User Guide

FOOTPATHS
A park filled with rides, shops, beautiful gardens, and other entertainment is utterly useless if
the guests cannot reach any of the attractions. To be successful, your park 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 assemblage 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). An efficiently
laid out path complex provides cues–some subtle and some not–that indicate to a visitor walking
the path what direction he or she is meant to travel. 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:
• Think of your path system not as tree-like (branches stemming from a central path), but more
akin to a flowing waterway. From the moment a guest enters the park, he or she should be
channelled along smoothly, and presented with moments of decision (branchings and
intersections) only infrequently. This minimises the risk of stalling and congestion.
• The path should loop back on itself so that guests do not often need to turn around and walk
back the way they came. This will help to minimise two-way traffic. However, unless you are
certain that they will be out of money by the time they reach it, do not provide a route that
leads guests back to the park entrance (the exit). Remember, the longer they stay, the more
they spend.
• 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
patronise a ride he or she does not know exists.
• Avoid creating double-width pathways and large paved areas. These allow your guests to mill
around, and can lead to confusion.
• To prevent crowding, provide alternate routes through the busiest areas.
There are two surfaces on which you can lay a normal path (one that conforms to the surface of
the land):
horizontal,
flat ground, and
simple hills, those with
no irregularities in slope.
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 umbrellas. 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.
Toilets
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 Toilet 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 toilet after a particularly intense ride. Consider the ride’s
nausea factor, too.
• Unless your park is quite centralised, spread these facilities out around the grounds. The
idea is to prevent a guest from having to walk too far to 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.
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