Park / cant_return.blend
-
03-March 26
- Views 3,028
- Downloads 28
- Fans 0
- Comments 15
-
Description
An error has occurred. To continue:
Press Enter to r?e?t?u?r?n? ?t?o? ?w?i?n?d?o?w?s?,? ?o?r?P?:?
Error: cant_return -
No fans of this park
-
Full-Size Map
-
Download Park
28
-
Objects
1
-
Tags
Logo by J K
2000
Your park must be set in or themed to the year 2000.
Your park must be no more than 500 tiles in size.
Before voting, please ensure you have viewed all entries below. The first question asks you to evaluate which park or parks have met the above Objectives the best. The second question asks you to choose the park or parks with the highest Quality. You may vote for multiple parks in each question. The poll will be closed in approximately 72 hours, after which the total vote for each park will calculated and the park with the highest number of votes will be declared the winner of the round, granting its creator(s) entry to the Grand Final.
Press Enter to r?e?t?u?r?n? ?t?o? ?w?i?n?d?o?w?s?,? ?o?r?P?:?
Error: cant_return
love the amount of entries in a week, great stuff guys. some pretty dense entries too, you maniacs.
cant return.blend
nostalgic outside computer shape with a ton of glitchyness inside, a fun entry that falls short of a couple of others with the amount of content. however, i did vote for this for the objectives, it does remind me nicely of that time.
Post Millennium Breakdown
an interesting take on millenium bug - pretty abstract and sparse entry but with a couple of cool bits.
Shibuya 2000
the most impressive overview for sure, and it's no less impressive once you get down to street level. so much crammed onto a tiny map - a great theme idea, executed so well. somehow you've got a really cool coaster in there too, everything feels so tight and is juuuuuust approaching being a little too busy to be easily readable, but lands just the right side for me. color palette is really cool and i love all the y2k stuff - signs breaking, electricity etc. the backside of the skyscrapers were also full and interesting, plus peeps everywhere... top, top entry.
Gustav - cool little micro! Hits the time for y2k with the huge monitor, just not as much content packed in as some other entries.
Josh/Ethan - what I love about this entry is just the volume of references to the era. The super soaker and the rubix cube for me are the top ones. The music with the nokia theme built in was a great shout!
Leon/AVC - top execution of the round for sure. And the level of signage is just so high. The error trapper custom built with the transparent land texture next to it was such a nice idea.
Hydro/Barn - feels like the best functioning ride of the round, really good executio and I love the blend of what is becoming signature Barn lighting and the Hydro influence on the architecture.
Narc - nice little add on to your other entries - I'm excited to see if you are going to stitch these all together post contest for a full scale park!
hypno - a bit simpler than the other entries but great to see you entering again.
split - another fun implementation of the moving map idea!
ge-ride - I think your work would benefit from more textures and going beyond the tt blocks for every sculpture.
Sorry for not having time to post more detailed reviews but really enjoyed all the entries here
Happy New Year everyone! In the order I opened these entries:
Times Square is so impressive. The spiral roller coaster layout is fantastic! Moody lighting too.
Hypno, I liked the shop names. I bought a beanie baby in hopes it will become a valuable collector's item in 26 years.
Gustav, this is literally dripping with aesthetic. On the technical side, Newton's cradle is a clever use of the teleporting train trick.
GeRide, this felt a bit unfinished, but I liked some of the little bug characters.
Shibuya feels comparable to Times Square, but with a strong af vaporwave aesthetic, for which I am a sucker. Cool colors, awesome signage.
Split, when are we going to see a feature-length film shot in RCT?
Narc, I quite like the restaurant, and the ride overhanging oblivion.
Josh/Ethan, this is so bubblegum pop. All the storefronts, wall art and sculptures are great. I wound up eating more than my fair share of playdough, which brought me right back to the good ol' days for sure.
Hard to believe you all did these entries in a week's time. Now who to vote for? Hmmmm...
