I’ve been working on the Botswana track today, it’s really different to the Paris track I was working on last weekend as you can see in the shots below.

Gay Paris

Botswana

Botswana is going to get some rogue elephants as well (like the truffle hunting pigs), I think that’ll finish it off nicely.

I’ve been pushing pretty hard the past week getting enough promo material together for Dirchie Kart – World Tour to be part of the “Indie Games Summer Uprising”.

It’s a great promotion organised by a few community guys to group together some of the top Xbox Live Indie Games about to be released into one big promotion, hopefully with some backing from Microsoft to get some dashboard loving like the previous Winter Uprising.

I’ve only really thrown my game’s hat into the ring at this stage, voting hasn’t actually started just yet. With only 10 entries chosen out of 70 odd the competition is tough.

Hopefully you can pick my Dirchie Avatar out on the second page here, and here’s a direct link to Dirchie Kart – World Tour’s page on the site.

Wish me luck.

Finally finished off the box art for World Tour this afternoon, it’s still short of my original vision for it, but it’s near enough and all I can do with the time I have.

I implemented a quick and dirty free look camera in Dirchie Kart tonight to allow me to capture much better screen shots, the following are the first batch showing off the new tracks.

I’m sure you’ll agree the results speak for themselves, much, much better, you get a weird matrix style effect as you move around the game as it’s paused.

Plenty more tracks to come.

Here’s what I’ve been working on most of the day, the centre piece of the new Egypt track for Dirchie Kart 2 the Dirchie Sphinx.  Though the texturing isn’t anything to wright home about I’m really happy with the modeling itself.

The track itself needs a little more filling out, but I should knock that over tomorrow morning ready to grab some new screenies and knock up a new promo website. I’m pushing to get that all done ready for nomination in the Summer Uprising promotion coming later in the year on XBox live.

I’ve always been searching for a distinctive visual style for the backgrounds in Dirchie Kart, some of the tracks look alright but don’t really separate my game from it’s source material.

Today I’ve slapped together a test background decoration around the new Monaco track of a textured cartoon idea I’ve been thinking about. So far I’m really happy with the look, it’s nice and quick to put together as well.

Let me know what you think?

Spending a little bit of time today to setup a new XNA 4.0 project for Dirchie Kart. At the same time I’m taking the opportunity to separate the “Ride the Fury” engine code from the game code.

Took me a little while to find out how I had the original project files linked together, it was handy because if you added a new source file to one it’d automatically update the other project. 

Curiously I couldn’t find any references on the web, so I figured I’d post it for future reference.

It’s pretty basic, just add your windows project or class lib then Right Click on it and select “Create Copy of Project for Xbox 360”. One cool thing I noticed is that if you have a class lib and game project both setup the same way it’ll automatically use the correct version for the project.

Some time in the wee hours of this morning Dirchie Kart received the last few community votes it needed to pass peer review and went live on the XBox Live Indie Game Marketplace.

This milestone is not signifies the completion the project and a lot of hard work, but also ticks off another personal goal.

Back when I finished Rhys Quest/Dispell I set myself the goal of getting a game published up on the XBox, at the time XNA was only a rumour so I had no idea how I might achieve that goal. Fortunately for me the tools available to me and our direction at work coincided with Microsoft’s direction with XNA and it all came together.

The big question now is where to go from here?

I’ve always envisaged Dirchie Kart as a party game with racing as it’s main game play, hence forth the convoluted party control and menu looping system. One feature I’ve planned from the start is a penalty system to make it a drinking game if you are so inclined… which I am.

This week I thought up a revolutionary way to implement it, a balloon hat (the one on BrownBot in the picture above, that looks suspiciously like a cock and balls) that grows as your penalty count increases.

There are set events in game that you get a penalty for, falling off the track, getting podded, coming last etc, while you’re racing these penalties count up, at the end of race count-up you get a penalty total for each player at which point you would take a chug of your drink for each.

At this point I’m happy with how the system works, over time we’ll develop a fair set of penalty events, I’ve got rough plans for an additional rules system, but I’ve got to bed the track down first.

Finished off a great week with a little Dirchie Kart work, only one more character to go!