Welcome to the Dirchie Kart beta, everyone is welcome to play as long as you contribute something.

This is the full version of the game as it stands in development, so there will be bugs and some graphic glitches. There is a feedback interface built into the game which submits your suggestions directly to this website for me to monitor, if you include your email adress I can directly answer any queries you have.

I'm currently trying to smooth out the split screen multiplayer and single player portions of the game, once that is looking good I plan to work on network multiplayer modes.

I’d recommend starting on 250cc , some XBox controllers hooked up to your PC and some mates around for a few beers. The download details are as follows:

1. Make sure you install this first Microsoft XNA 4.0 Runtime (note: Dirchie now uses XNA 4.0, so if you used to run the old version you will need to install this update before the new version will run)
2. The download and uncompress this file from IndieDB.com (120Mb)

It works best with an XBox controller/s hooked up to the PC, the keyboard controls are as follows:

Visit the contact section of this site if you've got something more direct to ask me, otherwise enjoy!

Development

Dirchie Kart started life as a platforming/fighting game called "Ride the Fury" where you only had one move, a dragon punch. When that turned out to be not much fun, it morphed into an over the top space invaders clone called Awesome Super Space Invaders (ASS Invaders)... again that didn't turn out to be much fun, but at this stage the underlaying "Ride the Fury" engine was starting to get fairly fully featured with quite a few special effects and a 2D physics engine.

I must have been playing Mario Kart on the DS because this was before the Wii version was released, but I got the idea of trying to mold the engine into a kart racing game... Dirchie Kart was born!

Realising my favorite tracks in the latest version of the Mario Kart franchise are still the basic flat tracks from the SNES and GBA versions, I set myself the task of trying to replicate the joy of those tracks in my own game.

I tried creating my own tracks from the get go, but I was struggling to tune the speed, turn rate and scale of the vehicles. Fortunately I found someone who'd ripped the orginal SNES mario kart tracks into handy 1024 x 1024 PNG files, perfect for importing what I'd already created, within an hour I had one of them in and playing great!