Aug 26, 2017, 02:12 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 26, 2017, 02:23 PM by Ziscor.)
The round has started at last. Let's get into it.
[Disclaimer: I don't judge entries based on ride layouts, as I understand that is not a domain I excel personally at. Most of my judgement is based on everything but the layout. As such, things like ride-interaction with neighbouring elements is still something I consider.]
A very interesting round, over all. Generally speaking, all entries kept me fairly interested. Some more than others, of course. Rather fortunate for me that 3 of the 4 entries were made in RCT2, or an extension of it (OpenRCT2, RCT:Classic), the game I'm most experienced with. Gives me the ability to judge some of them with at least some credibility.
Tropic Thunder: I can confidently say the least impressive of them all was Tropic Thunder. Above everything else, there is a naturally lacking atmosphere, that Qabr and Mine Escape manage to convey. The title and description are telling me 'tropical jungles of Vietnam', but the entry itself, unfortunately, isn't. I'd suggest the creator of this entry to work on adding details that help show the original ideas they come up with for future work. For starters, I wager the jungles of Vietnam aren't as flat or as monotonous with purely grassy fields with a tree every once in a while. Even looking at stills from the film, Tropic Thunder (2008), I can tell the foliage needs to be far more denser in general, with grassy large fields only every once in a while. There could have been mountains in the background, and river streams flowing inside the jungle to elevate it even more.Â
It's an okay attempt, but I'm confident you could have definitely put a lot more love into it. I suggest picking a wider selection of objects to convey your ideas with much better precision and accuracy. Even the vanilla selection in the game could be used to pull off your original idea here with a far better end result.
Mine Escape: A slight contrast to Tropic Thunder, I appreciate the far more focused approach with the scenery as well as landscaping. Relatively speaking, this is very well 'looking' work. With a simple glimpse, one can tell it has a focused colour palette that it uses with pride. It successfully conveys the idea of a busy mine in the middle of somewhere, with rusty mining equipment everywhere. However, when I dug deeper into how each bit of scenery was executed, some of the magic started to wear off. The individual vanilla mine shack objects aren't placed on flat soil and so there is a rather ugly looking black support structure visible underneath those objects. The smaller 1 unit pieces, such as the broken wheels, or the logs/crates are placed in far too many places to fill some empty space. That in itself could have worked, were it not for the fact these objects are placed without switching the orientation of these objects even once. A simple click of the rotate button once in a while could have fixed this. Above everything else, however, it is the roofed up area, covering what I can only assume to be the station of the ride, that shows some weak architecture. I can't see why varying some of that roof into different shapes, or perhaps creating an entire mine shack with the available object pieces couldn't have been the better solution. Right now it's four rows of continuous triangles with no variation in between.Â
To summarise, a good attempt, and you've certainly figured out how to pull off atmosphere with a focused colour palette. The thing keeping you back, at least at the moment, is the inability to use the roster of object pieces available in the game with better efficiency. Work on general architectural shapes you could have made with this specific theme, even. Mine shacks have an easy-to-make shape, generally speaking.
Now we've come to the top two: Qabr and Dueling Bobs at Alps Adventure. The tricky part for me is that I can't tell if the RCT3 entry here had more effort put into it over the RCT2 one. After putting some thought into it, I had to decide Qabr based on some crucial criteria Alps didn't pull off better than Qabr, in my opinion.Â
Qabr vs. Dueling Bobs at Alps Adventure
The first thing done just ever so slightly better by Qabr is foliage. It's unfortunate to say, but I have to admit there aren't as many trees in Dueling Bobs at Alps Adventure as there should be, for the specific setting of the countryside around the Alps. Searching 'Alps countryside' on Google Images tells the entry isn't as faithful to its setting as Qabr is. The overview tells me the trees should be clustered in focused chunks distanced by clean grassy fields. Qabr breaks its barren land with patches of palms, wild shrubs and bright flowers, which works far better than if one had just plopped some palms and called it a day. This is in striking contrast to Dueling Bobs at Alps Adventure, which hardly has any variety.
The second thing executed better, at least as far as I can tell, is the landscape itself. This includes terra-painting and terra-forming. The most terra-painting Dueling Bobs at Alps Adventure used was touching up the tops of the Alps mountains themselves. It's easy to notice that right below the snow is grass. Just grass. This is probably not realistic, let alone accurate. There should probably be a rock texture wherever the land rises this abruptly. For Qabr, the general land is flat, with patches of dirt and dirty grass here and there, covered up by aptly chosen foliage. A lot of people would have omitted using any other texture except sand when faced with a desert-based theme, but this shows some good thought was put into the entry. It makes Qabr seem like Ancient Egypt, from a time when there was at least some greenery around the Nile and such. Something like the new Assassin's Creed title coming this year.
The third thing has to be the architecture. Looking at each individual building in Dueling Bobs at Alps Adventure, I'm rather impressed. Creating buildings with that much detail must be hard. While the individual buildings are great (not all of them; I especially don't like the station itself. It's hardly as detailed as something like the Ice Cream Cafe), I'm confused by the lack of detail around everything else. What happened? Did you plop the buildings and forget to create some details around them all? I'm almost let down, because it would have been amazing if all the street level work was as detailed as the buildings themselves. This is where Qabr outshines the other entry (I'm tired of saying the whole thing by now; what a mouthful). Every little space has so much love for the Egyptian theme in there, that everywhere you look, there is something to check out. You'll have just been done looking at the brilliant fountain/waterfall and you'll find an Ancient Temple that just reeks atmosphere. Outside the building will be statues emanating this ominous feeling of some sacred culture. If this doesn't capture the feeling of being in the Ancient Egyptian Empire, I don't know what will.Â
To conclude, I must pick Qabr as the entry with the most amount of effort and love. It's a shame this isn't a full-NCSO entry, as that could have made me respect this far more. Nonetheless, it's obvious it uses only the most minuscule of pieces that don't distract from the over-all 'vanilla' feeling. The architecture is brilliantly detailed, and no corner is left unfinished. It doesn't feel overwhelming, which is something a lot of work suffers from. The colour palette is focused, with streaks of bright oranges, greens and blues to break the tan everywhere.
Currently working on a fictional Italian non-park. Expected release date: Soonâ„¢