User Guide

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relieve any condition that could cause dissatisfaction with your park.
Just like any other ride or service in the park, you can charge admission
for use of the rest room. As always, this is a trade off between making
enough income to cover the maintenance costs of the facility and keeping
your guests satisfied that your park is a good value for their money.
FOOTPATHS
A park filled with rides, shops, beautiful gardens, and other entertain-
ments is utterly useless if the guests cannot reach any of the attractions.
To be successful, your park absolutely must have a system of footpaths to
guide visitors through the grounds. This is especially true of larger parks;
the more real estate there is to tour, the more vital it is that you provide
an efficient, well-designed layout of trails.
The footpaths in your park should be more than just a random assem-
blage of trails that provide access to every attraction. An intelligent park
design incorporates a system that keeps your guests moving smoothly
from one ride to another (herds them along, if you will). You should design
your paths to do all this while, concurrently, leading your guests to remain
in the park and spending money for as long as possible. (A park, after all,
is first and foremost a business enterprise.)
Before we get into the step-by-step guide to laying down footpaths, here
are a few pointers toward building an effective park-wide path system. Be
forewarned that some of them are a bit manipulative:
♦ Keep the distance between attractions short, so that no guest has the
opportunity to become bored or overly tired while walking from one to
another. When a long walk is inevitable, provide benches along the way,
especially at the tops of hills.
♦ Provide transport rides from point to point (every point near a ride)
around the park. This will lighten the traffic load on your path system and
give tired guests an alternative to walking.
♦ Make sure that all of your attractions are visible from the footpaths. A
guest will not think to patronize a ride he or she does not know exists.
♦ To prevent crowding, provide alternate routes through the busiest areas.
There are two surfaces on which you can lay a normal path (one that con-
forms to the surface of the land): horizontal, flat ground, and simple hills,
FootpathsShops and Stalls
Info and Souvenirs
As you get more proficient in building rides, stalls, the
paths that connect them, and the scenery that decorates
those paths, even the most intelligently laid-out park
will become large and complex. That’s when your
guests start to want a map of the park. That’s when you
need to build an Information Kiosk. (Hopefully, your
researchers have developed one by the time you need it.) Supplying park
maps helps to greatly decrease the number of guests who get lost, too.
Another important function of the Information Kiosk is the sale of umbrel-
las. Rain is a serious problem for most parks, and yours is probably no
exception. Though guests will not simply abandon the park when it starts
to rain (especially if they paid a significant price to get in), they will avoid
certain types of rides (roller coasters, for example) and be drawn to other
types (covered ones, specifically). If umbrellas are available for sale, your
guests become much less uncomfortable — and therefore less unhappy —
in the rain. You also reap a tidy profit selling an item that, while the
weather lasts, everyone wants.
Bathrooms
Even if your park does not yet include any food or drink
vendors, your guests will need toilet facilities and places
to wash their hands, change children’s diapers, and
that sort of thing. When your park does sell food and
drinks, these little buildings become even more vital to
preserving the happiness of your guests.
You build a Bathroom just like you would any other shop or stall. Here are
a few important considerations to keep in mind:
♦ Make sure that the building is facing the right way. The doorway must
be directly adjacent to a footpath for guests to be able to enter (and leave).
♦ It’s a good idea to locate the rest rooms close to food service areas. You
want them convenient, visible, and easy to find.
♦ Sometimes, guests will need a bathroom after a particularly intense
ride. Consider the ride’s nausea factor, too.
♦ Unless your park is quite centralized, spread these facilities out around
the grounds. The idea is to prevent a guest from having to walk too far to
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