I don't think I have been this excited for a single round in a RCT contest since the semifinals of Head-2-Head X. I didn't live through the Renaissance or watch Neil Armstrong land on the moon in real time, but I was at least old enough to walk in the glorious year of our lord 2000. I developed conscious memories in the early aughts and I wanted to see those channeled in at least one entry. Did NEdesigns.com satisfy my sick, sick urges?
Post Millennium Breakdown: I'm dead serious when I say Ge-Ride was one of the names I was most excited for this round. One of the players who comes closest to the aesthetic I think of when I think Y2K. I will admit I might have coached him just a little here so my review is gonna be super super biased.
+ Power station infrastructure I think turned out nice. Got a really clean look going with the wires and I love the pops of color.
+- Really fun take on the Millennium Bug with the giant bugs attacking the power plant and leaving jumbled bits of circuitry in their wake. I also love how the bugs look like big chunky CGI objects. The black and pink one is adorable. Me if you even care. I think if you had more time, it may have been nice to see the bugs interacting more with the power station and climbing up the towers and stuff. Throw in some lightning and sparks and stuff and boom.
- Foliage I think could be a little less random if you're going for realism. Even if it's meant to be very sparse foliage, a little SV medium grass surrounding and connecting bushes makes it look far more intentional. Blend in some dark brown with the black if you want a really subtle look. You especially want to be careful with the mkx grass base and 1K half grass objects which have very sharp edges; those you would want to blend into the landscape with more organic looking grass or fern objects.
- Would have liked to see the tunnel covered up or themed somehow. What could have been really cool to do without much additional effort would have been using a green land wall inside the tunnels and adding thin vertical trims and road lines to the inside to match the circuitry on the ground.
- Path near the station feels a little groovy for the turn of the century.
Shibuya 2000: I do not think there has ever been a player like WhosLeon. I do not think there will ever be another player like WhosLeon. I do not even think that there will be another human with the brain chemistry of WhosLeon. Nobody makes this game his bitch like WhosLeon. Nobody has the compositional genius of WhosLeon. Nobody nails every last aspect of a theme like WhosLeon. Nobody weaves in a completely different thematic element and makes it feel like part of the scenery like WhosLeon. Nobody plays RCT like WhosLeon. An all-rounder maxed in every single stat. The best to ever do it, god bless and amen. AVC, the very player who inspired me to treat RCT like a genuine art form, is alright too. The synergy here is really tight and I'd love to know which parts AVC did!
+ Genius way to start with the "Windows 98 has crashed/Everything has broken down" messages. So clever.
+ Absolutely unreal composition. What gets me is how you take something as on-the-grid as a city intersection, weave it around an absolutely massive and flowy coaster, and somehow all make it work together. That is very very hard. The way everything is tucked into and framed by the coaster is seamless. I genuinely need to perform a lobotomy on Leon and see how he plans all this out because just thinking of raising a single land tile as a placeholder for a building makes me freeze up.
+ Perfect theme for this round! Shibuya is a great real-world choice with tons of high-tech billboards to absolutely murder with error messages and fire. Love the huge server building going haywire; also a really strong building which breaks the grid in a really cool way. The glitched land tiles next to the lower error messages are stupid smart.
+ The secondary tech/computer hardware theme is flawlessly integrated. Streets colored like circuit boards that become circuits on vertical faces is a shining example of this. The transistors and wires add such a cool new dimension to the lower levels without being distracting or out of place.
+ Flawless signage. Doesn't matter if it's an expertly rendered Windows 98 error message or a huge billboard. Everything is so recognizable you'd swear they were custom-made objects. Leon and AVC picking up a side gig as pixel artists!
+ Great choice of music and I love the error message noises at the beginning. Glad to see I'm not the only one using TikTok-ass music this round. Smoking the pack that made Tok tick.
