Gummies in Kirby Air Riders were in the early planning stage, initially was an online-only feature

Kirby Air Riders director Masahiro Sakurai has shared more insight into the game, this time sharing interesting information about the development of the Gummies feature. A new blog post just went up on Nintendo’s website with the details.

As it turns out, this was something that was in the early planning stage. Sakurai also revealed that initially, this was planned to be an online-only feature. However, “making it completely unobtainable offline would feel too isolating” and the team “needed offline play to be just as fulfilling.”

Sakurai shared the following:

We actually had Gummies as early as the planning stage.

Gummies are a visual representation of how many victories a player has achieved. Some might call it “candy-coated incentivization.” As you go up in position, you receive a gummy for every player below you.

If you win lots of times, those victories are usually just recorded as a number. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to make it something with a more tangible sense of achievement.

I had thought about having a big pile of the machines of defeated opponents in some form, but making them into Gummies had nothing but upsides. We could simplify the designs, choose the colors freely, Kirby pairs well with food thematically, and I felt like the tactile feel would make a good impression too.

Originally, we planned for it to be an online-only feature, but making it completely unobtainable offline would feel too isolating. We had to keep in mind the online aspect as well, but we needed offline play to be just as fulfilling, so in the end we included it as an offline feature as well.

As a result, the Gummies concept itself changed a little.

Even though the number of Gummies you receive was supposed to be equivalent to your number of wins, adding offline elements turned them into simple collectibles.

It’s possible to rack up victories quite easily when playing offline by fiddling with the settings, which negates the idea of Gummies being a visualization of your victories, right? But we’ve kept countermeasures to a minimum and are taking a fairly relaxed approach to it. As long as the players are having fun, that’s good enough.

Sakurai has also talked about how the game’s Road Trip mode came to be. He also touched on why Kirby Air Riders’ roster has many enemy characters and why the old City Trial map wasn’t brought back. He also revealed that he wrote the main theme song lyrics and explained why he previously kept that information under wraps.