Hi everyone! I'm ChicagoZohan. I am not actually from Chicago - my screen name is a reference to Left 4 Dead, haha.

I've been playing park builders forever - in first grade my best friend got me into Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires 2, and I've kept both of those interests to this day.

That said, I played these games (Zoo Tycoon was by far my favorite as a kid) as strategy games first and and creative games second. I never really played RCT3 (my wife played that as a kid so when we were in college we briefly played it together, but then....) All that changed with Planet Coaster. I became a creative builder first and a strategy gamer second, at least in these sorts of games.

My Planet Coaster career mostly consisted of a single crappy sandbox park - basically a Game of Thrones themed Disneyland budget park, with lands themed after the different kingdoms. It was incredibly crappy, with absolutely nonsense of scale, copy pasted square buildings everywhere and guests clipping through fake path, but it was mine. I fell in love with piece by piece building.

Then Planet Zoo came out. As a Zoo Tycoon fan, I was super into it, and still am. I developed my love of small, somewhat realistic builds in this game, and found the BroNation discord where I doubled down on that style. I also played with the ZSU discord for a while, as it helped guide my builds. I made two fairly extensive builds for ZSU and a few halfhearted attempts at an LA Zoo inspired build, as well as some other half finished projects here and there.

Eventually Planet Coaster 2 came out and with its new tools made Planet Zoo feel painful to play. I've been working on a single park in this game, I've had kids since Planet Zoo and so this is a theme park dedicated to my daughter. Eventually it will be a Disney style park with worlds themed after all of her favorite shows; for now, it is a Paw Patrol themed water park.

But my current and so far favorite build is in Jurassic World Evolution 3. See, the JWE games never felt anything like the Planet games. I never got very creative with them. And boy, did I want to. When JWE1 was first announced 8 years ago, I thought it would be the game of my dreams: Planet Coaster with dinosaurs. I was wrong. That game didn't come out then... But it has come out now.

My current build is an LA Zoo inspired Jurassic Park build. I'll start a thread to share it soon, having been summoned here by ShyGuy over in the BroNation discord.

Glad to have you here! Hope you enjoy the community and share some awesome creations!

Welcome to ParkCrafters! Excited to see what you'll create and share and enjoy your time here!