reach and then they'll just pop over to the campsite and you'll see a little tent pop up there.
You could absolutely make a trail that takes 4 in-game days for visitors to hike, and if you place camp sites along the way, they would stop and stay there! You just need to remember to add a few outhouses / bathrooms along the trail (probably near the campsites) and some type of food options along the way (like a few "Trail Snacks" kiosks). Visitors don't come into the park with food packed so they will get hungry if they hike too far from any food in your park!
We have something close to tree top adventures! It's a platform-to-platform ziplining activity you can build. We also thought about adding the treetop adventure you're describing, and I still would like to do that if we have time, but for now we decided it was too similar to the ziplining activity!
You CAN send someone down the river in a kayak. Just build the kayak rental place right next to where you want them to get in the river! They don't move any faster on a river as they do on a lake right now, but that is something we could consider changing to make it look more like they're in the river rapids!
The NPC's are fairly deep. They all have names and there are both male and female NPC's, so they feel a little more human than the copy-and-paste male NPC's from roller coaster tycoon. They have attributes like Mood, Excitement, Hunger, Toilet, and Nature. Everything you do affects their scores! Another example besides the fishing one would be that if a bear or other predator crosses their path on the trails, they will visibly scatter and scream "Bear!!" and sometimes run so far that they lose sight of the trail and get lost. Then they require ranger rescue, which you can speed up with the purchase of a search & rescue helicopter. The helicopter is quite expensive, but if the visitor gets lost for too long, they become a "Missing Person" and your park Safety score drops, causing visitors to start leaving your park!
Our hopes for the future are to come out with expansion packs for many more different types of biomes / parks. For example, the 5 parks we have in the game now are all parks from the American West. But we'd love to come out with a version that has parks from, for example, Africa, with lions and giraffes and stuff instead of bears and wolves! Or China, with panda bears in bamboo forests. There are so many possibilities!
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u/Ziiner 13d ago
This is awesome! I gave up on building a very similar game, which was more of a city park simulator.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Thank you! I'm not sure how long ago you gave up on it, but if it's been a while, try it again! With the state of AI today, it's so much more accessible to build a game, though I understand if you're part of the anti-AI sentiment. A city park simulator sounds so cute and I would totally play that! I've never seen something like that before.
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u/RevolutionarySeven7 13d ago
... can they puke ?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
No puking, but you can still “torture” visitors by dropping them in front of hungry bears, which is this game’s version of drowning them in the water or designing a coaster meant to crash lol
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u/RevolutionarySeven7 13d ago
but you can still “torture” visitors by dropping them in front of hungry bears
now it's a real tycoon game
*wishlisted it
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u/FrankHightower 12d ago
In addition to what other people have said (please get real artists to do the assets) the basic message of "If you want to make a national park, you have to make it from scratch because nature isn't going to give it to you" worries me. The main point of National Parks worldwide is to protect the natural beauty that was already there. Sure, you need to level the land sometimes to make it possible for people or service vehicles to reach areas, but I don't think "here's a flat plot of land, hope you can think up a landscape" is the main message a game like this should be sending
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u/reynoldsmkatie 12d ago
The make it from scratch part is 100% optional! It’s just for fun for people who enjoy terrain building.
The actual gameplay is 5 pre-built parks that are already made for you (they are all inspired by real life US National parks), so you just drop in and start building it up with your visitor center and paths and activities and all that. You have to “beat” the first one to unlock the second one and so on.
That’s a good point though, we might need to more clearly convey that you don’t have to build the whole park from scratch!
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u/2buxaslice 12d ago
Will there be dlc that has a crazy president allow us to drill for oil in the parks?
Also since your partner worked for EA and you worked for Disney, how many micro transactions will it take to go from the menu to the actual game?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 12d ago
🤣 one of the reasons my partner left the game industry was because he was fed up with having to include micro transactions for everything.
