Nightmare Kart has an interesting story. It was originally known as Bloodborne Kart, a fan-made game based on the popular meme and franchise. However, Sony intervened and the Bloodborne branding had to be removed, leading to the creation of Nightmare Kart. This game, which will be legally distinct and removed of all Bloodborne branding, releases for free on Steam and Itchio on May 31. Two months into the rebrand, with one month or so to go before launch, Game Rant sat down with developer Lilith Walther to speak about the creation of this game, the rebranding process, and the incredible work she’s done in making Nightmare Kart its own thing.
Of course, Walther isn’t alone. Her small team has gone to incredible lengths to aid her; Evelyn Lark, the composer, has had to create a brand new OST within 3 months. Mino has done all the box arts for Walther’s Bloodborne fan games, and he’s had to create the box art for Nightmare Kart. All of this in the span of a few months, reasonably explaining Nightmare Kart’s early 2024 delay to May, but it sounds like the team is on track for its May 31 release date. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Creation of Nightmare Kart
Q: I was hoping to start at the beginning. How did Nightmare Kart get its start?
A: It started out as a Bloodborne fan game because Bloodborne Kart was like a meme within the community. It was made as a fake leak to demonstrate how easy it was to fake a leak because, you know, Bloodborne gets fake leaks every three months to this day. Someone made a fake leak for Bloodborne Kart to prove how easy it was to do that. The concept was hilarious, so it just became a little in-joke in the community. People would make art and fake screenshots because the leak had fake screenshots, right? It just encouraged everyone to do it, so of course, you take that to the logical conclusion, which is to actually make it real.
That was how I started. I made it as an April Fool’s Joke. It was a really simple halfway fake, think like those E3 trailers where it’s technically gameplay, but it’s not actually real. I made it in two days, and that got more traffic than anything else I ever made. I was like, “Okay, I see.”
It eventually got Sony’s attention, they reached out, and they were like stop. They did specifically say I could still release it if I removed the Bloodborne branding from it, so that’s how Nightmare Kart was born.
Q: Were there any specific Kart Racing games you looked to when creating Nightmare Kart?
A: Yes, absolutely. Mario Kart 64 was my chief inspiration. That was the one that I grew up with. In early production, I did check out a lot of the classics like Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing. Nightmare Kart gets a lot of comparisons to Twisted Metal, but I haven’t really played that game. I think it was more just coincidentally similar because of the extreme violence and car combat aspects.
I didn’t think Twisted Metal when looking at it, but I can definitely see why people are making those comparisons.
I did too after people started mentioning it. I did check it out briefly, and I was like, “Yeah, I can see how people would think that.”
Q: Could you talk a little bit about the game modes such as the VS. Battle Mode and the multiplayer in general?
A: Yeah, so there is traditional racing, but there is also Battle Mode which is actually inspired by Halo. It’s team-based or free-for-all, with a bunch of racers locked in an arena. I think Mario Kart had a Versus Mode. It’s called Balloon Fight, I think. You just dump a bunch of racers in an arena, you drive around and pick up power-ups, and knock each other out. That’s how you score.
There’s a bunch of different game types, right? There’s a capture-the-flag type, there’s an infection type, and there is just a Team Slayer type, if you want to use Halo terminology. There is also Oddball, where there’s like a ball and you hold it to generate points for your team. I think that’s all of them, but it’s a very different experience from the racing.
There are also boss fights in the campaign mode, which is a pretty standard campaign mode. It’s just do some races, do some battles, with some very, very simple cutscenes between them all to try and string a story together—it’s a very simple story. I did want to put in boss fights because, as this was originally a Bloodborne fan game, boss fights are the entire central pillar of Souls games. I wanted to include that in this Kart Racer, so I put in a lot of effort. I think there is a total of 4 bosses in the game, maybe 3. It depends on how you classify a boss fight.
They’re multi-staged, and they’ve got a big health bar at the bottom. You’ve got to chase them, and then you’ll trap them in an arena. They all do a battle and maybe some gimmick will happen where they’ll transform into a big beast. Then you got to fight them and all that stuff. A lot of development was put into making sure the boss fights lived up to Souls expectations.
