Theme Park Studio lets you design your own amusement park and ride the roller coaster of your dreams; with a set of convenient editor tools for quick content creation and both Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra support, the program looks to be made for future Rift engineers. The Kickstarter goal has been reached, now Pantera Entertainment has extended funding for the ambitious project.
A roller coaster demo was one of the first released experiences once the Oculus Rift dev kits were out in the wild. MTBS3D user boone188 posted his RiftCoaster, now famous for eliciting lots of interesting and often funny reaction videos — some of them having half a million views already. And roller coaster fans probably won’t have to wait very long for more stomach-turning fun: the team at Pantera Entertainment is already planning the next step, with their amusement park simulator Theme Park Studio.
A few hours ago the Kickstarter campaign for the full-fledged editor, that allows you to design your own park and ride your own roller coasters, ended at the sum of $101,433 – but Pantera has extended funding for the project, so you can still get on the train.
Theme Park Studio: Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra Support
Pantera has pledged support for both the Oculus Rift and the Razer Hydra. The Rift support would obviously give the roller coasters and flat rides in Theme Park Studio a new dimension, but the planned Razer Hydra support could be an interesting fit as well. Place objects in a 3D space with your hands, switch through menus with simple gestures and draw pathways through your park: All this could work well, depending on Pantera’s implementation. It might end up somewhat like MakeVR.
Extended Funding: Hope for RollerCoaster Tycoon fans?
In its current state, Theme Park Studio doesn’t offer any management gameplay, which is a bit unfortunate given that the genre has pretty much dried up since the release of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004).
Fortunately, management gameplay isn’t completely off the list — it was one of the original stretch goals of the crowd funding campaign at $180,000. With an extended funding period of 30 more days, this goal could still be reached — just like Mac support ($130,000) and a PlayStation 3 version ($250,000) of Theme Park Studio.
The projected release date for Theme Park Studios is September 2013, so there should be more than enough time for hobby engineers to build stunning roller coasters until the Oculus Rift consumer version is released, currently expected for the third quarter of 2014. If you can’t wait that long, you can pimp your RiftCoaster ride with some easy tweaks or take a look at Parrotcoaster – another rollercoaster demo that is “coming soon to Oculus Rift”.