+- Dynamite coaster layout, very flowy and paced well even when out of context. It does get a tad hard to follow at times, although I do appreciate the holes in the path where you can see it when it goes underground. I also like how the holes have a blobby Y2K-like shape and color in case the theme wasn't hammered in enough already.
-? If I had to even think of a negative here, it's that maybe it feels a little similar to your past work? Shades of Bangkok Dynamo, Screameasy and even Gardens by the Bay which is six years old now. I will never say no to Leon and AVC doing another urban micro but still. Also the Habbo Hotel-looking fire truck is weird. These barely even count as negatives. One of the best maps of the entire contest and it's competing with some heavy hitters several times as big.
The Restaurant at the end of the Millennium: The Narc streak continues! Another lovely bit of realism that highlights your tangible improvement throughout this contest. I'm sure if we do a wildcard vote, this won't be the last we see of you.
+ Pretty surprised you managed to fit two rides into a restaurant! I love how Y2K: Overflow dips off the edge of the map and Millennium Peak is just so... peak...
+ Love the landscaping, especially the way it trails off at the edges.
+ This building kicks ass. This is your best archi yet IMO. Love the round overlapping forms and wacky colors.
- Half-baked interiors are kind of a bummer. I'm guessing you didn't have time to get to those final details?
The Year 2000: Very very happy to see a LL entry! I considered LL for a little bit before realizing my idea would be way more effective with a full CSO bench. Even if it's kind of a speedbuild, it's hard to beat LL's timeless aesthetic.
+ Highkey my favorite part of this build is the names of all the stalls and staff. iMac G3s, a dude with frosted tips, Smooth By Santana Ft. Rob Thomas From Matchbox Twenty; for one brief moment in time I forget I'm nearly 30!
+ Seafood stall on top of the Millennium Bug sign is genius.
+- A roto-drop is a really neat way to represent the ball dropping. Shades of Lurker and how he themes his rides. I love how the path wraps around it too. I just wonder if it may have been smarter to tuck it into the 360-degree helix in Y2K to give some more room for another attraction and make the helix look a little more justified.
- I feel like more could have been done to make it feel visually Y2K. I guess it works as like a super early LL park that would be made in the year 2000, but my aesthetic ass was begging for a pinch more gloss and color and vibes that make you genuinely excited for the future not knowing it will become a gray dystopian hellscape. Abstract/space scenery, grid land textures, and lots of water would have gotten it across well enough .
- I also feel like LL parks thrive under consistent aesthetics and this one is a little all over the place, especially for something so small and concentrated. It feels a bit hard to grasp.
Time Travels For The Rich: That thumbnail on a Splitvision build scared me more than the three collab entries.
+ Love the effect! We're seeing more and more of this moving illusion and now we take to the skies. At some point somebody's gotta do a park built onto a train to round it out! In retrospect I should have tried that for round 4 if I had the energy to lead a park.
- I'm gonna be honest, I kinda don't get it. I know this was a speedbuild, but I'm not really sure what Y2K there is to glean from here. Is the whole thing about flying across time zones to keep experiencing the turn of the century again and again, or is Dateline just a nod to that channel that used to show To Catch A Predator?
Times Square, Times Square: barnNID cheating on me with his best friend?! It's more likely than you think. Stunning bit of realistic goodness from a tried-and-true duo which brings the atmosphere of Times Square at the turn of the millennium to a Vegas-style setting. I know I was threatening to do horrible things to myself and others if I saw a shred of realism in this round, but I'll make an exception for you two.
+ This archi rips, both the dramatic skyscraper backdrop and the smaller and more detailed buildings in the foreground. Wouldn't expect anything less from these two players. Finding details barnNID might have gotten from my work in round 5 was fun too.
+ Millennium is absolutely incredible, definitely up there with Leon and AVC's for best coaster of the round. Who are y'all and what did you do with the grid?
+ I LOVE LIGHTING EFFECTS! I LOVE LIGHTING EFFECTS!
+- The Y2K theme is really subtle, but I also think it works just enough for the setting.
