Miracle Karts - Vintage go-kart RPG

[defomort]

@the21zonz Thanks!

After posting that gameplay footage I got really down on myself and my work so I spent a few days fixing and updating my personal website. Since then I’ve been pretty exhausted - not sure if it’s my liver issues or just stress from everything in my life but progress was crawling until mid-February.

I did manage to make some promo art for a couple of characters:

I have a few more I want to do so I have options for key-art. I love how Nat Winks (red) turned out and am going to do my best to stick to that style for the rest of them.

Otherwise I’ve been focused on fleshing out the game’s second season with quests and dialogue. Someone I reached out for voice agreed to come on to the project which is exciting! It will be nice to not have every character be voiced by me!

[defomort]

When I started the only kart frame style I had in the game was a fairly generic, 1980s racing frame. It took me a few days to model based on a handful of photos I’d collected during my research.

There are many versions of this design in the wild, and especially in other go-kart games, so I’ve tried to keep all the other styles as different as possible.

For the “dirt” frame I wanted a lot of clearance and a tight, squirrelly wheelbase for dodging rocks and trees. This is the boxiest of the frames, and I think it looks like the dependable clunker it is meant to be.

There are 7 frame designs; a few are based off what I saw as common vintage kart styles but I’ve added a couple of my own fantasy kart designs you’ll be able to acquire late in your career. There are literal hundreds of frames and weird parts I’ve seen doing research that I wish I could include but less is better for this size of game. It’s a bit like the chassis’ in Mad Max - they each have their benefits and weird quirks but it will come down to which you think looks nicest.

The last step will be completing the textures for the karts. For now they can be painted in different finishes and I’m working on dynamic scratch, rust, and dirt buildup.

These are placeholder colours and textures. The blue is scratches, red for rust patches, and a top green layer for dirt and grime. Each of these passes affects the specular, roughness, and normal layers of the texture in the shader.

The finished look will be like this but with more appropriate texture masks.

Of course there will be options at the paintshop for a quick wash and paint touch-ups so you can keep your beauty fresh and clean.

Be well and good luck with your games!

[defomort]

An element I haven’t taken time to talk about is the music in Miracle Karts.

Since I started I’ve composed over 30 original songs for the game! Most of the music is for the main UI and races, but a good chunk of it is location specific. Out of all of it the music, the songs that play at Zeke’s garage are probably my favourite.

Originally I planned to write the most obnoxious butt-rock for Zeke - I wanted you to be blasted with the chuggiest and loudest trash I could make. There would even be dialogue options to shame him into turning it down or off, but the idea kind of backfired.

Original theme for Zeke’s Garage (!volume warning!)

Even before actual testing began I was already sick of hearing it. I don’t think it’s the worst thing, but it was the opposite of what I wanted while tweaking my kart. Even at low volume I felt like it was making understanding the numbers harder.

Over time, as Zeke came into focus as a character, the inspiration for the music changed. He’s a character that everyone in the karting clubs go to for help and advice, and it seemed more appropriate that the music in his shop be warm and inviting.

Rather than try to fill up the garage scenes with a bombastic soundtrack I started writing some simpler songs with stripped down instruments, inspired by mid-century pop music.

Zeke’s theme #1

In the end I wrote 5 songs for Zeke’s, all using the same setup and processing. Some are a bit more somber or upbeat, but all fade nicely into the background while you’re focused on your upgrades.

Now visiting Zeke’s feels like a welcome break from the more beat-heavy songs in the menus and races.

From my IRL experience in garages and woodshops, either following my dad around while he talked shop or as an adult feigning understanding, there was always some ancient radio crackling along setting the tone for the day. Songs hit different in a workshop. I remember hearing John Cale’s Sabotage for the first time in a shop and it blowing my mind. It’s hard to know how much of my fondness for the song is tied to that day with my friend talking about projects.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts on the songs or let me know if you’d like more music focused updates in the future!

[phoenixdk]

I like what I’ve heard so far, though the game is pretty loud

Is there a playable demo somewhere?

[OleNic]

Not yet, the latest I heard. Been eagerly waiting for it myself

[defomort]

I’m happy to hear you guys are into what you’ve seen.

The demo is still going to be the first couple days of the game, so I’m trying to have every system as polished as possible by June. It’s going well but time goes fast, and I’ve got a very busy spring!

I was able to do 2 full play-throughs of the game this month which is really cool. They took 5.5 and 4 hours doing every side race and finishing a season at the top of Super Class. This doesn’t include time spent in menus tinkering with my kart, or talking to other racers.

These playthroughs led to a massive re-balancing of the game’s systems and stats. It feels very tight now, and even on a “bad” playthrough you always have enough credits and consumables to keep going.

I was also able to add in a high level engine, the Vicewyn Thomper, and a couple more slick tire options. These come in year 3 earliest but will be needed for some end-game races.

Another thing I’ve spent a ton of time on this past month is improving the UI and UX. This is kind of boring but the highlights are: Sponsors now get upgraded with successful fulfillment, shop windows are now bigger and have easy to use item filters, and items can be bookmarked so they are easy to find on any screen.

