One of the Developer Sessions onstage today at EGX was from Frontier, as they talked about the development process of Planet Coaster, both what they'd already been through and what was still to come in the game.
The game at its basic level is a theme park designer, utilising paths, rides, shops and other things to make money from guests. The game had been in Alpha this year from March until around Gamescom and the team talked about how the community had helped them shape the game. They gave examples of when feedback from the community playing the game made the revise new updates to the game, such as when height limits were imposed on roller coasters for gameplay and cost sake, they eventually reversed it because the community overwhelmingly asked them to remove it again.
They spoke about the future of what they wanted the game to be, with one big thing being that they wanted a game that had a community sharing maps with each other through the cloud and especially Steam Workshop. Already when an alpha update removed some basic toilets from the set of buildings available, someone had remade them and put them into the Workshop shortly after. They showed off that the game would contain transport rides to enable guests to go further into the park quicker and also reduce some of the traffic of footpaths, some of the pieces for the new Sci-Fi theme (although they did say that it wasn't quite finished yet) and spoke at great length about how they really wanted people who played the game to play around with the concepts and create their own 'themes' for their parks. They also said that while they wouldn't be putting in patrol zones, they would make the AI for entertainer staff much more intelligent to stop them either leaving the park altogether or clogging up the entrance ways and stopping people moving into the park.
Of course, the crowning jewel of the presentation was one trailer in which Frontier demonstrated that yes, this is very much like theme park builders of the past:
Planet Coaster will be coming out towards the end of this year, on November 17th. Can't wait to try this one out.