- While not a true one-angle wonder, I think the initial viewing angle (compass facing right) is the strongest and the others are kinda weak.
- Some signs of unfinishedness like the unnamed and unpainted rides and some rides that are laid down but not operational. A shame, but considering you two only had a weekend this is pretty damn earth-shattering.
walt: This is what I was dying to see when they announced a Y2K theme. A complete and utter overload of turn-of-the-century nostalgic goodness shoved in your face with the force of a Brightline train slamming into one of them food delivery robots. A love letter to the iconic mall culture of the early aughts and the take on the Y2K theme that completely and utterly has my heart.
+ I cannot stress enough how happy I am you that two went for early '00s mall culture. The iPhone silhouette ad reference had me taken aback and I absolutely love the Scholastic Book Fair nod; no doubt where a good chunk of us got our start with RCT. The Play Doh store facade is so well done too. I clapped because I know Rainforest Cafe!
+ Even then, there's something to be said about the way it takes enough outside influence to not be a total cliche storm. It feels like a genuine love letter to these types of malls, a way of life that has tragically faded since.
+ The actual construction of the mall is so cool. The size limit means turning it into a huge, surreal open-air tower which is such a look. I also love all the curved terraces and overhangs.
+ The Jazz solo cup design on the lower wall. YES!
+ Custom music is great. That super echoey mall ambience takes it over the top and the distant ringtones are a nice touch.
+- Love the cel shaded bits here and there! A cel shaded entry was something I was hoping for this round, almost like what we initially designed those objects for on the Soda Jerks. I do think they feel a tad out of place but I really can't hate them.
- I think the map itself could have been larger to get more of that light pink background. It cuts off pretty often when I'm looking at the upper levels.
There's a pretty obvious top three here in terms of quality, while I believe I'm choosing a sleeper for the theme. Shibuya 2000 and walt take both categories for me, with the former being my favorite quality-wise and the latter being everything I wanted to see out of the objective. Times Square, Times Square also wins in terms of quality for me, while I really enjoyed the whimsical take on the Millennium Bug in Post Millennium Breakdown. Really great stuff from all of you, and I can't wait to see what we bring to the table in finals!
cant_return.blend:
Shibuya 2000: Such a successful rendering of the theme. Jam packed full of material but also surprisingly readable. Fantastic quality overall.
Time Travels For the Rich: I thought this was really effective. And the music added a nice touch.
The Restaurant: I thought the building was endearing and enjoyable. And the foliage was rather tasteful too.
cant_return: This was a great take on the theme. I appreciated how you still managed to incorporate a ride in it as well.
Post Millenium Breakdown: Though it was a bit unfinished, I think the understatedness actually added to the overall effect. Just lacking the refinement of some other entries.
Times Square: Hooray for the spiral coaster! And the skyscrapers were of such a great quality. Really strong submission. Compact but without being too over-bearing.
walt: A fun, silly entry of solid quality. I love a good shopping centre so I'm glad to see one done so well here but to the extreme. Although I thought the coaster layout wasn't the strongest here.
The Year 2000: This was cute. Perhaps a little all over the place. But LL just makes me happy regardless.
Nicely done everyone.
Super fun micro round. I loved all the entries, great work from all!
Among the highest level entries, each had some truly standout parts and some clunkier aspects for me, which is to be expected on such a quick 1 week build!
Some of my favorite things:
+ Newton's cradle and CRT monitor of cant_return
+ all the mini sculptures and cutaway views in walt + all 4 angles are interesting
+ spiral coaster and street area + lighting in Times Square
+ Y2K bug theme and overall vibe of Shibuya
+ everyone's custom music was great
Good luck to all the entrants!
Gustav Goblin
Can't return to this aesthetic because this aesthetic was never real. False nostalgia of the 90s (not really Y2K) well captured. Some clever ideas here with the balls and the clock hands! Monitor is also well done, realest thing on the map.
