What was the process for developing this feature? (who is involved, how long did it take, what were the major development steps)

Like the elevated paths that we covered last time, this feature was also a pretty big undertaking that involved design, art and engineering. And we basically followed the same routine. It started with design talking about what we wanted to be able to do, then working with engineering to help determine what we could and couldn’t do, and with art to work out what they are going to look like and how they are going to be put together, not by the player but by the game engine itself.

And just like elevated paths, it gets implemented piece by piece, the graphical look gets refined, the user interface (UI) gets polished and the kinks (aka bugs) get worked out. It’s a process that goes from the inception of the idea, to the day the game gets released for gold master.


What was the biggest challenge implementing this new feature?

When the feature was first implemented and we started actively playing with it, we realized that you could create configurations that we, um, hadn’t originally planned for. So in a way we ended up with some “unplanned” elements in the feature. On the plus side, we discovered this “extra functionality” pretty early on.

For example, when we were working through the look of the stations and how the sky tram chairs would travel through them, we decided that we wanted to let you run a wire on each side of the station so that you could create what we call a return trip (this is where two wires run in parallel very typical to what you see a ski slope). This sort of configuration is ideal when using sky trams to transport your guest from A to B… to a remote food court for instance. Of course you also have the option to run a single wire through a station making a single loop that travels in one direction only and this configuration is great for creating a tour. But we hadn’t exactly planned on the fact that now you could create two separate loops… imagine the wings of a butterfly... and when you created something like this, not only could you not really control where the sky tram chairs ended up when you purchased them but the guests became sort of confused.

So we had two choices… either prevent you from creating something like that… or let you create it but make sure we handled it so that you had control over it and so that the guests were smart enough to evaluate what you built. The latter was a little more work but gave the player more flexibility. So that’s what we did. We still consider it to be a more advanced way to build a sky tram circuit but it’s a fully functional way to do it.

The downside was that it introduced extra work to support this unusual configuration that we hadn’t completely counted on. The plus side of course is that they’re more convenient to build and there is more flexibility for the player. Fortunately we do incorporate time to polish and iterate on new features in the planning stage so in the end it all worked out fine. We were able to make the improvements that we felt were important and still get it done on time.

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