Karting Kriiation would be a game that put player-created content to the fore, allowing them to create their own worlds, karts, and characters to share with the world. If that sounds like ModNation Racers to you, you’d be right. But note that I said worlds. Not tracks. And that is the key difference.
While ModNation Racers allowed you to create individual tracks, this time you have the ability to create an entire world. To do so, you’d have an easy-to-use editor to construct that world. Within that world, you can then allow five tracks to be a part of it – whether they be a part of that world or outside it.
Racing games offer a lot, and there’s plenty of kart racers around. Yet there’s a lot of people who would enjoy creating their own racetracks. You only have to look at modding communities for that. Or even games that offer the ability for player-created stuff like GTA Online or DiRT 5.
ModNation Racers – back when it released in 2010 on the PS3 and PSP – went one further. It put every part of the creation of the world into your hands. But that creation was geared toward a racetrack. Even if you could make some great looking worlds that the racetrack winds through. But with this concept of mine, the focus is more on the worlds than the tracks.
People like simplicity when it comes to creators, it’s true. Meaning the ability to create an entire world would be too much for many. Unless that world was small enough to manage. While masters of creation would love the ability to mess around in 10km2 worth of sandbox, you can decrease the size down to as little as 1km2 so that there’s less to be working with.
The map size can be edited to be any range between those two, so if you’d rather you had an oblong map of 4x6km you can do that. Player freedom is the key to any creation toolset, after all. And that extends to all facets of the toolset at your disposal here.
Placing roads is as simple as choosing the start and end points, then editing the curve of that piece, along with width, height and other stuff. Then carry on placing pieces from one of the two ends, or create a junction from any other part of that piece. Various road types can be selected from, such as those with barriers, or pedestrian paths, or even the surface of that road. Dirt, gravel, tarmac, with harder surfaces giving customisation of the road markings, so you could go simple or make it rainbow coloured.
For editing of terrain, there’d be the line editor and square editor. The line editor would see you indicate the length of terrain you’d want to edit, then use a width line to choose the position and width of the widest point of that terrain. For the square editor, you’d define an area that would change in height and another to define the start of the slope. You can also choose to curve the entire thing to create a rounder hill.
As with the roads, you have a lot of options to edit how that terrain looks with a paint tool. Various grasslands, ice, rock, and many more, with a water tool that allows you to fill in any holes you’ve created. While editing the road, you can take it through terrain and merge it, creating a seamless transition between the two. Or a tunnel.
Of course, roads and terrain changes alone don’t create a world, which is where the massive amount of other world design placeables comes into things. And I do mean massive. Buildings, foliage, fences, and more besides. There’s a lot of stuff to find in our world, and I want that to be the same for these worlds that people create. There’d be various styles of each item that can be used, such as different types of tents for when making a campsite. It’d be a bit unnatural for them all to look the same, after all.
It would be a hard ask to say that every piece of foliage had to be placed individually, so for that you have the marking tool. The marking tool allows you to set an area which would then be auto-populated with whatever pieces of foliage you want, depending on the settings chosen. You can then individually place more should you wish to further diversify the area.
Placement of buildings will auto-populate pedestrian areas if you choose to do so, but you can use the road placement tool for that as well. Choosing a pedestrian road piece will allow you to create stairs if you so want when creating slopes, as well as right-angle corners. Barrier options are also available with these pedestrian pieces. You’ll only be able to travel around those areas your kart is small enough to fit in, naturally, but it’s good for those who want to go as realistic as possible in their creations.
As I keep saying, options are always a good thing, so you could easily just create a single racetrack or a world for exploring. But you can have both, and all in a single world. Sort of. See, the racetracks wouldn’t be workable in that open world. You’d have to clone the world you’d created with the tracks in it, then assign a route by driving it, placing checkpoints where necessary. You’d then link the track to the explorable world, creating a mark on that world to transfer you between worlds.