Hypnopompia
Not much Y2K here, other than the RCT music and the fact that this is built in a game from 2000. Also wish you got rid of the grass tiles around the micro!
Ge-Ride
Your work confuses me so often! I don't necessarily mean the concepts (though can get very out there as well), but more the lack of care. You've got a pretty cool coaster and concept here, and I LOVE the bug sculptures. But that floating station is just... not good. The flower power paths? Why? Still, 90% of the map is the ground layer and I really like that. Nice transmission towers too. Cool stuff.
Leon + AVC
The error sound in the first second instantly made this the most Y2K map so far. This is so good! I love all the details; the way you did the circuitboard elements, and all the billboards (Playstation!). Is the Japanese font sign new? Very useful. Wish it was less cyberpunk-y though. It doesn't evoke nostalgia to me, but it's a brilliant piece of RCT.
Splitvision
Nice idea well done, but a bit thin on content of course. Love to see the Day at the Races plane getting more use, niche as it is. Acid Style is an on point music choice.
barnNID + hydroportal
Nostalgia! The music positions the entire map into a Y2K feel. Architecture is excellent, as is the coaster. Points for going with an original coaster type. I wish the map had more good angles than just the front one, with some more depth to it; I couldn't explore it as much as I would've liked to.
Narc
More acid style, yay! This map is also a bit thin on content. Good to see the peeps are as confused as I am concerning the whale tail. The building itself is pretty cool, the stack of circles feels appropriate, and the observation tower passing through the yellow beams is a cool feature to give the building some character. The 2000 logo is also well done. Wish you had more content, but what's there gets the job done.
Josh + Ethan
Since I didn't grow up in the US, some of the references here are lost on me. But there are so many, as well as the general aesthetic shining through, that Y2K feel is palpable. Like Gustav's this is leaning towards vaporwavey 90s nostalgia a bit much, but there's plenty there to also keep it grounded, including the sound of nokia ring tone with enough reverb to make this seem like an actual mall. Furbicoaster is a brilliant idea, and I quite like the coaster and its supports. Love the giant stilts it's on when viewed from the back. Some great sculptures and murals. Play-doh and the super soaker stand out to me. Good job! A slight negative: not the first time you're building a sick park and then try to ruin it with a stupid name.
I'm blown away by how much you all got done in that timeframe. Some thoughts on each entry...
cant_return.blend
Absolutely love this - so abstract and it captures the aesthetic of Y2K computers perfectly. The weird liminal temple part at the back especially. And the glitchy palette trick to get those garish multicoloured objects is exactly in line with how I remember old games from our old family computer in the 90s. Bonus points for the soundtrack.
Post Millennium Breakdown
A fun take on the concept and the blocky bugs give that early 3D modelling look. Cute! The station being so high and kind of utilitarian stuck out a bit for me. But everything at ground level is fun.
Shibuya 2000
Amazing opening sequence with the sound effects and messages. All the signage and glitching is fantastic. I clicked into some of the custom signs with the eye dropper and my god that must have been tedious using those minuscule objects! Hats off to you. Love the movement everywhere and the see-through buildings around the back. Such a strong visual identity. Love it.
The Restaurant at the End of the Millennium
Have you entered every round, Narc? This is mad. And again you’ve stepped up the quality in this one. Lovely architecture and the circular shapes are very 00’s. Some very nice custom signage too. Less content-rich than other entries but I applaud you for your amazing productivity throughout the contest!
The Year 2000
Happy to see an LL entry and using its release is a nice take on the theme, feels like a suitable tribute! As others have mentioned, the shop/ride names are a highlight here and trigger major nostalgia.
Time Travels for the Rich
Got to love a moving map diorama! The idea of crossing the date line is a very creative interpretation of the brief. Really cool stuff.
