Hello!
Long-time, no see. I feel suddenly responsible to give DollKart's current and future playerbase some closure, also providing some dev retrospectives. So here goes.
About DollKart
DollKart was always a student project and more of a tech demo of procedural generation and physics prowess than anything. We threw it up on Steam because well, it was fun. It lacked polish, looked and to this day looks rudimentary, was perhaps hard to the point many thought it wasn't intended but instead was a manifestation of incompetence. Despite the plentiful negative responses, it was overall received positively and we had a lot of feedback, and a couple of updates later the game became something I can look back on a year later and smile at, with improvements on everything from polish to physics to the core gameplay loop. We still play 2P mode with friends as a drinking game.
The multiplayer broke again. I don't know what made it ever tick because it seems to break on its own a certain while after every update. In retrospective springing for multiplayer as a feature was a mistake because that dev time could have been used to have a better launch since even when it decided to work, we never had enough players for the multiplayer to matter anyway. I guess it's live and learn.
As my last future plans update made clear, DollKart was already basically slowly but surely headed in the direction of the projects I toss aside to focus on newer ones. It has been a while since it hit that pile. Besides this, due to a lot of boring reasons, the Unity project files for DK cannot be recovered in a working state. As much as I am a nerd for memories and preservation, I can't even save DollKart's files, let alone work to develop it any further. So this post marks the official end-of-life for DollKart.
DollKart 2?
This is sort of tongue in cheek of course, but my latest release was a redux and PC port of my first ever game and it turned out amazingly, I can't say I never consider a second DollKart with a ton more polish, more forgiving gameplay, more content, actual AI etcetera. I love driving and racing games and have tons of prototypes on my HDD that don't involve karts or dolls. I'm simply looking to move forward and not just stick to the same ideas over and over again, it's not like there is a big group of people demanding DollKart 2, but that doesn't mean we won't make other racers and/or eventually return to the idea of ragdoll-survival-kart-racing