Turret and Barrel in Action

Here's a video of the dog-statue-turret in action, complete with explosive barrels. The turret follows you around, fires every couple seconds with an animation, the cannon rotates up and down, the barrels will catch fire if they are thrown relatively softly and then explode, and if thrown hard enough, will explode on impact.

Barrel and Turret Concept

In Programming, we're learning how to make "barrel"-type items, where they explode after being hit. We also have to make a turret that launches the barrels. To match my theme, I'm going to do a pot with some dangerous magic or alchemy or something inside. If you hit it a little bit, it'll start emitting green or purple smoke, and then make a big explosion. 

For my turret, I'm going to take one of the statues I was planning to build, and just strap a cannon to it. 

Here are some of the reference I've been looking at.

Race Opening Sequences

We are going to start the art part of our racetrack, and part of that is making the opening sequence! For inspiration, we are looking at some good opening sequences. I think all of the ones from Mario Kart 8 are good, and it helps that that game is really pretty and polished in the first place, but I want to talk about the one for Mute City.
It starts off with a panning out view of this giant sci-fi building with a vast city landscape and gives a really good feeling of what kind of environment this is. Then, they show this insane sideways twisting part of the track that personally gets me pumped up about the race because it just looks exciting. Then, you pull backwards from the starting line, and then you get to start the game! I kind of wish there was one more interesting shot highlighting the track, but what there is does a good job of showcasing what the track has to offer.