Yeah MTs like Mario Kart. Diddy Kong Racing does not have them.
Crash Team Racing does.
The best kart racers always have their own speed mechanics that they benefit from. The feel of the game as it is now might lend to a more Rally car feel to the karts maybe? More turning and micro adjustments. Getting a good turn to accelerate faster than a rival would be important if you did not have MTs boosting you to max normal speed automatically.
The packed nature of the game feels really good.
I like the tracks so far. How did you balance the multiple choice routes?
Some jump over a gap sections might be fun.
Also the rolling bomb/mine thing is kind of cheap lol. No way to tell someone has that.
Yeah, i will try to come up with something for the MTs mechanic that distances a little from Mario Kart, i think it may be what the game needs to be more balanced.
The routes are a simple coin toss, the AI chooses from one of the paths at the beginning of each lap, i tried to make each path the same lenght (just eyeballing). I think maybe i could experiment with more items on one path and more zyppers on another to see how it goes. I figured out how to make the AI jump and had a track that already did that but the track itself did not grew on me. I am planning kind of an over the top track (maybe at a Space Station) that has maybe one or two jumps :D.
I already noticed the bomb problem and had some ideas to fix it but did not implement it yet. I thought mainly about creating an animation or visible delay for it so that the driver behind had some time to react, what do you think?