Park / Yucca Desert Park
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02-June 24
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79.00%(required: 70%) Gold
Cocoa 85% Liampie 85% Scoop 85% Camcorder22 80% G Force 80% ottersalad 80% Terry Inferno 80% Babar Tapie 75% pants 75% Recurious 75% RWE 75% bigshootergill 70% 79.00% -
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Did I come off too negatively? Quite liked the park actually haha
No you didn't just messing with you haha. Always appreciate your thoughtful reviews!
Yucca Desert Park
Really cool vibes here, even before the space ships arrive. I think the music and colors really set a great tone for viewing the park. The ground textures are excellent throughout and this feels like a proper roadside attraction. Perhaps the coaster is a bit too high budget for a place like this, but I do appreciate the coaster a lot. Simple layout, but really good interaction with the landscape. Albeit, a bit sectioned off from the rest of the park. The roof being interacted with by the flying saucer was a neat touch. All the custom vehicles/busses/train cars were all wonderful.
The Sailor
This is perhaps a hot take, but this feels like La Reve, but better? Newer? Modernized? There's so many creative flourishes where realism transitions into fantasy. Bright colors bleed over grounded buildings and structures. There is so much detail to explore here, little scenes to explore, and a narrative that wants to be told. But that's where this park falls a bit flat for me. Is this the story of one sailor drunkenly going through town and having the time of his life before going off to war? Or is this a lot of sailors having a bender? I'm sure it's up to us as the viewer to decide and you aren't holding our hands narratively. Some highlights for me was how well the waterfalls were framed and the blue/green archy near Ahab's Fish Fingers. Lowlights would probably include the wave swinger platform being a circle of wooden coaster track and the usage of RMC track on a wooden coaster for a few turns. They don't transition well at all!
I wasn't able to vote on these park because I was out of town for work at the time, and I probably would've gone with The Sailor. Really beautiful, full of life and detail. And that's not to discredit Yucca whatsoever. That park achieved exactly what it was set out to do. Strong landscape with a believable and highly detailed attraction/park.
The Sailor
It took me some time to figure out what was going on here and I'm still not sure that I completely got it, but I have to say that it is an incredibly creative idea! So it seems focused on the story of a sailor going on a bar trip, having different adventures, falling asleep and dreaming, getting a hangover and then going back to his ship to go on open sea? At least that's my take.
Love all the depictions of the different pieces of the narrative here and that ship is immaculate. My main criticism is that it is too dense and packed in some places, making it difficult to read sadly.
Yucca Desert Park
This park gets weirder and weirder by the minute. Loving the overall vibe and the addition of the space ships is really funny. At first glance it seems to be quite empty but on closer inspection there's actually quite a lot to see here in different scenes and especially staff. My main complaint, and that's perhaps a strange one, is that once the UFOs arrive, some parts seem to be difficult to see due to them dangling in the way. Also, it takes a massive blow on my FPS.
Reviews!
The Sailor:
https://youtu.be/PfkDF8-jIZQ
Yucca Desert Park:
https://youtu.be/p3xr2pcWFRM
I voted for Yucca though The Sailor has definitely grown on me. Not my style by any means, but I love the atmosphere and the overall presentation of the map.
Just wanted to say, after seeing The Sailor again, I feel more and more rejuvenated with building than ever before. This is quickly becoming a personal favorite park of mine, and something I'll be revisiting for sheer enjoyment alone. It's wildly imaginative and doesn't feel surgical. I think it's so refreshing to see stuff like this.
Hoob is awesome, he's had a great H2H.
If Hoobaroo has a million fans, I am one of them. If Hoobaroo has five fans, I am one of them. If Hoobaroo has one fan, that one is me. If Hoobaroo has no fans, then I am no longer alive.
I can only concur with Bluetiful, sometimes i see comments get thrown around in the vein of "i dont realy understand the concept, or why did you do x thing".
And i totally had that feeling occasionally when viewing The Sailor... but in the best possible way. The Sailor is one of the few parks i showed to non-rct fanatics, just to highlight that there is more to (open)rct than building amusement parks. The sailor staring off into the distance at the end of the pier, the lone butterfly hovering nearby, and the entire scene at the top of the mountain with the sailors in the graveyard and church just had me captivated for no reason i can explain. Naturally, the visualisation of the barcrawl and the wacky stuff going on in the town was extremely fun to discover, but its those two scenes that just leave me wondering what hoob was realy thinking about. (again, in a good way)
While im commenting on the matchup, I dont want to discredit Yucca, it was well executed, came with a clear concept and a great highlight of some new functionality in Openrct2, but it failed to captivate me as much as The Sailor did, even though the latter had some technical shortcomings.
first they came for hoobaroo, and I did not stand up for I was not a hoobaroo
shalom
Some time has passed and I thought it might be neat to get down some behind the scenes thoughts on Yucca, which is still one the builds I'm most fond of.
