Hey guys! Just wanted to show off some of the stuff I've been working on these last couple weeks! Firstly, I want to show off a new item; the blade! It's a work in progress still but it's looking and feeling pretty good!

The weapon & trail match your chosen colors, so it ends up looking pretty flashy!

You can destroy obstacles with it, I still need to amp up the FX for when that happens, but it does the job!

Yep, that's me failing to slice a rocket with it. I wonder what happens when you do it successfully?... Something to think about! You may also notice there's no actual sword model or item icon, but I'll need some more time on that.

I also made a sort of taunt system. If you press the hop button at the height of your jump, you'll do a little taunt. Every time you press the button after that until you land, you'll drop a coin, making it possible to intentionally drop coins. This can be a strategic maneuver, or to give yourself a little handicap, since coins give you a small speed boost.

Additionally, the UI now supports labels! You can toggle it on and off, of course. Sorry about the quality of the gif on this one, Steam only supports gifs up to 5MB large:

Lastly, conveyor belts! The tools are pretty universal; you can apply this to terrain, or even an entire area to produce a wind effect.

Ignore the rotation of the tires for now; the animation is just confused because it sees all forward momentum as "driving". I'll fix that and it'll be great!

The last thing; I added horns & honking to the game. That's not really something you can show off in a gif, but you can effectively use any sound you want since it's integrated into my mod support. I expect folks will be making stuff like "stock sound effect sound pack" mods, and things like that.

That's the development over the last couple weeks! I've got a couple good buddies helping me with the artistic side of the project, meaning some track-related modeling stuff and music, more to come there. Hopefully more stuff to report soon, thanks for checking in on KART and I'm looking forward to delivering everyone a fun game! Take care!

P.S. Today is my birthday! The best present you could get me is spreading the word about my game and making sure it gets lots of wishlists! Thanks everyone, love you lots!

Hey everyone! Not sure who may be reading this so early on, but assuming you're seeing it not long after it's published, thanks so much for your interest in the game! Programming-wise, it's just me (Eiko) working on this, and for the majority of the development time, the modelling has all been me as well, so any support is extremely encouraging! Somewhat recently, I hired a 3D artist to help work on tracks, so there's more to come on that front, which I'm very excited about. Working on this game has mostly been a daily grind for me, but of course I've still got to pay my bills with my really cruddy job that pays me peanuts.

Mostly, I'm writing this to sort of communicate where I am with development, so you guys know what to expect. I'm not going to be too comprehensive since it's a lot to cover, but I'm going to quickly go over the key things that are finished and things that still need work.

Most importantly, gameplay feels really nice. I often spend a silly amount of time just drifting around and playing the game because it's satisfying to execute drifts, collect coins, and run into hazards. Currently, races are working very well, and a very simple CPU racer system is also working. So, it's currently possible to race CPU's from start to finish. The CPUs are extremely dumb right now, but they add enough chaos to KART that I have a good idea of how the races against other players will feel.

That leads me to speak of multiplayer; it's already working! That was one of the first tests I did a while back. Currently it's extremely user-unfriendly to join/host a game, but I've been designing all features with the knowledge that it must work with networking, so I expect minimal adjustments to code I've already written as far as online play is concerned. Eventually I'll get to a point where I can start focusing on lobbies, then I'll actually start looking at having online play tests. I'll probably need some volunteers when that time comes. Wink wink!

While there's still work to be done there, I feel really confident about the actual racing aspect of the game, so for the last few months I've been pouring a lot of my focus into the modding aspect of the game.

As an aside, I already have the spawning system done, so racers and their vehicles can be interchangeable, and you can choose primary and secondary colors for your racer as well.

In regards to modding, I have a system which I'm also feeling really good about. Since I want creators to have as much flexibility as possible, I've decided to not include an editor in-game. My reasoning is that it would limit people to the tools I provide them. Instead, I will be releasing an SDK that can be used to create content for the game via Unity. This means you can make racers, tracks, karts, horn sounds, and maybe more using external tools. So in theory, you should be able to play as whoever you want if you're willing to put forth the effort. In concept, this will effectively be the same as Tabletop Simulator's AssetBundles, if you're familiar with that.

That said, I will be providing a free demo which people will be able to use to play test their creations without ever owning the full game. This will happen before the game fully releases, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested! (I might eventually decide to include some sort of editor in-game, but as of right now, that's beyond the scope of this project.)

Also, I'm making the modding tools as simple to use as possible, and I'll be creating tutorials on top of that down the road.

The final result will be a little different than the above, since I've already made a lot of progress since that gif was recorded, but it should be approximately as simple as that. For instance, in the case of custom tracks, you can (selectively or not) apply various effects to racers, as well as implement various interactive elements such as timers, counters, detectors, and so on. There's even a feature where you can trigger events based on the beat of the music.

So anyways, this last week, I've been thinking through the game's startup sequence. That is, from the moment you launch the game until you enter the main menu. The method by which you launch the game is important (from Steam or from Unity via playtest) so that's what I'm working on now. This includes loading the proper things, like achievements or user settings, when the game starts up. I wrote 44 achievements tonight. They're not actually achievable yet, but Steam can acknowledge their existence right now, so that's nice.

Alright, it's 6AM and I gotta get some sleep! Thanks again for your support, I'll keep working hard to bring you all a fun game!