Q: You mention there are cutscenes and a few bosses. Is there an original story to Nightmare Kart?
A: Originally, the story was just an abridged version of Bloodborne with a bunch of bits skipped over because you were expected to know the Bloodborne story going into this, so it was more referential than an actual coherent story. Of course, that changed when I was told to remove the branding, so I have been writing a coherent story that is still close to Bloodborne, but there are a lot of changes. Everything, all the references to actual events, don’t happen because they were referencing the Bloodborne story, and now it’s actually referencing things in its own canon. I guess I’m creating that on the fly. It’s a very, very unique way to write a story. Well, I guess it is very common for video games to have stories written at the very end, I think Mirror’s Edge is an infamous example, but it is definitely a unique challenge for me.
I actually kind of enjoy it. The pressure is off because it’s a Kart Racer; you’re not really here for the story. I am having a good time writing everything and making sure everything connects and fits together. It isn’t going to blow anyone’s minds, but I think it would please people who would be along for the ride, so to speak, as they go through the campaign, take on bosses, and do stuff like that.
Making Nightmare Kart Its Own Thing
Q: Has this rebranding process at least been fun for you?
A: It’s been very fun. Honestly, I’m not going to say I’m glad it happened, but there have been a lot of positives. It’s been a lot more freeing. The play space, I guess you could say, has opened up to an indefinite degree. I love Bloodborne, I love making Bloodborne fan games, but of course, it is very limiting. I’m working in a world that I didn’t make. While I’ve been making these Bloodborne fan games, there have always been instances where I wish I could do this or I wish I could do that, but I can’t because Bloodborne doesn’t do that.
Now that the Bloodborne branding is gone, I can go forward with those ideas. I just have a wealth of really well-thought-out ideas that I could execute now. It’s been pretty great. It’s been just pure creation, I guess, because I can do whatever now that it’s mine.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about the racers in Nightmare Kart and how, in general, you approached their rebranded designs?
A: I want to say there are three tiers of rebrand.
The first tier is the palette swap, I guess you would say. I think the Micolash to Nicholas rebrand took me less than two hours. I just changed him from red to yellow. I changed his brain cage to a bird cage, and then as a little gimmick, I threw a bird in there because, well, it’s a bird cage. You should have a bird in there. I changed his hair to blonde, too, and that was Nicholas. That took me two hours.
Then there is the mid-tier, requiring slightly more effort. It could take a day or two for me to change the silhouette significantly. I think Lady Maria would classify as mid-tier. I gave her armor pieces and gauntlets, and I changed her hat. Changing hats has been very common; I’ve changed all the hats. That’s been really fun researching Victorian hats and coming up with new designs. It’s minor changes, she’s still in a coat with that side cape, but she’s had significantly more work put in.
The highest tier is the ground-up redesign: a completely new model, new concept art, and new texture. That was the Hunter; specifically, the redesigned Hunter was done from scratch.
Those are the three tiers, and the two-hour redesign is going to be most of them. I did want to put in extra effort for fan-favorite characters, and of course, the cover art/main character Hunter would also need a lot of extra effort put in. It was fun going through the roster and being like you need a super quick redesign, you need a little a more effort, and you need to be done from the ground up.
The most recent one I did was The Messengers. Originally, they were going to be simple skeletons because the Messengers are like shriveled-up old guys, but everyone misinterprets them as skeletons when they first play Bloodborne. I’ve noticed that on a lot of first playthroughs, so I was like, “Okay, let’s make them little skeletons.” I did that with the skeleton body, but I really wanted to mess with the silhouette. I change their head, then, to a giant eyeball because Bloodborne doesn’t really do that. There are a few things that Bloodborne seemingly deliberately chooses not to do, to make it less generic, like the werewolves are not called werewolves. They’re called Scourge Beasts, right? That’s an example.
There are a few design motifs that Bloodborne doesn’t do, like big creepy eyeballs. Another example is just the idea of a red rose as a motif. There are no roses in Bloodborne as a visual thing. You’d think there would be, but there aren’t. It just seems like a conscious decision, so I wanted to use those. There is a character who has a rose motif, and there’s an enemy that’s just a big eyeball. There are eyeballs that give you Frenzy in Bloodborne, but that’s it. I just wanted to lean into this more, to give this game a little more identity, because they have eyeballs and flesh blobs, but not just a big eyeball by itself. That’s pretty common when it comes to these Halloween monster tropes, which is kind of what Bloodborne is, at least at the start. That’s where I get a lot of my ideas for the enemy redesigns.
