Monster Racer · Development update

Meet Monster Racer: monsters, mud and a lot of grey boxes.

Monster Racer is a roguelike racer where runners, flyers and burrowers fight over the same track, and every race you survive changes your monster. It's very much a prototype, with grey boxes for scenery, placeholder names and numbers, and nothing to play yet, so this is a quick hello with the art we have.

Development through · Published · Keaton Anderson

Results

A running prototype in Godot 4.7 with Jolt physics. No public build. The scenery, names and numbers are all placeholders.

Development capture: three next-gen research models pinned mid-gallop on a staged mud strip, 1 November 2026. They aren't in the game yet.
Development capture: three next-gen research models pinned mid-gallop on a staged mud strip, 1 November 2026. They aren't in the game yet.

The idea

You start a League Run with a bare-bones monster and try to come out the far end with a beast shaped by every race you survived. Every part you tear loose goes into your inventory, win or lose, and the Lab lets you graft those parts onto new monsters.

There are three kinds of body: runners, flyers and burrowers. The track splits into routes that keep folding back into one shared lane, and any monster can take any route. So a flyer and a burrower can go very different ways round and still end up trying to ram each other in the same place.

Three simple monster models mid-stride on a plain grey floor: a green spiked runner, a brown long-snouted flyer with folded wings and a tan burrower under a green shell.
The three bodies as they are in the game today. Rendered on 5 November 2026 on a plain test floor. Every monster is generated from a script, parts included.

Where it stands

Very early. You can race all three bodies around a grey-box track, and an AI pilot drives every test build round the courses to catch falls and abilities that don't pay off.

The League Run around the races is being built in steps on a development branch. The map of events, the paddock, rival pilots, side bets and a garage between runs are in there so far, and the grid is still four racers.

Monsters with bones in them

Today's models are simple, so a research branch is rebuilding them from the inside: a skeleton, bone cores and muscles under one skin, scaled hides and proper reptile heads with glowing eyes. The muscles bunch and flex on a boost.

None of it is in the game yet. These shots are staged, with a strip of mud, grey blocks and red banners standing in for a real course.

Low behind a spiked green monster on a wet mud strip, with an armoured grey monster and a red one ahead, grey blocks and red banners on both sides and a hazy sun above.
Low behind the pack. Staged test scene on the research branch, 1 November 2026.
Close on the runner's head: dark green scaled skin, a crest of long horns, an orange slit eye and a row of crooked teeth.
The runner's reptile head. From the same research branch, 1 November 2026.

What's next

  • More racers on the grid.
  • Real names and real numbers to replace the placeholders.
  • Decide whether the next-gen monsters go into the game.

What I learned

Speed changes everything around it. When the top speeds doubled, the track had to get twice as wide, or the races ran down a tunnel.

Sources & development context

Based on Monster Racer's source history to 3 November 2026: the League Run's phase 2 branch, the track widening (1 November), the model-skeleton-research branch and its renders, and one render of today's models made for this post on 5 November.

All Monster Racer posts