Haahaha that bear drifting so !! Love the art style! Great work keep it up!
Thanks guys 
New update on the hub world. Let me know what you think.
I really love your art style. The new track and the rivers looks very good.
How is the performance? 4.7 might be a good update for the project for the performance of your grass instances.
I still prefer your old bear over the newer one. It had the essence of a real bear, a little bit mean and grumpy, way too big and fat for a small cart. It was pretty ridiculous and that was great. Your new one looks more artsy, friendly, and more like a bear kid.
All in all, your game looks fun.
You need to release this as a mobile game! Great style and looks like great fun!
Still love the looks of the game, but I’m personally not a huge fan of the blocky clouds, especially since the overall style isn’t completely blocky (like the river foam). I would personally go with very stylized look, but more round or cartoony like Wind Waker.
@LAn: I will check it out, I am still on 4.4 
I liked the old bear as well but this one just fits into the art style so much more. There are going to be a few bears though so a bigger one will make it back in!
@DustyKhan: It would never run on mobile The original one was on OUYA but I really want to do it for PS4.
@Pikkukatit: Had a few comments on the clouds so I will have another bash at them when I get a chance, thanks for the feedback!
Here is an Ice shader I have started working on for the Arctic themed levels. Let me know what you think
Oh I love that shader, do you mind sharing a bit more details about the material setup?
Being from Finland where the weather is crazy freezing right now I’d say that the color is a bit turqoise for my taste, I would test a bit whiter/cooler color just to check how it looks, but off course it all depends on what kind of a color scheme you’re doing for the level etc.
Did you need anything special to develop it for the PS4?
the artstyle is delicious! Keep it up
@Pikkukatit: I will post up the shader graph later 
glad you like it. Thanks for the crit, thats the colour scheme i’m going for so hopefully it will look right in the finished levels.
@Neurot1c: There was some stuff that I needed to go through but luckily I had a lot of help from Epic! The hard bit was waiting for all the aproval stuff. It took nearly 4 months to get approved and stuff. Wish I could talk about it more, need to double check the NDA’s first 
@{}: Thanks!
Started work on the snow shader as well.
I figured it would come under a NDA. It’s cool! I was just curious to know if you needed an actual developer kit. I’d heard rumours you didn’t.
That snow shader looks amazing!
Looks really cool and reminds me of mario kart =D , will you be adding different bear drivers for people to choose from?
Your first bear revision looks more like a beaver but your second looks like a bear, so Id say go with the second one.
Would be cool if later on in development you could add taunts and maybe a mode called create-a-bear where you can create your own custom bear driver using recolor options and maybe even clothing and hair, would be funny to make a bear with a top hat or with a Afro. You could unlock new hair styles, clothing or other body decal options the more you play.
Just my 2 cents, have a great day and keep up the good work.
Your visual development style is very nice. Those mushrooms look awfully high-res, though. If you want the spots to look like they’re bumping off the mushroom, baking down a normal map might be more appropriate than actually modeling all that stuff out. It would be nice if the particles don’t immediately turn off when you leave an area, but fade out. There are many ways to do this: the easiest is to make a new sprite emitter system within the same particle that fades over time. This way you get the benefit of a ton of dying particles for fast VFX and some fade as well. Also, UE4 has EXTREMELY efficient GPU particles. You can render like tens of thousands of sparks a second, and have them collide with the ground, work with gravity, have realistic drag, etc. You can even let a few of them emit light (not GPU particles, but a few CPU ones wouldn’t hurt). For the snow level, you don’t even need fog, you can just render hundreds of thousands of snow particles and let them pile up if you want them to But seriously, you don’t have to go that far. Some simple GPU snow particles that stop moving upon collision and slowly fade away (get smaller) would be a great way to add depth and function to the effects in your environment. Make a max collision of at least 2, and set the bounce values very low: this way your kart wouldn’t hit a snow particle and leave it suspended in mid-air. Because GPU particles are so efficient, you can have hordes of them colliding basically as many times as you want, so, definitely use it to your advantage. It would also be nice to have grass wind in the final product. You can use a simple grass wind function in the material for vertex displacement, or you can make your own using sine waves. A quick and easy way to use weights is to either paint them on or use a masked texture coordinate to render a gradient, so the bottom of the UVs on the grass are tied down to the floor while the rest of it flows in the wind. Not really, but the effect is convincing. Put this on the trees too, to give them a little bit of life. 
