Hello, fellow speed demons. It's been a year since I started Miracle Karts, something I jumped on while recovering from covid and while helping my partner recover from a serious hospital visit. Surprise, surprise - I have covid again, despite masking and barely leaving the house. As you can imagine, it makes it really hard to stay positive about things when your brain feels like cold soup but I'm holding strong!

Since my last update in July I've added 3 new tracks: Sorro Beach, Teton Valley Karting, and Nechy Boondocks. My inspiration for the tracks is conjured up while watching vintage karting footage, studying aerial photos of abandoned and overgrown kart tracks, and imagining parts of Coelis that would be fun and interesting settings for the player.

For designing the tracks, I start by quickly sketching them out on paper while picturing myself bombing around. It's very scientific.

Much later, when I have the gumption, it's time to build the track in Blender.

Once the track is in Godot I spend a long time testing it at different speeds with different karts and AI. While my AI had a lot of trouble with a few of the turns and jumps on this one, I'm having a blast! I'll usually wait a few weeks before committing to my curb and ditch placement as I end up making lots of small changes, but for the first mixed surface track in the game it's feeling pretty sweet!

Sorro Beach is part of Sorro Bay, a busy fishing town on Lotti's South-Western coast, under the shadow of dormant Mount Croksol. I want each track to feel like a real space so once I'm ready to polish things up I'll be adding in more details like beached fishing boats, and ancient volcanic rocks for you to crack your helmet on. :P

As my 2nd year on the project begins it means it's time to be cutting some of the extra features I had planned (*gulp... and announced) but there is already a lot more in Miracle Karts than my initial concept from last December. I have a ton left to do and I haven't given myself much time to do it so wish me luck!