Launchway
← Play something else Theme park sim · Build 68 · Playable

Rickety Park

Manage the chaos. Keep the rides running.

Rickety Park
Works on phone, tablet and desktop · No download · No account

What it is

A theme park management sim about coping rather than about building a dream park. Rides break down. Queues back up. The toilets are your problem now. Incidents accumulate in a log you'll wish you'd read earlier.

That's the deliberate difference. Nearly every other park game is aspirational: a picture of the park you're going to build. This one is about the afternoon where three things fail at once.

The rides are real rides. The coasters run full circuits over a lift hill and a drop, and the Steel Coaster has a loop. Logs splash down the flume and the bumper cars bump. A broken ride comes to a stop, smokes and lights its lamp until a mechanic gets there. Every park starts mid-morning on a 20-minute day, and at dusk the lights come on: bulbs strung on every ride, lamps along the paths and stars over the hills.

How to play

  • Place rides, stalls and facilitiesBuild
  • Set what you chargeTicket price
  • Watch what's going wrongIncident log
  • Move the cameraDrag / pinch
  • Sound on or offThe speaker, top right

On a desktop everything is a click, the scroll wheel zooms the camera, Escape cancels a placement you have started, and M turns the sound on and off.

The dashboard never hides: budget, guests, happiness, tickets and price all stay on screen. A management game that tidies away its numbers isn't decluttered, it's gutted.

Built for a phone

The build panel is a bottom sheet on a phone rather than a full-height rail covering the park, and the whole park fits the frame at every screen shape. A vertical field of view means a tall screen sees less across; the opening camera compensates rather than showing you a speck in an empty field.

Build Log

  1. Build 60

    Every ride and stall gained marquee bulbs in a slow chase over a warm pool of light, 36 lamp posts went up along the paths and stepped aside for any ride built over one, a lit arch spelled the park’s name at the gate, the fountain glowed and stars came out. The night turned darker and bluer so the lights carried it. All of it fades in at dusk and out at dawn.

  2. Build 59

    Logs now float a water course, ride a conveyor up and splash down a chute; the train potters round its line and puffs smoke; the bumper cars drive and bump. Every ride turns at a set speed per second, and a broken ride stops, smokes and shows its lamp on top.

  3. Build 56

    Each coaster now runs a closed circuit of real track: the Steel Coaster climbs a lift hill, drops into a vertical loop and banks home, and the Rattler rattles over camelback humps on a timber lattice. A train runs the circuit, crawling up the lift and racing down the drop. When a coaster breaks down, its train stalls halfway up the lift until a mechanic fixes it.

  4. Build 55

    A busy park asked the phone for about 2,450 draws a frame, mostly for shadows: every guest was 28 separate parts and each part cast its own. Parts that never move apart are now merged into one mesh per surface, a guest is six meshes over a soft round shadow, and the tree ring is five instanced meshes. The same park now takes 310 draws. Name tags show up close or when a ride is tapped, and no longer stay behind when a ride moves or goes.

Earlier builds (8)
  1. Build 54

    Every colour was lit as if it were already linear and sent to the screen unencoded, so the grass read near-black. The renderer now outputs sRGB through a filmic tone curve, a sky-and-grass light replaced the flat ambient one, and a sky dome and meadow run to a hazy horizon. Every park starts mid-morning on a 20-minute day, and night is moonlit.

  2. Build 53

    There was no quick way to silence the park. Music and effects each had a slider in Settings, and nothing else. A speaker by the menu button, or M, now closes one master gain that both run through, so a sound already playing stops at once and both sliders keep their levels.

  3. Build 50

    A mechanic serviced the one ride they were assigned and nothing else, so a ten-ride park needed ten mechanics and every ride built was a bill rather than a draw. They now finish their own ride, then take whatever is broken and nobody else has claimed.

  4. Build 48

    A backgrounded tab banks its whole absence and spends it on the first frame back. Five minutes away replayed five minutes of simulation before anything drew, and the park aged while nobody watched. A frame now carries at most 500ms of a 220ms tick, and returning resumes from now.

  5. Build 43

    Progressive disclosure pass. The incident log stays hidden until the first incident, so its arrival is information rather than furniture. An empty panel is worse than no panel.

  6. Build 41

    Two rides could never be placed. Tapping one put pointerdown on the hover tooltip and pointerup on the button beneath, and no click fires when press and release land on different elements. The tooltip was information, not a control, so it stopped taking input at all.

  7. Build 39

    The bottom bar docked properly instead of floating 118px up and forming a third band of interface across the park.

  8. Build 36

    Responsive layout. The previous build had no media queries at all: every position in the interface was a fixed desktop coordinate.

Credits and licences

Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover drawn from the game’s own 3D park, ride and guest code.

Rickety Park is original work by Launchway Games.