Your square rocks have a very uniform size and scale. On one hand it helps to separate rocky walls from the surface you want people to drive on, but then again value and color will do that better than anything else, and at the moment your rock mountains look monotonous and visually tiring. Break it up with different shapes and sizes of rocks. Take a look at Wario’s Gold Mine, especially the Mario Kart 8 update for reference.
The mist effects on the waterfall are very solid. This would be a nice area to have some additive translucency, and let the mist fade over time. You don’t need a lot of mist at every section of the waterfall either: a little at the top and more towards the bottom will sell the idea that water’s breaking better than if everything is uniform. If you want a transparent water shader, keep doing what you’re doing, it’s looking great! But if you want reflections, you’ll have to either set up a scene capture with a 2D render target, or you’ll have to get rid of the translucency and take advantage of SSR and physically based materials (water is metallic, btw). One last word of advice: use UE 4.7. It has much more efficient instancing than 4.6, and with racing games I’m sure you’re finding how wonderful instancing can be. This will just run things a lot smoother than the current engine. Create a copy and migrate your project early. Like, right now, to ensure compatibility and take advantage of it. Otherwise, you’ll be seriously limited by how many meshes you can instance at once. I hope all this was helpful to you somehow. I made a racing game in college… while also trying to figure out how to use the engine for the first time. UE4 is much easier than UE3, though. Good luck!
Wow thanks for the mountain of feedback!
A lot of this is already implemented in the game. The mushrooms are actually fairly low res for next gen but they are also loded so they only load that when you are close enough.
I do need to fix the particles just popping out, I have added it to my list
The grass already has wind applied to it using both sine waves, panning textures and wind. I really need to do a new video to show it all off
I need to do more rock variations, added to the list.
I am not a fan of UE4 translucency on meshes, It sorts really badly so I try to avoid it where possible.
I will upgrade to 4.7 asap. Just need to check its compatible with the PS4.
Thanks again for all the feedback
What I’m concerned is, those polygonal details are so small they don’t really matter, and your polygon budget would be better spent elsewhere. If you can combine the mushroom into one material, that’s one less draw call per-mushroom that you’re ultimately saving, which is great. But UE 4.7 seems to handle instancing fantastically, so, I guess this wouldn’t be a problem :S If you set LODs properly, I guess it won’t be that big of a deal.
It would be nice to see a video of just the grass/foliage wind. A little bit of it can really breathe life into a project like this.
Translucency sorting is not as much of a concern if you’re making a puddle of water or particle effects. Now that I think about it, opaque water would look very thick, and that’s not the style you’re going for.
There is a preview version available right now, or you can wait like a week or two and get the final build.
I wouldn’t worry about the mushrooms. They are as big as the bear so the detail is visible, also they are already one material. Translucency has been a massive pain with particles, especially when I am spawning meshes, which most of my particles are. They shouldn’t be as much of a problem on the butterflys and bees though so I will implement that to get the fade. I will post up a video soon!
Hmm… I’ll see if I can test out a nice water misting effect for you. Keeping everything solid might not be the best route for your style, though: it’s a limitation. I wouldn’t fade effects like bees and butterflies, I’d just burst them and give them an infinite lifespan. That way they come into view immediately and don’t leave all of a sudden for no reason. But water effects, dust particles, and the like should definitely have some fade out.
Wow! If those are all 3D meshes, that might create a serious issue with draw calls. Unless that’s not a problem anymore… in which case, you’re doing great! I wish I could show you a system I made, but I just spent the last two hours trying to figure out how to get dumpmovie to work properly. I’m using GPU collisions, and for some reason they don’t work with Matinee’s movie recording 
this looks great xD loving the art style!
I think the hidden paths need to be lit up a bit? You could put some cool lanterns or something in the cave and hollow tree trunk