ScreamRide: Building Your Roller Coaster

For today’s Screamride tips article, we’re covering the basics for building your own roller coaster. While this may seem limited compared to other features, it’s quite in-depth – and the community features, which allow you to share roller coasters, are sure to be a big hit as the game’s audience grows.

Put on your engineering hat 

The first thing you’ll want to do when building a roller coaster is see what kind of pieces you have to work with. You can literally twist your design in any given direction, whether it’s constant loop-de-loops chained together, a coaster made of sharp curves or even inverted loops where you go straight down, upside down and then right side up again.

When you first start the game, you’ll receive a select number of challenges to complete. By doing these, you’ll finish the five main goals and earn a star rating on the stage, and be able to move onto the next one. These goals are fairly easy to meet, although you’ll need to lay down a decent amount of track to make them work. 

Loops and corkscrews (also known as barrel rolls) can be small, medium or large depending how much depth you want to add to the coaster. However, you don’t want to make them too big, as you may lose riders as the coaster loses momentum going into the loop. Try to stick with medium sized ones, or if you can build a decent enough ramp to gain speed, go for the larger one. It never hurts to start small and work your way up.

Build smart 

Directionally, you can design the coaster any way you want, provided it fits within the sustained space you’re able to use. One thing you’ll want to do is avoid the coaster overlapping on a current level, otherwise your riders crash and burn. Instead, try to create a loop-de-loop, and then have the coaster run through that – but make sure you have plenty of headroom. Again, you don’t want riders flying off…or maybe you do. Have fun with it.

The more intricate you make your coaster, the better the score. While we think you should use caution when it comes to interlapping pieces or making them too large, that doesn’t mean you should avoid experimenting. Try using a number of pieces over the course of your design, then chain them together for some thrills. The more the virtual people enjoy the ride, the better you’ll do.

In addition, don’t forget to add color to your coaster. There are a number of paint jobs available, and you don’t necessarily have to stick to one single color. Go nuts and mix things up – you might gain more attention from users when you upload it to the community page. 

If at first you don’t succeed… 

When it comes to designing a coaster, trial and error is the best way to learn. If something doesn’t click when you take the coaster for a spin, you can always go back and edit, or even add that thrill effect that makes your coaster even better. That’s the great thing about the creation aspect of Screamride, you learn as you go. 

For good measure, if you’re a little cautious about building your first roller coaster, browse the community selections first, or go into the ride mode and see what the developer has to offer with available coasters. You’ll get a better idea how they work, and eventually use that experience to bring your creations to life. Do your research, then make your ultimate dream ride (or rides, since you can design more than one). 

Good luck, and remember to have fun! 

Screamride is available now for Xbox 360 and Xbox One.