In the latest Mario Kart World developer interview, Nintendo shared that it takes 24 minutes for an entire day to pass in Mario Kart World.

Setting a short cycle allows players to experience courses at different times of the day. The team also considered that certain times of the day may be rather bland for some locations, so they decided to focus on the most appealing times of day and have dramatically shortened the transitions between day and night.

I see. So, you altered your programming workflow to overcome the unprecedented volume of content. All thanks to that, you can now really sense the flow of time when you’re driving around and the scenery and weather change naturally.

Jikumaru: We designed it so that a day in the game passes in around 24 minutes. You easily get a sense of how time passes in the game, since it happens faster than in real life. But the time doesn’t progress evenly, does it?

Ishikawa: At first, we made the color of the sky gradually change over time, but in many cases, we considered the time and scenery together. For example, we wanted players to be able to experience the desert at night. In this case, when there’s a particular scene we really want players to see, we didn’t think such a feature would work, as players might drive through that location at the rather bland time between evening and night. So, I discussed this issue with the programmers, and we decided to focus on the most appealing times of day and dramatically shorten the transitions between day and night.

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