Hi Fruit Racers,
As you know last Thursday we announced the 4th of September as our early access go live date. The response so far has been great but it has already thrown up lots of questions that we can reply to already.
FPS
Some concerns were raised that in the trailer the frame rate appeared to drop in multiscreen, the trailer was created from a version of the game from a couple of months ago and was already stable. Having said that we have improved the fps even further during the last two months and will continue to do so throughout the early access. We are happy with where we are but are striving to improve further.
GAMEPLAY
A kart racing game lives or dies with its gameplay, our aim is for the game to be easy to play but hard to master indeed it’s our mantra. We added a strategic element with the powerups to ensure player engagement, let us explain more.
Each kart has a juicer on the back and each juicer contains 4 tanks. Fill each tank by collecting the relevant fruit along the track. Once 1 tank is full you can use a special move however if wait until 2 tanks are full then the special move will be more powerful and even more so with 3 full tanks. Now wait until all 4 tanks are full and you can use your mega-juice move, each character has a unique special mega-juice move you will need to try them all to find your favourite.
CHARACTERS
We read several comments about the fact that All-Star Fruit Racing has an all-female cast some positive and some less so. We wanted to leave just a little bit more of suspense but... 😊 The cast is male and female although the majority are female. We sketched dozens of characters and simply chose the ones we liked the most of which are of the gentler sex. p.s. we discarded the characters that we thought were too sexy as it was not the feel we were looking for.
FRUIT
Fruit why fruit? This is our first game so obviously we don’t have a catalogue of characters to pull from so we needed something else that everyone could identify with. Fruit ticked all the right boxes as everyone recognises fruit and almost everyone thinks of fruit with a degree of affection. Most importantly a fruit theme gave our artists incredible flexibility and really go their “Fruit juices” flowing (sorry couldn’t resist). Join our early access and you can see if you can spot the several tributes to our favourite movies.
But there's more to it....
INSPIRATION
Lots of comments regarding Mario / CTR / Sonic and the Sugar Rush game in the film Wreck It Ralph, we love all of these games and films and we played and watched them constantly during our design period so yes of course they had an influence but it was only a starting point. We really hope to have brought a new dimension to kart racing for sure it’s the first true next gen kart racer and nothing previous has had the cool fresh look of fruit or the not so hidden tributes mentioned earlier.
Keep your questions and comments coming and remember All-Star Fruit Racing available 4th September in Early Access.