Lastly I took a look at how I was mixing the different kart sounds and found a bunch of errors and glitches. This led to replacing and improving the dynamics of sound effects during races but I’ll go more in depth on this later.

That’s it for now. My updates might be sparse for a bit with the move coming up but I’ll do my best!

[phoenixdk]

@defomort

I was able to do 2 full play-throughs of the game this month which is really cool.

Awesome! It’s a great (and slightly overwhelming) point in development. Great time to get it into other people’s hands - usually at this point, one is a little out of touch with the actual difficulty that a new player would experience

[defomort]

Yeah, it’s definitely time. I could tinker with this forever.

Most of this week was spent fixing a fatal error caused by deleting a file that was attached to an unused material. I could launch from the editor but it wouldn’t boot from the export. I had a timeline of when I created the bug but my last backup is from February so it was pretty scary. Still not going with corpo version-control but I at least set an alarm to remind myself to backup once a week. Massive thanks to Linky439 on BlueSky for recommending WinMerge to compare builds.

I made some improvements to Gax Farms, one of the early dirt tracks.

I smoothed out the turns as much as possible and got rid of a more unpredictable than fun jump out of the back of the barn.

A cute little field area behind the barn.

The barn now houses a tricky but satisfying banked curve.

It still needs work but once the last 2 tracks are locked I’ll come back to add some unique decorations and details. One thing I’ve learned that with track design versus level design is that smoother is almost always better on a track. Chicanes and jumps look cool but in a sim they are a huge hassle!

[defomort]

The Steam page is up and I finally finished the teaser trailer!

Miracle Karts teaser

Steam: Miracle Karts on Steam

I got it all in for the June Steam Next Fest deadline and with an hour to spare.

It took this long to finally finish because I wanted to get the final character models in the races but then I realized literally no one will notice or care. I’m really proud of the result, here’s hoping I can get the demo polished up in time.

[OleNic]

Wishlisted ! Pis entre Mourialais, ça sent tu la coupe ou quoi?

[phoenixdk]

Still looking forward to trying it!

[defomort]

Pas mal! I’m gonna miss the smell when I’m in Ontario.

[defomort]

A hyuck hyuck, looks like I jumped the gun on Steam Next again. I need to learn to be more patient with this process. I really appreciate yall saying you’re excited to play the demo, so I’m going to put it out ASAP. It just isn’t possible to fix all the bugs and get it looking as finished as it needs to be in 3 weeks.

In the meantime I’ve been reworking the character faces to be more human and distinct.

I worked on the eye shader and repainted the textures. Even though it’s not many pixels in game, it makes a huge difference when talking to characters, especially when they are moving.

Eye textures are now a whopping 128x128.

I did up the teeth a bit as well and added 7 variants that can be mixed and matched.

I also made a Miracle Karts website so now I have somewhere to send anyone who asks what the game is!

[OleNic]

Bravo mec! Vraiment impressionnant!

You’re working on this solo, right? Doing everything yourself ? Hallucinant!

Really eager to give it a spin, granted for me it’s all about the driving and racing

Cheers, lâche pas la patate, ça sent le démo!

[defomort]

@OleNic I’m solo except for voice acting but my partner wants to help with social media once we’ve moved. I have a remote recording session with one person who will be doing several characters in July and hopefully will be able to hire at least 1 or 2 more. Also, weird, you’re not the first person to say they are more about the actual racing…

Speech is made by breaking the text into vowel sounds and adding in pauses or pitch shifts depending on either the tone of the dialogue or sentence length. It’s cool because occasionally it will sound things out phonetically giving this uncanny feeling without making it hard to read at the same time. There will also be occasional barks during races that use the in-world conlang, but those will be subtle.

My friend got stuck and tried talking to the characters to figure out how to improve her kart and ended up feeling reassured that it was normal to suck! So I’ve added in some more contextual suggestions in your first year to help tutorialize some of the more sim aspects of the game.

On the marketing side I’ve accumulated a whopping 26 wishlists! Steam data shows over a 1000 people visited the page so that needs work! I tried to be esoteric in my summary but I can see that it just makes it seem like the game doesn’t actually exist. The thumbnail is the barn kart you get at the start of the game but doesn’t really look like anything at a glance either.

It’s just my guess, but I think I need to focus more on the game’s racing features in my posts because the market for narrative indie racing games is both niche and over saturated.

[ComicallyUnfunny]

Found a little typo in the website

Wouldn’t mention it normally but it may be the first thing new players see.

[defomort]

Thank you! I had to look up which words were misspelled so I would have probably never noticed.

[defomort]

We’re moving this week! It’s going to be several months of living in my parents basement with my partner while we sort out our living situation (not looking forward to that bit). I haven’t stopped working on Miracle Karts most days but I will need to temporarily put posting and marketing to the side while I sort my life out.

Just wanted to leave this here in case months go by without a post. Once I’m setup again I’ll get back to regular updates and have an extended gameplay preview.

See yall on the other side!

[phoenixdk]

Good luck! It’s a never-ending dev cycle, working on the game of life