This is the first in a bunch of guides that are going to be based on a single park. These guides will be built over a period of months, so please be patient. Hopefully you'll see the park build from scratch over several tutorials.

This guide is all about getting your park basics right. How to build a park from scratch that you won’t regret after you've put in a lot of work.

To start with, here are a couple of images of what would be a successful park in RCT3. If you were playing a scenario, this park would do well as it has everything the game needs:



It doesn't look pretty, but it has the gentle ride at the start, a thrill ride, food, coaster near the back and scenery.

Here we have started adding in a new space themed area:



From a designers (and viewers) point of view, this is pretty dreadful. The rides are just dumped down. There's no planning and the theming is haphazard. Even if you made some major theming changes, the park is doomed because it's just badly laid out.

So, to start building your park, plan, plan, and plan...

First of all, decide exactly how you want to lay it out and theme it. Most parks have an entrance area that is either very generic, or a milder version of the theme within, leaving the best bits for right inside the park.

If you are going to have several areas to the park, decide roughly how big they will be, and how you will navigate between them. If possible, lay out rough divisions and paths to start with.

Here we have "Guideland", my park designed just for these tutorials. We start with an entrance area to guide people in:


It's very simple and neat. The buildings cover the peep basics of Info desk, ATM, First Aid and Toilets. Nothing spectacular, but I've given myself plenty of room at the start, so if I wanted to add a transport ride over the entrance area I can (at a later point).

Behind it, you can see I've started altering the land. I've decided to go for a Disney style layout, with long run in, then a central hub the splits off to three themed lands.

I'm changing the landscape now as it makes things interesting, and it's something that's difficult to do at a later point.

Here we can see the entrance plaza leading down into a food and kiddie area. A nice and relaxing place for the family in the park to settle for a while:



There's plenty of shade while peeps eat, and a few of those little rides (and a bit of a thrill on a kiddie coaster) to get peeps in the mood. I added a stream through the middle to keep things interesting and it leads into a lake that I'll use later one. Again, planning now will lead to things that would be impossible to add later.

At the back, you can see the land rises quite steeply. My central hub is going to be on the top of a hill so that it stands out throughout the park (we'll see more of this in the future):



Lastly, I've started to build a pirate themed area down to the right hand side of the hub:



So nothing much really in this tutorial for the expert, but hopefully for those new to park design, there's something of a little assistance. Just remember the following:

My next task on this park would be to get the basics down in each land. Then I would go back to the start (entry plaza) and build again, then work through the park rebuilding and redesigning until it is just right.

Some people may prefer to absolutely nail one area at a time, getting it perfect. It may be you have a great idea for a ride and/or building structure. Go with that; just make sure that all the other points are kept in mind. Then you wont have wasted your time.

Download the example park from here