Oh no! Another Mariokart clone!

"Notice how mean Mario looks compared to Bruno the parrot?"

 Hi everybody!

It's been a while since my last blogpost, but I'm back again to tell you why o why we made another kart game and dared to put it on Facebook.

To understand this better, you need to know why we made the prequel, Go Kart Go! Turbo! in 2009. The answer is obvious: we are big mario kart fans and we thought that making one ourselves would be loads of fun. And pretty do-able. And within the small budget we had at the time (we made the game as a showcase for Adobe). And we were right!!! ;). Can you imagine that after all the times we've tested and played the game we still enjoy playing it in splitscreen mode?

"Xform karting games throughout the years..."

"If the game was so good, why not leave it at that and NOT create a sequel?". It was certainly tempting not to do it. But we couldn't resist: there were just too much 'nearly done' art assets and a couple of weapon and gameplay ideas that didn't make it into the original. Furthermore, the original game was kind of a success, we really would enjoy working on it and we would probably not lose too much money doing it. So, earlier this year we were very proud to announce Go Kart Go! Nitro! (which was initially planned to be released as the offical 'game of the movie' New Kids Nitro)

"Oldschool 4:3 640*480 versus Ultracrisp 16:9 800*450 ;)"

As you might know, we primarily deploy our games on game portals such as Shockwave.com, Miniclip.com and Agame.com.  The same goes for GKGN, it's already been released on several portals worldwide. But sometimes we also do advergames, and it happens to be that some time ago we created a cool face-controlled karting game for Red Bull, which had all sorts of Facebook technology built in.
At the end of that project we thought: wouldn't it be cool if Nitro was on Facebook?!? Luckily our friends at Adobe also thought that this might be a good idea to broaden the target audience for their Shockwave plugin so we partnered up to port the game. Happiness +100!

For us, it's a great way to gain experience in deploying games on Facebook (the hell of certificates, privacy stuff and cloud hosting!) and to find out if Facebook users are the kind of people who would enjoy the type of games we make (shooting stuff <> feeding farm animals).
Unfortunately, the budget wouldn't allow for any of the cool stuff (i.e. multiplayer!) or lucrative stuff (i.e. in-game purchases). But maybe it's better to just take it one step at a time.

We'll let you all know how it all went. But for now:

Please everybody, please, go play the game. Like it (or don't!) but share it with all your friends! We'll probably start spamming you with all sorts of stuff the coming days so click on every red monkey butt that you see!

"Monkey Diederik says: go play!"