Nightmare Kart Boss Fights and More
That’s interesting. Mistress Marie, right? That’s the rose character? I would never have realized there’s not a single rose in Bloodborne.
A: Yeah, there might be an incidental rose somewhere, but it’s never a central motif anywhere. That’s what I was talking about earlier because I want to do that, but I couldn’t because Bloodborne doesn’t. With the branding gone, I can go all out. I can have a whole character whose gimmick is that they are into roses or whatever, so that was super fun.
Q: With Mistress Marie, does Nightmare Kart take a lot of inspiration from The Old Hunters DLC?
A: Yes. The Old Hunters was in Bloodborne Kart, so I had to work on rebranding that as well. I’m going to change the clock tower face and all that stuff, which I think will be fun. Here’s another thing: the clock tower doesn’t have any numbers or Roman numerals on it. It’s just empty holes where Roman numerals should be, so that’s just another thing it seems they did to make it less generic deliberately. I will probably be adding big Roman numerals to this.
Q: I know we touched on boss fights earlier, but how difficult do you think they are in comparison to Bloodborne or Soulslike games in general?
A: Oh yeah, they’re easier–it is a Kart Racer, right? I do want it to be Soulsy, as Soulsy as a Kart Racer can be, but at the end of the day, this is a Kart Racer and not a Soulslike game. There are design sensibilities I wanted to stick to. Not for the final boss, but all the other bosses have mid-boss checkpoints. You would never see that in a Souls games, but the boss fights for Nightmare Kart are very multi-tiered. It’s not you just hit each other until you die.
It’s you chase them through the streets, then you do a fight, and then they turn into a big beast. I felt like it was natural to put checkpoints there because you do the chase, you do the fight, and you die in the fight. It feels kind of bad to do the whole chase again. The exception is the final boss, you do have to deal with that all in one go.
That one is definitely up there in Souls boss difficulty. Maybe not like Final Souls boss, but definitely a difficult one. I watched some playtesters spend an hour grinding through it again, and that felt like getting super invested in a Souls boss, right?
Q: I also wanted to ask specifically about the rebranding process for things like Insight and Blood Echoes. What tier is that?
A: That kind of stuff is mostly just name changes, asset changes, and change the icon and sound effects. I think, right now, Blood Echoes are just called Blood Droplets. I haven’t figured out what to do for Insight, but I’ll come up with something. Change the icons, change the name, change the sound effects, and that’ll mostly just be it there.
Q: How far do you think, if you had to estimate, into the rebranding process are you?
A: We have a month and some change, a little over five weeks, until the release date. I say like 35-40% maybe. It’s difficult because, if I just listed out every asset, I would be at like 35%, but some assets take way more effort than others. I’m trying to get the more difficult ones out of the way first, so I feel like it’s starting slowly, and then it’s going to speed up exponentially as we get closer to release. But I think a very, very rough estimate would probably be like 40%.
Q: Is there any sort of award or special event that happens if someone collects enough of Insight’s replacement?
Yes, but not for Insight’s replacement. It’s the Umbilical Cords, which have been renamed Moon Shards. The final boss fight I was hinting at earlier is locked behind that, and Insight’s replacement does a play role in that. But, you know, I don’t want to spoil it.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about Nightmare Kart?
A: I want specifically to shout out the other developers on the project, specifically Evelyn Lark, who goes by @TheNobleDemon on social media. They were hit the worst by the rebrand because they are the composer, so they had to redo an entire OST in three months and have been knocking it out of the park. Then there’s Mino, @Art_Mino on social media. He painted all the box arts that you’ve seen for Bloodborne PSX and Bloodborne Kart. He’s going to be repainting the box art to remove all the Bloodborne characters, and he’s been helping out a lot. I just wanted to shout out the rest of the team for also doing an incredible job and staying on board.
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Nightmare Kart releases May 31 on Steam and Itchio.
