Game Rant recently got a chance to sit down with one half of the development team behind the delightful 2018 indie game Minit to discuss their most recent project: a light arcadey racing game set in the Minit universe, called Minit Fun Racer. That "fun racer" is a close homophone for "fundraiser" is no mistake, since all proceeds earned from sales of the $2.99 game will go to charity for as long as it sells copies. We got to chat with JW Nijman and Kitty Calis to talk about why they decided to make a charity game and everything that went into the end product.
Having played Minit Fun Racer ourselves, it lives up to a higher standard than one might expect for a $2.99 game aimed at fundraising for charity. It's a charmingly simple arcade-style racer, with just the right balance to make gameplay feel addictive. With 10-second lives that can be extended by gathering coins and a long list of challenging side objectives, the game feels simultaneously bite-sized and satisfying to dig into. Luckily, JW and Kitty were more than happy to walk us through the creative process and their favorite parts of the game. This interview transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
GR: can you quickly describe what Minit Fun Racer is and why you made it?
JW: Minit Fun Racer is made by me and Kitty together with Dominic Johann and Jukio. It’s a little one-bit racing game where you race your way through traffic to get to the beach just in time for the sunset. And all proceeds will go to charity forever.
Kitty: Players work their way through traffic and a dangerous desert, buying upgrades for the bike to go a little further each time. There’s a list of goals like delivering a pizza, driving into cop cars, going for a swim.
JW: And it’s set in the same universe as our game Minit, so it has a similar style and lots of little secrets. We tried to put a lot of charm and little details into it.
Kitty: We wanted to make a full game and not something that you buy just because it's for charity. It has accessibility options and achievements. It’s like a full game.
JW: As to why we did this, we were in between projects in a way. We had just finished Disc Room and we were figuring out the start of our next bigger thing. It was a perfect window to do something good, make something small, and everyone one the team was in on the idea of it.
Kitty: It really was a passion project... I wanted to make a charity game for some time. It was a matter of getting people back together and finding the right situation. It has been really fun to do, and it has such good energy.
GR: Do you have an idea of which charities you want to target?
Kitty: We have a few in mind. We are going to start with Doctors Without Borders, but there’s also like SpecialEffect. We want to stay flexible, because if something happens we’ll be able to chip in.
JW: Yeah, we want to be able to jump in. Last year with the pandemic situation all over the world, it made us realize that if we have an opportunity to do good we should take it. Kitty had the idea of making a game for charity and it felt good.
Kitty: It’s very important to look after one another and help out where you can. This is a way for us to do that.
GR: Why use a time limit instead of player error to restart? It feels similar to other rogue-likes, but the timer element is an interesting addition.
JW: I think we just love working with restrictions. Not just the time limit but also the art style, it just makes us more creative in a way.
Kitty: Minit was just black and white, simple controls, only one button...
JW: ...and the 60 second limit. It’s interesting to design games like that. At first we thought it would be fun for the player to deal with, but as designers it also made us solve interesting design problems just to make the game enjoyable.
Kitty: It really helped us shine on the creative side.
JW: As far as Fun Racer goes, it is a game where you start over and over again like Minit, and you slowly make progress in a similar way to a rogue-like. We are not making these games to be difficult or punishing... It’s like little episodes of a cartoon. In one try, you have a whole adventure. Fun Racer is like that. You deliver a pizza, get chased by the cops...
Kitty: ...go for a swim, or you can wake up the dogs and cats to cause havoc.
JW: We want to give people these little short bursts of fun stuff happening.... We found that one minute for Minit, or ten seconds for Racer, is kind of the sweet spot. We’re not wasting your time, it’s not like you did a whole thing and now you have to do it again. Every run is different, and by keeping it short we’re respecting the player’s time.
Kitty: Hopefully it’s short and sweet, not frustrating.
GR: can you speak more specifically as to the challenges or benefits of working with that art style and within those time limits?
JW: Well I think the fact that it’s black and white with a simple art style, it makes it very easy to iterate. If we have an idea we can add it into the game in only a few minutes, just to try it.
Kitty: Definitely. Before, we all came from bigger projects. I worked on Horizon Zero Dawn... If you wanted to experiment with something, add something to the game it became a huge project. You had to set up a meeting, talk to multiple people, it was such an undertaking.... Because this is smaller team with the four of us, we can just put things in and see if it works.
JW: At the same time with the black and white artstyle, sometimes it’s really hard to make the art clear. Every pixel needs to be just right. You can’t just give it a color so it's clear to the player, 'avoid it because it’s red,' or whatever. You [Kitty] and Dom [Dominic Johann] did great making it read well.
Kitty: We worked in such an iterative way that made it fun. In Minit Fun Racer there’s the store, and the first draft of the store had a painting with a bike. Then we said, how fun would it be if you spend some money, there will be a new painting?
JW: So the shop keeps upgrading, and as you buy more items the shopkeep gets richer.
Kitty: He gets a fancier store. Between Dom and I, we get inspired by each other’s work.
GR: What were some more of your favorite moments from development?
Kitty: Very quickly we realized there is a joy in hitting trashcans, and hitting more of them in a row, so we decided to add a boost from hitting them to the store as an upgrade.
JW: We originally put them in as obstacles, but it was so much more fun to run into them. So now there is the trash turbo item. Hitting trashcans makes you go faster. The whole game was little things like that. We made a really comically long limousine to put in, and then thought...that’s an expensive car, I really want to dent it and annoy the rich person sitting in it. So then that became a side goal...
Kitty: -..or hidden things in the background. We have “vegan mode” and it makes the billboards change from things like hotdogs to falafel.
JW: We love putting dumb jokes in. If you have fun making a game, it will shine through in the end result.
Kitty: Also, making a game is pretty personal. The little stories we add come from things we’ve seen or people we like. If you add things from your own life it will be original, because nobody else has that story.
GR: Is there anything else about the game you want to cover?
JW: It’s just really nice for us to be able to do something for charity. And for the players. This game will cost the same as a cup of coffee, or a sandwich.
Kitty: $2.99, or pay what you want on some stores.
JW: You get a fun game, and at the same time all the money goes to help others. It feels very lucky to be able to work on something like that. Even Devolver Digital said ‘sure, we’ll publish it for free.’ To me that’s amazing, to see that there’s so much good will....
Sometimes you have downtime when you’re working on planning the next project or negotiating contracts or whatever, and I think we’re fortunate enough that our games have done well and we’re able to do this. It’s not something that everybody would be able to do. But the idea felt so right.
Kitty: We got a lot of help, like Devolver putting in their time. We asked for help from all over and people really pitched in.... I don’t want to get my hopes up, but the bigger it gets the more we can help, and the more people will have a good time too.
JW: As you said, it really is a finished product. We have mappable controls, difficulty settings, and all this stuff as well. It is a fully polished product. We wanted it to stand on its own. Even if you buy it for charity, you will have fun with the game.