Times Square, Times Square
The lighting effects here are just fantastic, especially on the brick building at the front - that just works sooo well. Beautiful architecture, lovely coaster layout, absolute banger playing. What’s not to like?
walt
I think this one packs in the most Y2K cultural references out of any entry, both visually and with the amazing soundtrack. Instantly sells the vibe and the more I explored the more fun details I uncovered. It feels like a living mood board of the era. Love the amount of dolphin statues. Remember when everyone wanted to be a marine biologist? Totally on point.
Very interested to see how the vote turns out. Some real big hitters both on quality and brief. Well done everyone!
Logo by J K
Round 6 - Y2K
Results
2000
Round 6 has now closed, having cast ourselves back to the digital frontier of the year 2000. Out of the 8 entries received, it was WhosLeon and AvanineCommuter who came out on top with 41 total points with their entry Shibuya 2000, and secured a place in the Grand Final! Congratulations!
Find the full results table below. Total score is calculated by adding the number of votes for the entry in the Objectives and Quality questions.
Total = Objectives votes + Quality votes
Shibuya 2000
by WhosLeon and AvanineCommuter
17
walt
by Ethan and In:Cities
21
Times Square, Times Square
by barnNID and hydroportal
10
cant_return.blend
by Gustav Goblin
15
The Restaurant at the end of the Millennium
by Narc
5
Time Travels for the Rich
by Splitvision
2
The Year 2000
by hypnopompia
3
Post Millennium Breakdown
by Ge-Ride
2
download Download All downloadCongratulations! Was crossing my fingers for walt to win, but Shibuya is also very worthy, and Leon/AVC in the final is an exciting prospect!
this result is pretty much exactly how i had it in my head, commiserations on 2nd and 3rd it was a really close one though. looking forward to seeing what you're cooking for finals.
Congrats to everyone on such a strong round. The contest that can really change the tide on the results if players smash the brief out of the park! Josh and Ethan were so close but Shibuya tipped it.
Shibuya had my heart but I smiled so much viewing walt.
On god
This was the round I was the most excited for and for many different reasons. What ended up defining the course I took was finding out that the round 5 park I had poured a solid month into was only up against one other entry. Don't get me wrong, I've been a huge fan of Narc's steady improvement over this contest, but in terms of both concept and quality I was pretty sure we booked our ticket to finals the moment round 6 was announced. This meant that the week-long micro speedrun, the round I was most excited for out of any, now had zero stakes! It doesn't matter how well I do because I'm in finals regardless! It's a building challenge now! This was a godsend for me, as I just wanted to decompress with a nice bit of therapeutic RCT after a hellish R5 grind.
Most importantly, it really let me put all my focus into the theme, which right away I clicked with. I would have done five parks for this round if I could have. With only me and the relatively open objectives at play, the biggest question now became what Y2K meant to me. It's tough to really pin it down to 2000 specifically since I was only starting to form memories by then, but what about the early '00s speaks to me the most?
I have a real soft spot for early '00s aesthetics. Eerily clean and glossy CGI, intricately rendered beaches, rompler music, those compilation album infomercials that seem to endlessly drag on into the wee hours of the night; it feels overly polished to an almost surreal level. It just tickles my brain the right way. There's also a real underlying optimism and innocence to it all. The world was getting its footing with tech and the future could not have looked brighter. You can talk to people from the other side of the planet with one quick email! An entire Library of Alexandria is at your fingertips! The future is online! It's digital! It's here! It's now! And it's so, so bright!
What twenty-six years of so-called progression that have happened since then reduces my fuzzy nostalgia to pain and frustration. It could not be any further from the bright future Y2K anticipated. Everything is so bland, so monotone, so corporate. The boundless customization of websites like YouTube and Myspace way back then have been slowly reduced to clicking the avocado to turn the buttons green; a change only you can see. We're all wearing the same suit now. Huge companies and even government institutions have seized the internet and turned themselves into skinwalkers masquerading as trendy netizens. Social media apps, once the pinnacle of instantly finding and forming communities on the internet, have been reduced to algorithmic slop dumbing us down if not bioengineering us into toxic hate machines. Keep the common folk distracted while the rich get richer. And on the topic of the rich, techbro barons are pushing generative AI in a way that punches down on the human condition rather than bolsters and accelerates it. "Hollywood is cooked!" "Artists have been replaced!" Is it really about us anymore? Has it ever been? The internet was the Wild West back then, a true celebration of humanity and how it expresses itself. Now I can't help but feel like a mere statistic, a pawn being dragged around by some higher power. I have been reduced to nothing.
