The Making Of Matica Karts - Finishing Up.

Original Matica Kart & Driver Model

Watching the Karts learn to drive by themselves was fasinating. We looked at our original concept model, and proudly watched the realisation of the game on screen as the newly evovled Karts battled it out together.

This game was turning out so similar to how we had imagined. All that remained was window dressing. Adding to the tracks, high scores, a front end to select Kart and Track, and a lap counter etc.

We had to reduce the complexity of the track graphics because too much detail caused the game to run slowly. We had a 2 year old Sony Vaio laptop and we wanted the game to run well on that machine.

Our work computers were very high spec, so we had to test the game frequently on the laptop and were forced to reduce the complexity of the game for performance reasons.

We liked the game so much we considered making a downloadable version with some bells and whistles we couldn't put on the Flash Web Browser version.

This version could have some of the features and details we had to leave out due to performance issues. So the web version would contain only the first 2 tracks.

After spending months making the game we couldn't recoup our costs by licensing it out as the web version only had the 2 tracks.

We hoped we could recoup some costs by selling the download version. Our aim is to provide all our games free for anyone to play, but thought it was fair to charge for download versions to support the development of new games.

We wanted to set a fair price and so asked our matica.com visitors what price they thought was fair. Our visitors were more than generous with their suggestions, we were so touched by their suggested prices we felt we had to try even harder not to charge for this game.

Our solution was to start development on 'Matica Karts 2', (which we will be released for free to play at Matica.com) and not to sell the download version of Matica Karts.

These games can take months to create (there are only two of us), so sometime in the future we may have to sell download versions but for the moment we are please to be able to offer them for free. 'Matica Karts 2' is planned for release in early 2009.

Thanks for reading, Alex & Clare