Follow the Leader

Start of FTL game on Aquadromo

Follow the Leader (often abbreviated as FTL) is a racing gamemode in SuperTuxKart. It is currently playable offline only and is played against AIs in singleplayer or splitscreen multiplayer.

Unlike most racing modes in which the goal is to finish first, in FTL the goal is to be not first. One AI kart is picked to be the "leader", and all other karts including humans should follow him. After some time interval the elimination begins: each 10 seconds one kart is eliminated. As the leader should be followed, if a non-leader kart has the first position at the moment of elimination, it is eliminated immediately. Otherwise, the kart placed last is eliminated. This continues until there are two karts, one of which is the leader, and the other wins the game.

FTL can be played on any track in any direction, and can also be played in Grand Prix fashion. It was also present in Story Mode of 0.9.3 version of STK, which caused speedrunners to suffer.

Issues

Follow the Leader differs pretty much from any other existing racing gamemode because the leader is a special kart (not even a human player), and the game ends independently of karts' track positions. This makes it more difficult to be implemented online because it at least requires good AI algorithm online.

Another issue is that all karts can be stuck in some narrow place, or, even worse, use different paths of the split driveline. Both cases make the game unpredictable because no one knows where exactly to go to be not last but not first either.

Time Cooldown

The first kart is eliminated after 30 seconds, the second one after 20 and the remaining ones after 10. The timer increases by 5 seconds every time the leader gets hit or rescues.