Preview - DKR Walrus Cove in Mario Kart 8
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Here's a preview of what will be my first custom track for Mario Kart 8, a remake of Walrus Cove from Diddy Kong Racing! I picked Walrus Cove because I wanted to make a track that incorporated gliders, underwater, and anti-gravity for my first MK8 course, and I had the week off from work so I didn't want to take the time to plan out my own layout. I settled on Walrus Cove because I felt I could easily update the ending section to incorporate gliding and underwater sections.
This isn't yet complete as there's a number of mostly minor issues. Some are obvious like object placement, but here's a few notes on some of the biggest ones.
- The camera isn't great during the loop: honestly, this is the most glaring flaw of the track right now IMO, and unfortunately, it's probably the one I'm least likely to fix. I liked how the loop played when I was testing the layout and figured I'd use other means to adjust the camera, but it became clear too late that the only real solution the issue would be to reprofile the loop entirely. Maybe someday off in the future I'll reprofile it, but not for the first release.
- Water and pad animations don't play correctly. I used the presets in Track Studio, but they didn't seem to work properly or resized the water texture and I'm not yet familiar with its animation tools.
- The track is too dark: I intend for the track to be at night and it probably won't get too much brighter, but I really want the lights along the way to be brighter so I'll need to remap the shadow and light maps to fix that and some other issues.
- Item paths aren't great: as I demonstrate accidentally when my finger slipped in lap 3 and threw the shell I was dragging as a red shell was coming only for it to explode on its own, right now item paths don't work super great and red shells can easily slam into walls.
- It's untested on console: I've yet to test this out in a Wii U (yes, sadly no Deluxe port. I know, I prefer Deluxe too, but I don't want to risk doing anything to my Switch that might get it banned even with reassurances that some ripping tools won't cause issues)
- Need to fix the map/music/UI. I know how to fix a couple of these. The map actually should be updated already and I honestly don't know why it's still loading Mario Kart Stadium's map.
Anyways, I hope to have this done sometime this week, but it could easily slip into the week after. Overall, I'm not sure how many MK8 tracks I'll make due to how much more work it takes for a relatively simple course such as this to make it even close to the vanilla game's tracks, but I'm glad to be working in a game I love, and the new track studio makes it in many ways easier than even Mario Kart Wii tracks to get up and running with enemies, objects, and cameras.
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