Just the beginning

Hey everyone!

My name's David, and I'm working on a multiplayer party game called DracoDrift. For those familiar, DracoDrift is a follow up, spiritual successor, next iteration, or whatever have you of the game Kirby Air Ride (KAR for short), originally releasing in 2003 for the Gamecube.

I grew up loving KAR, playing a ton with my friends on local couch coop, especially the City Trial mode. In that mode, each player controls a kirby, and your goal is to power up your star (the vehicle you ride) as much as possible in a few minutes before time runs out and you're plopped into a final minigame, where you and the other players face off to win either a race, battle royale, long jump, etc. If you haven't seen it before, I recommend looking it up. Back in 2003, the "city" you got to explore during city trial was amazing, full of secret passageways and wacky events; there was nothing else like it.

It's a super simple but addicting formula for a party game, and I miss it deeply! I'm a firm believer that one of the best spaces indie developers inhabit is the "spiritual successor" space. We take concepts that are great from the past but may not be top of the list for big AAA gaming companies to put resources into, and we make them our own for all the other fans out there. KAR still exists of course, but not with online multiplayer, so us fans are currently stuck. Enter DracoDrift.

Dragons....er, Dracos?

That's right! In DracoDrift, you control a freshly hatched draco, and your goal is similarly to grow that draco as much as possible by letting it each powerups before time runs out and you have to compete. The idea was born as a cross between City  Trial from KAR and the Chao Garden from the Sonic series. I love the idea of training up a small creature into a formidable force.

Each time you start a DracoDrift game, you're given a random egg which hatches into a baby draco with random starting stats/abilities. As you progress through the trial, each powerup alters your draco's various stats and therefore it's appearance!

This looks awesome! What's the timeline?

Thanks! The project is super early, like only 2 months old! I technically started working on it in April 2023, but as a newbie to netcode at the time I couldn't get much to work. This time, however, I'm using all new tech and am confident I can proceed to finish the full game while supporting solid 1-8 player online matches.

Stay tuned

This will be my one and only dev log for the game, so if you're interested in the project, make sure to subscribe here! DracoDrift.com will redirect here during development, but will probably turn into a marketing page after launch.

For all of you supporting, thank you so much for your time and interest. I hope to make you proud with what I make. Cheers!

- David