User Guide

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♦ Foresee and fill visitor’s needs — A little preparation goes a long way
toward preventing unhappiness. For example: If you serve food, your visi-
tors will need bathrooms and trash bins; provide them before there’s a
problem. Salty foods make guests thirsty, so build drink stalls. Think about
causes and their effects, and you’ll be ahead of the game.
♦ Don’t let guests stay lost — A visitor who wanders away from the main
attractions is not having fun. Maps of the park can prevent this, and a
sharp-eyed park manager (you) can spot and retrieve lost guests. (This is
covered in more detail earlier, under Lost Guests.)
Provide something for everyone. Yes, roller coasters are the focus of the
park, but not everyone enjoys riding them — and even those who do want
to ride something else now and again. Maintain a balance of rides running
the gamut from mild to intense, and you will maximize the number of
people you satisfy. Variety is the key if you want to appeal to a wide spec-
trum of customers — and you do.
♦ Keep the rides running — An attraction that is idle brings in no income
and satisfies no guests. Try to minimize the amount of time each ride sits
waiting for repair — down time. (This is covered in more detail earlier,
under Safety and Repairs.)
♦ Novelty is king — A ride that is newly built and opened attracts more
customers than one that has been running and available for a couple of
years. Old rides just don’t excite your guests as much as something fresh.
Keep this in mind, and use human nature to your advantage. As time goes
on, you can generate business by opening a new ride every now and then.
Pace yourself well, and your park will never seem “stale” to your visitors.
Be aware that you might be forced to dismantle an aging attraction that
no one visits any longer.
♦ Charge reasonable prices — There is no strict rule for pricing your
rides and the park entrance fee, but you should take into account that
your guests have limited resources. They will not pay insane amounts to
enter the park, nor will they patronize over-priced attractions. In the long
run, a moderately priced ride that gets twice the business makes more
profit than a premium attraction that gets fewer riders. Here are a couple
of general rules that should guide you in the right direction: If the
entrance fee is high, guests decide whether to enter based on the park rat-
ing. Once in, they expect low or nonexistent fees for the individual rides.
Conversely, if there is no entrance fee, they’re willing to pay premium
♦ Guest Info — The Guest Info window tracks the thoughts and actions of
every visitor to your park. (To open this window, click on the Toolbar but-
ton with the crowd of faces on it.) There are two display tabs in this win-
dow. the first lists the current thought and action of each guest in the
park; this can be useful for getting an intuitive “feel” for their attitudes.
The second tab summarizes for you the actions and thoughts of every
guest, and presents them in descending order of frequency. This is per-
haps the most useful report for finding incipient problems; if there’s a neg-
ative comment near the top of this listing, it’s a call to arms for you to do
something about the situation.
♦ Guest Windows — For a more detailed (but less complete) survey of vis-
itor opinions, you can click on any guest to open a Guest window. In it,
you can see what the guest is doing, what he or she has spent since enter-
ing the park (and on what), and the items that visitor is carrying. More
important, this window shows you how the guest is feeling and what he
or she is thinking about your park and the attractions in it.
♦ Ride Info — If you open the Ride Info window (using the button on the
Toolbar), the default display is the current status of every ride. However,
that’s not the only information in this window. Using the Data Selector,
you can see how your rides rate with your guests for satisfaction, popular-
ity, and other helpful measurements.
♦ Park Rating — Watch the Rating bar in the Status Box (in the lower
left-hand corner). Position the mouse pointer over the bar to see the actual
rating. This number (between 0 and 1000) reflects your guests’ overall
impression — of ride design, park layout, tidiness, value, efficiency, etc.
This is a great barometer of your park’s success or failure, although the
rating will never tell you what a problem is, only that there is a problem.
The guiding principles to guest happiness are twofold, and both can be
traced back at least as far as the legendary Mr. Barnum. First, give the
customers what they want. If they’re hungry, supply food; if they’re tired,
give them a place to rest. Second, always leave them wanting more. Every
guest should stay until he or she has no money left, and then leave happy.
More to the point, here are some specific ways you can keep the general
level of guest happiness high.
♦ Keep the park tidy — No one enjoys walking in trash. Keep your park
from becoming messy, and you prevent your guests from being disgusted
by it. (This is covered in more detail earlier, under Cleanliness.)
Park ManagementPark Management
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