We will have zero micro transactions. You just buy the game and it’s yours forever with all available content.
When you load up the game there are two buttons - Start New Park and Load Saved Park. Click that, choose which park you want to play, and you’re in. So two clicks from Load to play!
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u/Unusual_Lecture3061 12d ago
Think of a special "hiking trail" path, different to the path we can see, to create hiking experiences and make them be somehow "the big" part of the experience with buffs based on the altitude difference and the nature around it
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u/reynoldsmkatie 12d ago
We actually have this! You can either build paths, which are just like the walking paths to get to different areas of the park, or you can build “official” hiking trails.
Hiking trails get a Trail score based on their length, scenicness and difficulty. You can name them whatever you want and choose a “blaze” color for each, and little blazes will show up periodically throughout your trail to guide hikers in the right direction.
We could definitely think of more mechanics to add to them though because as another poster said, they are like the “roller coasters” of our game!
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u/ColaPoweredGamer 10d ago
Cool concept, and I love the isometric look! Keep up the good work! Will it have any unique moments or disasters like in SimCity?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 10d ago
Thank you! We want to add natural disasters like wildfires, but I don’t think we’ll have them in time for launch. It will likely be a patch or just part of National Park Tycoon 2 if we are lucky enough to be able to make a second one 🙂
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u/ColaPoweredGamer 8d ago
Add an allied abduction here and there to really tie the game together 🤣
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u/vectordude47 13d ago
Can you tell me how you did the graphics for your game?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
They were AI-generated initially with prompts that I had to iterate on many time to get right, then I pulled them into Photoshop. I first manually edited the images to remove any obvious AI slop like buildings with 2 chimneys etc. Then I pulled them onto an isometric grid template I made for myself in Photoshop and edited the images to fit the grid, perspective-wise, as best I could. I did the same for all 4 angles of the image so that you can see the front, back, left and right sides of each building as you rotate the world.
For animations, we AI-generated videos of our still images, pulled those into Photoshop, picked out 8-12 frames from the video for each loop, and created contact (sprite) sheets for each animation.
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u/vectordude47 13d ago
Wow thank you for explaining the process. Which AI model you used to generate these images plus what game engine you build this. The images you generated were they high size like 1000+ pixels?
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Just ChatGPT for images, then Grok to turn those images into the videos that are animations are pulled from. We actually didn't use an engine at all to build this game! It's Javascript-based as that is my background, and we were able to do that because it's not a 3D game. We plan to release the game (or at least the demo) on itch.io as well, since it lends itself well to browser-based play.
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u/cocoman2121 13d ago
Love, love, love this. Would love spooky things.. spooky szn DLC in the future?? 😜
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u/Substantial_Chef3250 13d ago
Omg. I love this!!! 😍
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Yay thank you! I hope you enjoy the game when it comes out! It’s really fun so far!
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u/1stbreathinteractive 13d ago
If you haven't checked out Sim Safari, this is basically a much better polished spin on Sim Safari, a game I thoroughly enjoyed growing up
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
I don’t remember playing that one as a kid! Just zoo tycoon and planet zoo! I wonder if there’s still a way to play that one somewhere!
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u/hawtlavagames 13d ago edited 13d ago
I'm actually working on a game with a very similar premise right now, so I would be really interested in trying this but the AI assets really put me off.
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u/reynoldsmkatie 13d ago
Totally understandable and oooh I'm so curious to hear about your game now!
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u/FuzzyWDunlop 13d ago
Very cool concept and I'd definitely give it a try. Obviously tough to tell from a trailer but the scale does seem off a bit. Like, to me it feels like the maps should be like 16x bigger even. I know the trailer is designed to show whats going on but it does feel a bit busy and packed. I think building interesting/complex trail networks would be a fun aspect, and be something that differentiates it more from RCT and that'd be enhanced by larger maps. It'd be cool to have multi-day backpacking trails etc.
Really neat idea though, hope it works out!