During my down time I’ve been cracking on with XNA and am developing “Avatar Kart” – essentially Super Mario Kart on the SNES with Xbox avatars (we have to wait until XNA Game Studio 3.1 this summer for avatar support). In a couple of days I’ve managed to finish:

• CPU Car AI
• Physics and wall collisions
• Terrain effects
• Lap counts and car rankings
• Split screen

The track is still from SMK and the cars are empty but it does the job. Although its in 3D, I’m trying to get a 2D mode7 type handling feeling, really tight controls and simple graphics. I’ve already hit the performance wall of floating point operations in the compact framework on the Xbox so will need to spend some time optimising later. I will be replacing the Mario Kart track with my own design soon.

Below is a video of how its looking so far: