Ideal = Appealing to my tastes specifically in this case
To begin today’s blog entry, let us take a trip back to the year 2018, when a dedicated group of developers came together to create a Sonic kart racer in the Doom engine. This game would catch on with quite a number of fanbases, including fans of Sonic, fans of Mario Kart and other kart racers, and fans of pixel artists all coming together to show the game love and helping it reach new heights online.
That game of course is none other than Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, created by the talented group of Kart Krew and unleashed into the wild in November 2018. Of course I was unable to play it release day since I was attending AnimeNYC 2018, but once I got home and loaded it up for the first time, the game changed my life in a way no other game had done before. For almost all of 2019 until the middle of 2021, I spent the majority of my time creating custom characters for the game and posting them online for players to try out, sidelining most of my other hobbies and very much ending my several-year-long career as a sprite ripper. By 2020 however, I would begin to lose steam with custom character creation, caused by a combination of getting temporarily booted out of the game’s Discord and the failure of my Mac’s hard drive within the span of roughly one week. I would be back to working on Kart characters a few weeks later by the end of October, but by then my interest in the game was dwindling since I had pumped out roughly 30 racers across both my main pack and several spinoff packs and character files. It wouldn’t be the end of my custom character packs, but let’s just say that after 2021, new Kart characters from yours truly had slowed to a crawl so I could focus on other projects and personal interests. I would release a touch-up of some of my older characters and create two new ones across 2023 and 2024, but as of now things are once again in semi-hiatus to prepare myself and my workstation for some bigger projects in the future.
But for now, let’s rewind a bit to the tail end of 2022 and into early 2023, when I was still, for the most part, not really bothering with SRB2Kart. As I was perusing around one day on Twitch, I noticed different streamers were still playing SRB2Kart in modded servers with their audience. Thus, 2023 became sort of a resurgence period for Kart as I joined various creators and communities, including one hosted by a friend of mine, in their SRB2Kart sessions. Of course, there was another reason I began to join these Kart sessions: to gather data and research for a Kart server of my own by carefully judging what works and what feels unnecessary or over-complicates gameplay. Based on my gameplay preferences and the streamers and communities I would find myself playing with, I landed upon the following ideas:
- A character roster focused completely around Sonic characters, with a few crossovers and Sonic-likes to add more roster diversity. It is very much inspired by Power Bomberman’s roster in that aspect, which similarly only contained characters relevant to Bomberman’s history and the companies that birthed and currently own the IP (non-Bomberman characters are regulated to Hudson Soft and Konami characters only, plus official crossovers).
- A track roster designed with quality over quantity, with no track ports from other games (Mario Kart, Crash Team Racing, etc) as they usually get the lion’s share of votes in the voting tally when they do appear. No tracks with disruptive course mechanics or powerful hazards would be featured to keep focus on the game’s main racing mechanics (and if they are featured, the mechanic(s) would be either nerfed or removed for that reason). Even with this approach, I did my best to include many of the staples of the SRB2Kart modding community, including some packs and individual tracks
- Hard (aka 150cc) speed, for more general excitement during races and allowing acceleration-focused drivers with low natural top speed better opportunities to compete with faster drivers. This would be combined with per-track size modifications to further assist heavy drivers with high weight/low handling stats that are usually not played in most servers thanks to net game input delay worsening their already poor handling stat.
- Very few gameplay modifications to keep the core game simple and approachable. Any gameplay mods that do exist are “no duh” features common in other kart-racers (i.e. slipstream and a trick system), expand around already existing features without adding all new controls and mechanics, or are purely visual and meant to provide greater feedback when performing certain actions. The mechanic changes also serve to provide additional buffs to racers with lower natural top speeds.
- No Juicebox, as the Dash Gates mechanic does not match the gameplay style of the server. It is good for more casual environments where the host wants to add more party game-like elements to SRB2Kart, but the server I want to run is not designed with that sort of element in mind.
- A modified Acrobatics as the trick system mod of choice, to make jumps engaging and rewarding while keeping drivers’ attention on the race and give opportunities for low top speed drivers to get big bursts of speed.
- No audio-only mods, including horns and announcers, due to the mod pack already being quite large thanks to the amount of characters and tracks featured (and it not being easy to opt out of the features in question).
This research continued for some time, up until many of these streamers and communities would leave Kart behind to migrate over to the then-new release of Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers. It wouldn’t last, however, and by late 2025, most of the communities and streamers I follow(ed) that hosted or streamed the SRB2 kart-racing duology would migrate over to Sonic Racing: Crossoworlds, return to SRB2Kart, or move on to other games entirely. That’s not to say it’s a completely lost art, as community-hosted Kart and Ring Racers servers still see plenty of activity even into 2026. As for myself, I always enjoyed both Kart and Ring Racers for different reasons and Ring Racers is the rare skill-focused kart racer in a genre otherwise dominated by RNG-heavy titles (including Crossworlds!) that decide the winner by whoever gets the best item rolls. That said, this blog entry is very much focused on SRB2Kart and SRB2Kart alone, and as much as I want to give Ring Racers its own time in the spotlight and talk about its positive aspects, this is very much a blog entry on Kart and Kart alone.
The long road of research would continue on, and through 2025 and 2026, the mod pack for this conceptual server would begin to resemble its final form. Out of a desire to make the server one of the best ways to experience SRB2Kart, I would obtain permissions from two of the SRB2Kart playerbase’s current active communities: Sunflower’s Garden, and Karts R Us, to integrate gameplay and track design fixes. That of course spiraled into a deep rabbit hole where I spent the majority of the first half of 2026 using SRB2Kart’s track editor, ZoneBuilder, to implement further tweaks to tracks. For the most part, these edits were relatively minor, such as checkpoint fixes and extending out finish lines so drivers are still counted for completing laps even if they fly straight off to the side of the track. Soon, I went into deeper refinements as I proceeded to address everything I could think of to either fix or improve these tracks. As of August 2026, I can pretty much say that nearly everything that I wanted to fix up across the sets of maps I plan to feature has been mostly done, and what remains is a few more bug fixes to the game mods in the pack as well as enhancements and optimizations to improve tracks (being sure to remain faithful to the authors’ original visions as possible). The deadline I gave myself to finalize the server’s major mod list and character/track rosters was roughly the middle of September 2026, if only because I do not want SRB2Kart map editing to be the only form of productivity I accomplish this year and I very much want to go back to creating characters for Kart and Ring Racers (and that’s without mentioning the things I want to do outside of SRB2-adjacent content).
And so here we are, in the middle of September 2026. While most of the map editing I just alluded to has been finalized, the SRB2Kart server is still not quite ready yet, as I must make final preparations and smash a few unaddressed oddities before I can consider it done and ready for hosting. I eventually would like to make this a public SRB2Kart server that stays open for most of the day, but for now, I’m planning on keeping the audience to various friend groups as means of testing the modpack and how much stress it can take before folding over itself. Now you may be wondering “Really, that’s how we’re ending this blog post?” Well, as anti-climatic as it sounds, I very much wanted to document the journey of setting up a Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart server inspired by the many streamers and friend groups I found myself playing with, whenever it would result in something playable at this very moment or not. Also, I consider myself a dedicated SRB2Kart fan (even if my skills at winning races are more on the questionable side) and wanted to make this Kart server as a means of providing the best experience for this game that I can make in the span of two years following years of experimentation and seeing SRB2Kart evolve from its birth in 2018 to its current state eight years later in the year 2026. And even with newer racing games to play, SRB2Kart still has a dedicated community of players and creators gathering together to race in support of one of the most customizable racing games ever.
Now that I’ve covered very much everything I’ve wanted to write about this experience, I will keep polishing what I have so far in the background in hopes that I won’t have to make too many changes once I declare the mod pack I spent years carefully constructing and polishing complete. Until then, catch you all on the flip side.
