Hey, we’re back!

Actually, Garret is still on his plane home right now, but he already made some nice new Western theme objects anyways! They are inspired by some of the theming we saw at Phantasialand:



And Luuk added an option for building blueprints without scenery. This is especially useful for scenarios when money is tight, or if you want to theme the ride yourself.

And we’ve done some work on a new ride - more on that next week :)



Travel report



As some of you know, we went on a trip to 3 major theme parks in Europe a week ago. The idea was to gain some insight into real park operations, and collect reference and research for scenery and new rides (and also have some good old fashioned fun).

Our trip started in southern Germany, where we visited Europa Park. If you’ve never been, it’s a very large park with incredible theming and high production values. We rode all eleven coasters (some twice) and a number of scenic rides.

We got a behind-the-scenes tour of Blue Fire, allowing us to see the trains up close from all sides. That was pretty cool after years of trying to figure out details on blurry images off the web :D

Our favorite coaster at this park was Wodan, a very fast wooden coaster. Not the most intense ride in the park but a really fun one!



Wodan



Next was Phantasialand near Cologne. This is the smallest park we visited, but it’s still home to some excellent coasters (many of them hold some sort of record) and great theming. Again, we rode every coaster, most notably the twin-launched coaster Taron, which is the 4 of us’ favourite coaster of the trip.

I would recommend visiting this park just to ride this coaster. We also spent some time on the other rides, and got plenty soaked on River Quest (a river rapid ride that’s impossible to leave dry in our experience) and Chiapas (the log flume with the steepest drop in the world).

Taron - most intersecting track points on any coaster



Lastly we visited Efteling in the Netherlands. A large, fantasy themed park with some heavy theming and a couple bigger coasters. We rode most of the rides we wanted to, though sadly Villa Volta broke down as soon as we entered it. I’m pretty sure our favorite coaster here was the dueling wooden coaster Joris en de Draak.

Joris en de Draak



We took plenty of pictures of scenery and rides to help us add more content to Parkitect. We’re especially interested in adding LIM/LSM segments to coasters in the short term as well as some interior rides and calm/scenic rides that are more raised-track friendly. We can’t wait to share those with you as we build them in the near future!