But nostalgia is ultimately just that, nostalgia. Is it really as straightforward as I claim, or am I just a bitter, jaded old man? After all, nostalgia and the pain it brings is the root of so much modern hatred and evil. We really just miss being innocent and not having to worry about so much. We just want to return to the womb. 2020s kids are gonna wax nostalgic over Tung Tung Tung Sahur for God's sake. I also can't sit around and pretend like things were perfect back then either. The internet is a far, far more accepting place now than it was back then, even with how hell-bent we've been on trying to reverse that over the last year. My loud queer ass wouldn't last a second on the internet of old. And likewise, am I too stuck in the past to embrace what the future still holds? Can we leverage something as groundbreaking as AI to assist rather than replace? I think that largely depends on the kinds of people that choose to harness it, and unfortunately many simply see it as a lucrative business venture. And that's really what it's boiled down to; we're being stripped of our individuality so someone with a ton of money can make even more. That's just life in general and I'm so, so tired of it. As much as I can claim thinking about the past only makes it clearer we just can't return, maybe it was always like this. Maybe I just didn't know. At the end of the day, do I just want to be unaware and oblivious again?
-----
Anyway this was really fun to make and I love how it turned out yaaayyy yippeeeee! I knew off the bat I wanted to do something really glossy, which then evolved into a straight-up iMac. What's more Y2K than that? Unfortunately this went south quickly for a multitude of reasons. The shape would have been tough to nail and the transparent back would have meant a ton of extra work. I briefly contemplated doing an iMac in LL to justify a less-than-perfect shape and get creative with my object choices (including teal-colored rapids pieces with the water exposed for the back), but I realized a full CSO bench would help me nail the concept. A few reference pics convinced me to go for a huge, blocky, Steve-colored monitor that would obscure enough of each view for me to get away with my classic one-angle japes. Realizing enough of the screen was obscured for me to do two different times of day was a miracle.
The actual scenes inside the computer came kinda quickly. This aesthetic gave me the excuse to go full stream-of-consciousness. In fact, the sunset angle (one of the coolest things I've ever done in this game IMO) was done almost entirely on the last Monday! Including a water ride was a no-brainer with how much they loved their fancy new water rendering tools back then. I was gonna go for a river rapids at first, but realizing I could make the custom raft ride look like an untextured 3D "donut" was too good to pass up.
I actually started the initial view in 2021! Sorta. A long time ago, I saw someone say they wanted to add a Newton's Cradle into their park but didn't have time. It got me wondering how they would have done that, so I opened up a bench, slapped a sphere coaster on some minigolf track, and watched that bitch go. Then I got inspired! I started throwing a bunch of brown base blocks below it, slapped some dark purple glass bases below that, and then reflected the entire thing! Sound familiar? While I never actually saved my Newton's Cradle, I pretty much recreated it for that initial view. It's funny because this whole thing ended up looking like an elevated version of the kind of RCT I tried to make back then. I feel like this would be 2021 me's favorite RCT, and I can't think of a better person to have made it than myself right now.
You know what I really really like about this entry? I actually had time to do the parts I actually like doing! I am a total hype moments and aura builder and am horrible at macro planning, realistic design, custom supports, and the other things you actually need to be good at this game. I just slap down a million objects on one tile until it looks cool. I lower the rim and pretend I'm Leon for hours. What was also nice was that the way early 3D aesthetics feel so untethered from reality meant I could just kinda cobble a bunch of random elements together and sell it anyway. Lemme just plop a spiral staircase on top of the water and wedge an alarm clock into it, why the hell not. With that said, I did have a pretty solid set of references to draw from.