Since they are separate, what affects one wouldn’t affect the other, so if the route of the racetrack was a city course, you could place barriers around to indicate where the route is going without blocking off anything from your explorable world. It does make things difficult if you want to make changes to that explorable world, since the process of track creation would then need to be repeated, but better that than being restricted on how you can design the world.
Of course, if you’d rather not have to repeat the track creation, you can create a separate part of the city as just a track. Since you can create a track separate from the world, it doesn’t even have to make geographical sense. You could have the explorable world as a forest, but then have tracks at the beach, a frozen wasteland, and inside a hotel. As long as the tool is within the game to pull it off, you have a lot of creative licence with how you want these worlds of yours to look.
It wouldn’t be right to have this much control of your world to not give a lot of control over how you traverse it. So let’s talk a bit about character and kart customisation. For the kart, it would be a modular builder. As long as it has a seat, steering wheel, and wheels, it counts as a useable kart. However, with so many pieces to choose from to make something fabulous, why would you settle for what amounts to a steerable skateboard?
You could create an approximation of a double-decker bus, a roller-blading dinosaur, or an F1 racing machine. Just as with the world creation, there would be a lot of varied modules to use in customising a kart. With all the modules in place, you can then paint it to how you like. Modular painting can be used to change the colour of an individual module, with advanced painting allowing further detail to be added.
There’d be no stats for the kart you create, since it needs to be able to compete on any surface the game throws at you and make it across any jumps over gaps that appear, but size is going to be an issue. If you make something that hits the limits of how large you can make a kart, you could easily run into problems on some worlds that have a few small spaces.
For the characters, they’d be Miis. But not. After all, the Mii creation system can be used as any character creation system, as shown with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Nintendo Switch Sports. The system would allow you to set how they would look using the parameters of the Mii creation system, but they would have more detail than the Miis of old.
There’d be a few outfits you could give the character, with customisation of the colours and a painting tool to put more detail onto them. That would also extend to the face of the character and their hair. A few accessories such as hats, gloves and glasses can also be worn by the characters, with the same options for customisation.
All of this customisation is no good if no-one can find it. Fortunately, the tools are there for discoverability. Search for a creator and follow them. Search using key words and see the results of those named with such words. Use a list of most popular (by user ratings) or latest creations uploaded. Filter by using tags. All from within the game.
I’d expect Nintendo to have made some worlds of their own to show off what’s possible with the creation tools. While there wouldn’t be such things as a tournament mode, it would be fun to see a small hub with four tracks based on Mario Kart courses, or a recreation of Hyrule from Ocarina of Time. Some original stuff would also be there, as no doubt fans will go crazy with the recreations.
It would be lonely exploring the various worlds by yourself, so why not bring some friends? Or randoms? When selecting a world to explore, you can open it up to randoms to join, an invite-only session, or keep it all to yourself. With people in the session, you can open a menu to see their profiles on the game and give them a follow if you like the look of the content they’ve created.
Since to get to the races you’re technically world-hopping, there’d be an invite system to get others from the base world into the race. That way, if they’d rather not join a race, they won’t be forced to switch. Only one race can be active at a time, but those who want to can spectate the race after it has started can do so by heading to its swap point on the map.
A kart racer is nothing without its items, but there’d be no item boxes here. Instead, there’s a drift point system. Whenever you drift, you’ll build points. Those points can then be put into one of four different items. Offense, defence, boost, and ghost. Each item would have their own point value depending on which position you were in, meaning the more powerful items would be hard to save for when in the top three.
A game centred around creation will obviously live or die by how many support it, and the key to that is the ease of use of the creation tools. World creation is a lot of work, and I don’t expect everyone to be masters at it, but I would hope they could use the tools I’ve described to have a good attempt at making the world of their dreams. Extra content would also help with that, so perhaps Nintendo would create and release franchise-specific items while using those items to create a new world.
But hey, since this is just detailing a concept, would you be interested in it?
Images Taken From:
Crazy Crater | ModNation Racers Wiki
BeamNG.drive Steam Store Page
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Xbox Store Page
Miitopia Nintendo.co.uk Overview Page