Yucca had many real-life, cultural, and fictional inspirations. I live in the southern Nevada Mojave Desert, which felt like a strong location because of its familiarity, distinctive rock formations, and unique plant life. The park name comes from yucca plants which grow in the region and can be seen throughout the park along with Joshua trees, Creosote shrubs and brittlebush, and Cholla cactus.
While building, I took several hikes to Red Rock Canyon, which provided plenty of fresh inspiration for the landscaping. dr dirt was particularly strong in this area, sculpting amazing natural rock formations and color gradients.
The colorful stacked rocks at the park entrance are based on a real art display off the highway south of Vegas called Seven Magic Mountains. In real life, they are 30-35 feet tall.
There are several ghost towns in the area, the most well-known being Calico Ghost Town, a former silver mine turned tourist trap off the highway. Ethan was the primary builder of this area and crushed it, he came on very late in the process and pushed it to the finish line.
I imagined Yucca Desert Park as a small locally owned distraction for drivers headed to/from Vegas, with greater context the park would be located off of the I-15 highway surrounded by broad swaths of empty desert, not dissimilar in concept to Desperado at Buffalo Bill's Casino.
In terms of vibe, if felt somewhat like a spiritual successor to Marineland of Canada: an amateurish free-spirited circus-like atmosphere with disjointed and poorly conceived attractions. During research, I discovered these hilariously staged photos of that park's founder admiring the rollercoaster Dragon Mountain.
Perhaps best known for its one-of-a-kind bowtie element, Dragon Mountain served as the inspiration for Yucca's coaster, Fire on the Mountain. Maverix was an absolute ride design beast, tweaking the layout to capture Arrow jankiness and ensuring supports stayed absolutely true to the style in which they would be constructed.
The name of the coaster is also the name of the song playing in the background throughout the park, a 1977 recording of the Grateful Dead's Fire on the Mountain. The band's free-spirited and anti-authoritarian vibe fit the park perfectly, plus I got to see the Dead perform at the Sphere last year and they fucking rocked so I wanted to include one of their songs. We scattered a few small psychedelic/hippie details around the park to tie it together thematically. The atomic circus tent is also a reference to nuclear bomb testing in the Mojave Desert during the Cold War.
I knew early on that I wanted to create a dynamic cinematic sequence of an alien invasion. Area 51 is about 150 miles away from Las Vegas, so it's common to see alien-related souvenirs around town. I've had an Area 51 magnet on my fridge for years and didn't realize it until after the park was finished. Incorporating aliens felt very natural to the location and culture of the area. For this, I took inspiration from movies, most obviously Nope and Asteroid City.
Programming the invasion sequence was one of the most complicated but fun tasks I've ever taken on in RCT. After realizing the possibilities of what could be manipulated in-game with bespoke plugins, I was determined to put together something new and ambitious. A heavy chunk of my career involves coding in Python, so I was pretty naturally able to translate into JavaScript with some help from deano, spacek, and Ethan. I would have done a few things differently in hindsight, but I was and am still very happy with the result and proud to say it was written before ChatGPT became publicly available. However, AI was super helpful to visualize the dramatic scene.
The last thing I want to mention is that the odd park layout, ride choices, and general funkiness is by mostly intentional as the park itself is a cheap amateur sideshow. It's a weird park in a weird location. Although it may present as a more serious submission, there is a lot of shared Action Park DNA in Yucca which I find humorous. A few of my favorite OSHA nightmares:
- Metal bleachers are completely impractical in the desert with 100+ degree temperatures and no shade coverage. People would burn their asses immediately
- A gun range... at an amusement park... aiming toward the roller coaster
- Sphere of death sitting in an asteroid crater makes no sense whatsoever. It looks awesome and I'm really happy how clean the execution is, but what a stupid idea
- Slingshot launches way too high for the support towers
- Why is there a cow in the park? No reason other than to be abducted, of course
- Active fire breaking out with no resolution than to let it burn
This being such a diverse international community, and Yucca being such a specific location with specific references, I think some of the cultural influence may have been lost on viewers. Hopefully this writeup makes it clear how much thought and personal experience went into conceiving and designing the park. It's a representation of my home and the quirky oddities that southern Nevada presents
I never got around to reviewing the park... Of course I'd have loved for The Sailor to win because that also has a lot of love in it, but this is a match outcome I couldn't be mad about. Yucca is a great park, and your write-up increases my appreciation for it. I love to read about how multiple completely different ideas and concepts come together to form a cohesive single work of art. Some of the subtleties were lost on me until you mentioned them.
There were so many great shoutouts to Vegas and the surroundings, and having been to all of the places you've listed, I can confirm you pretty much nailed everything. Great park, great writeup, appreciate it!