- Bryce3D renders.
- Animusic, specifically Aqua Harp.
- That goofy ass Oh No song from VeggieTales.
- Microsoft Encarta.
- The music video for Smoke and Mirrors by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
- The Eyewitness intro. Yes I know it's from 1994, bite me.
- RCT work by Jaguar, hoobaroo and secondrun919. All three players do a fantastic job of leveraging both RCT's natural aesthetic and the uncanniness of early CSO to nail that early aughts look. I tried my best to channel that as well; huge shoutout to bla3aj who led me onto the RCT Archive with all sorts of godawful objects.
One of the huge turning points was stumbling upon a tweet about art based on the degradation of memory. When I stopped to think about it, isn't this what nostalgia is kind of about? Memory's inauthentic twin, as Norm MacDonald put it. So beautiful and rose-tinted, yet never fully remembered and oftentimes deceitful. A little hypnagogia for the road; not the dude who made The Year 2000, mind you. I decided fairly early on to glitch the hell out of my otherwise pristine environments to bolster the narrative, which I did using a special palette swatch made of garish 4-bit colors. A digital take on TV static or blank silhouettes. The opportunities opened themselves up from there; my personal favorite is the mix of glitchy and void colors in the "foliage". I feel like I could have made it a bit glitchier, but I also wanted those scenes to speak for themselves.
In fact, there were quite a bit of what-ifs I just didn't have time to execute! In short:
- A partially-modeled horizontal desktop below the monitor that the waterfall would cascade onto. The raft ride would continue on a glitchy river before falling off into the void. With the time I had, it was better to nix it and add some more polish to the monitor.
- Before that, a fully modeled desk with some other Y2K trinkets scattered about. This went out the door fairly quickly as I chose to prioritize making the monitor bigger and giving the scenes more space.
- Various letter objects fading into the void below, almost like random keys on a keyboard.
- Void-colored vines made of CTRs that would slowly snake up the sides of the monitor. My idea was the water leaking out of the monitor would be watering these vines that would further obscure the park. A little sad I didn't get around to this.
- More stuff to break up the big beige sections of the monitor in general. At one point I was gonna have some newspaper clippings from Murder in McAllan surrounded by glitchy void stuff to allude to remembering the current state of the world but I thought it was a little corny.
- Brighter, sunnier aesthetics with more greens. My original plan for the sunset view was originally going to feature a nod to the Windows XP Bliss screensaver.
- I wanted dune backdrops in the back side instead of mountain backdrops. The problem was the dune backdrop scenery group comes with the RCT Archive but not the actual objects themselves!
- Custom garden objects that would start transparent and become dead pixels and ultimately huge glitchy blobs. I figured most people wouldn't look at the park enough for them to appear.
- I wanted to actually have the music glitch out to match the visuals. This is something I have done before and it won me Best Music in a pretty huge game jam.
I was talking that good trash in the Discord about what I wanted to see out of this theme. In truth, I was really hoping to see all the other ideas I would have pursued realized in different ways. I even kinda nudged Ge-Ride in that direction when he asked for some advice on his entry, albeit partially because I thought his style fit that look really well. Not many of the entries really matched what I thought when I heard Y2K, but is that really a bad thing? We got multiple imaginings of the Millennium Bug, deep dives into early '00s nostalgia, and even a quaint little LL park that you would definitely see before the end of the year. It's a reminder of what I find so beautiful about NE; the way that not a single one of us had a similar imagining of the year. We took 500 tiles and a basic theme and offered up our interpretations in the week we had. In a sense, we really do embody why I look back at the old internet so fondly; that genuine drive to create and pursue our incredibly niche art in our own way for no one except each other. With that said, I am now extra pumped up for finals and ready to give it my all with the rest of you!