The team has made the decision to turn away from the concept of racers attempting to finish last, and will instead focus on designing a kart racer where the objective is to win. The game still retains elements of unexpected opposites, in particular that hitting walls will boost the player forward. During development this element has been found to be particularly enjoyable, and emphasising it will benefit the gameplay greatly. When a player does not hit a wall for a period of time, their snail will slow dramatically. This ‘decay’ element was already a part of the game, but will be rebalanced and heightened to balance for the new objective.

The game also retains its focus on players controlling chaos. Bouncing off walls can easily force a player to make a bad move, potentially even accidentally turning backwards, and so players will need to maintain both control and speed using wall bounces.

A number of factors contributed to the team reaching this decision, some of which were foreseen as hurdles and others which were encountered during development. More than anything else, we simply found that attempting to retain minimum speed wasn’t fun. It grew monotonous, didn’t have a good feeling of flow or movement which is crucial to a good feeling racer, and the slow speeds made even small and basic tracks feel overly long.

Discussions were had about increasing the default and minimum speed of racers, though this brought the problem of decreasing the contrast between racers at the start and end of the race. When you were already going fast at the beginning, there wasn’t much to gain throughout each lap.

Other issues included problems with preventing players from using unfun exploits to win, like continuously weaving side to side, turning backwards entirely, and getting into loops where players would hit a wall head-on and bounce off one then the other continuously.

The team intended to alleviate these problems by implementing a time limit - once the first player had finished the race, all other players would need to finish in a set amount of time to qualify. In the end the team convened and agreed we were attempting to patch over fundamental flaws, and that the most important factor of fun was being lost.

Specific abilities will be repurposed. While previously power ups involving shells and slime made snails go faster, they will now make the player go slower. Changes to the brake bar are still being discussed, with a boost bar seeming redundant when players can hit walls for a boost.

While the team recognises there are risks in making such a fundamental change relatively late in development, we’re confident this decision benefits the game greatly.