By Director Mr. Sakurai, Kirby Air Riders: Development Insights — Part 3 – News

Join Kirby™ Air Riders director Masahiro Sakurai as he shares insights into the development and details behind some of the game’s modes and features.

While it would be reasonable to limit the number of playable characters who can use Copy Abilities to just Kirby, it would feel like a bit of a letdown for nothing to have changed in the over 20 years since the original game. I think it’s important to have distinct racing and aiming styles, so allowing players to choose their own Riders was always going to be a necessary change.

It may feel like there are comparatively more enemy characters to choose from, but that’s because, in the Kirby universe, it’s easier to create Riders out of enemy characters.

Because of the Copy Ability mechanics, Kirby’s enemies all have their own special skills. Some are super heavy, and others can fly in the sky, or fire lasers. Waddle Dee’s lack of abilities is actually part of his charm.

And those skills can be understood by looking at each enemy character’s design. You can easily tell at a glance, even from a distance, what that character’s skill is and what effect it might have.

So that’s why there are a lot of playable enemy characters. That said, it’s not enough to only have enemy characters as many people want to see major characters, so we added a few of those in as well.

I also decided it would be best not to go overboard with adding in too many original characters. For the Riders, there’s only really Noir Dedede.

An incredible amount of work went into the animations. There’s the actual riding animation for each character of course, but there’s also the idle animation, walking, jumping, when they get hit, when they look back, when they show off, etc. Those all had to be created as well.

Just having the Riders dismount and walk around exponentially increased the amount of things we needed to consider.

But it was something we had to do if we wanted to add more Riders. We couldn’t say “You’re not allowed to dismount in City Trial this time too!”

The form of each Rider varies a lot as well. Not just their shape, but even their number of limbs and body proportions differ. In other words, it’s tough compared to games with mostly humanoid forms, since we can’t just reuse the animations.

But one of the joys of this game is seeing the characters react correctly to your inputs and movements, so we had to tackle it head on.

More than anything, I’m glad we were able to show these off in the Paddock.

I think players that fall in love with this game will play it for a long time, just like they did with the previous title. Knowing that this game could be played that way is one of the things that kept me going during development.

Even if they aren’t playing every day, they might play when guests come over. My efforts would have been worth it as long as people can enjoy the game for a long time, and that kept me motivated.

We hadn’t yet finalized how many machine types would be in the game during the initial design phase, but we did end up utilizing a number of our ideas.

Note: Vampire Star, Chariot, and Transform Star. Caterpillar Star later became Tank Star.

I did suggest Runner as well. I thought it could be interesting to have, but it was going to be too much trouble to create, so we scrapped it.

In the design document, we presented an initial concept while iterating on overall balance before finalizing it. How much we can create depends on the composition and scale of the team, so it’s best not to finalize everything in the document right away.

Looking at the final lineup of machines, I thought there were a few too many bulky ones.

From a balance perspective, given the advantages of flying and the limitations on the ground, we made flying machines discernibly weaker.

But flying machines are more fun because they offer greater freedom of movement. Land machines can only creep along the ground, whereas flying machines can retrieve items from various places and have advantages during field events in City Trial. As a result of our tweaks, I don’t think that players currently feel that significant difference anymore.

Neither flying nor driving should be overly dominant. In the process of bringing the two into proper balance, we of course changed a lot of elements from the previous game.

Before starting development on this project, I created a high-poly model of the Wheelie Bike to see how much detail I could achieve when treating it as an actual motorcycle. I created a realistic model with leather seats, textured grips, and a weightiness to the metal. I then placed it in a park setting with outdoor lighting, viewable from all angles. Prototype models like this served as our visual direction to a certain extent.

I’ll be honest, I really do think it’s quite fun and exhilarating to skillfully maneuver a machine that could actually exist in real life, whether it moves the way you expect it to or not.

I really do love driving, myself. I’m totally enamored with the experience, taking in the passing scenery and feeling the surface of the road. The trend in recent years has been to move away from cars and the like, so I did wonder at times whether it made sense to create a game where machines are the heart and soul, where they play the starring role. I do hope that I was able to convey the joy of driving and operating various vehicles well enough to the younger generations.

I felt as though we needed more purely movement-type Copy Abilities. Drill, Flash, even Steel Ball, they’re all movement types, right?

Among the newly added Copy Abilities, there are standard attack types like Cutter, which traditionally Kirby has had plenty of. But considering the game’s rules, I felt as though we needed more movement types than just the Wheel ability.

We didn’t include Wing, which appeared in the previous game, since making Wing animations for every single character would have been quite difficult. So we added Jet instead.

You might think that we had to do animations for every character for Drill as well, but for that, we didn’t have to do anything once they were in the ground, only for when they jumped out.

We have to take all kinds of things into consideration when making these kinds of production decisions.