By Director Mr. Sakurai, Kirby Air Riders: Development Insights — Part 5 – News

Join Kirby Air Riders director Masahiro Sakurai as he shares insights into the development and details behind some of the game’s modes and features.

(Note: Something like “we’ve been envisioning features of the final product from this early stage” will do.)

I’m not someone who needs to adjust visual settings in games, but addressing issues others might have is something I wanted to pursue. Because the game includes many visual effects, our first priority was to ensure that the screen remained fixed. But this sort of thing really requires input from those who actually experience issues, so we asked testers to support by reviewing designs that were likely to cause issues. We then had them carefully pick out patterns that they felt were particularly effective.

It would be terrible if someone found the game interesting, but couldn’t play it due to the fast-paced gameplay. At the same time, we don’t want to diminish any of the game’s charm, for example, by dropping the game’s speed, or changing the camera angle to be less exciting. One of the things that makes City Trial so much fun in particular is being able to test out the machines you’ve built and push them to their limits. So it has to have impact, no matter how unrealistic.

But, some players may experience issues regardless of how many measures we put in place.

Still, personally, I don’t want to see anyone left out…

We considered providing ways to adjust the visuals to be something worth prioritizing. It does help quite a few people. So, we hope players will make whatever adjustments they need.

I believe that it’s important to be able to express your true self when playing online. That’s why we’ve made it so that players can freely customize their License and My Machine and show them off to others.

The Machine Market was created as an exhibition space, and we even alluded to marketplace price fluctuations in the initial planning stage.

We wanted to cater to players who enjoyed decorating with headwear as well, and we knew that Kirby’s headwear added to the character’s appeal.

Initially, we considered limiting them to Kirby and characters with similar body types. Usually, that would be about as much as we could do.

But in the end, all characters are able to wear headwear. That’s all thanks to the staff who worked hard to pull it off.

We always try to keep the perspective of the players in mind.

But when it comes to the actual development, that can add a whole lot of time and labor.

I want to implement things because I understand the reasons behind the players’ desires. But it would be utterly impossible to grant every request. So we have to decide what should be implemented with that balance in mind. There will be players who think customization is pointless, but I definitely don’t feel like our efforts were in vain at all.

We actually had Gummies as early as the planning stage.

Gummies are a visual representation of how many victories a player has achieved. Some might call it “candy-coated incentivization.” As you go up in position, you receive a gummy for every player below you.

If you win lots of times, those victories are usually just recorded as a number. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to make it something with a more tangible sense of achievement.

I had thought about having a big pile of the machines of defeated opponents in some form, but making them into Gummies had nothing but upsides. We could simplify the designs, choose the colors freely, Kirby pairs well with food thematically, and I felt like the tactile feel would make a good impression too.

Originally, we planned for it to be an online-only feature, but making it completely unobtainable offline would feel too isolating. We had to keep in mind the online aspect as well, but we needed offline play to be just as fulfilling, so in the end we included it as an offline feature as well.

As a result, the Gummies concept itself changed a little.

Even though the number of Gummies you receive was supposed to be equivalent to your number of wins, adding offline elements turned them into simple collectibles.

It’s possible to rack up victories quite easily when playing offline by fiddling with the settings, which negates the idea of Gummies being a visualization of your victories, right? But we’ve kept countermeasures to a minimum and are taking a fairly relaxed approach to it. As long as the players are having fun, that’s good enough.