The End of SRB2 Kart

Well we’ve all come to this; After five years the long-awaited sequel/followup to Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers, shaddowdropped during the week I was prepping for Castle Point Anime Convention 2024. The game that had famously swallowed most of my productive life for almost half a decade and put a stop to my years of routinely contributing to The Spriters’ Resource now has a full sequel filled with engine improvements, a hugely expanded roster of characters and tracks, new mechanics to balance out the eighty-one stat blocks so more racers then ever will be able to take wins without relying on modded rulesets, and perhaps most important to this post: an all new artstyle and a new tool for making custom tracks.

Originally I was planning to write this before Ring Racers Launched, but since the game emerged from my back out of nowhere while I was focused on other projects and while I was still stuck in something of a struggle to get back into working on projects, I decided to tear down and rewrite the post to get my points down in less time (and believe me the first draft was quite long).

For starters, the Superjustinbros Character Pack, or the SJBCP as I call it, will make a return in Ring Racers, now re-branded as the New Super Justin Bros. Character Pack. As of now, this is what I’m currently planning for the pack when it launches and I have more time to develop characters:

• The pack’s contents will gravitate towards new drivers with a stronger bias to Sonic and SEGA characters to better complement Ring Racers’ base roster (and my growing obsession for retro Sega titles).
• For characters returning from the SJBCP, they will receive overhauls and in some cases will use different, more modern looks than they looked in SRB2Kart. And for characters I choose not to bring back, I will fill their slots with new characters with a similar feel but with more appeal on a visual and recognition standpoint.
• The pack’s new non-Sonic and non-SEGA characters will give priority to more well-known characters, including popular characters and themes in Kart servers during that game’s time in the spotlight. The more obscure, left-field picks that defined the SJBCP will still persist but will include choices with more appeal from their design and personality alone. Some of the media I choose to represent will have a secondary character, side character, or rival/antagonist picked over the main character depending on who fits the theme of Ring Racers more (or who I prefer).
• Unlike SRB2Kart, there will be little to no themed character packs released as separate addons on the message board such as the Mini Racer Pack, the 8-bit Pack, the My Little Pony Pack, or the Super Mario Kart Pack. There is however a chance I may at least bring the Super Mario Kart pack back with the assistance of a close friend since it was somewhat of a popular mod back in SRB2K and by far the most successful of the themed offshoot packs next to the Pizza Tower Pack.

With much of my attention in May and most of June taken up by a combination of convention and birthday prep and the first two weeks of July being taken up by SGDQ 2024 and prep for my friend’s birthday, I got something of a late start to working on characters. In all honesty don’t expect to get any of my currently-planned characters done and released till sometime later this month, if not early August before I end up getting swamped by two back-to-back sessions of convention prep for the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo and AnimeNYC.

The first characters I will release for the pack include the two OC’s you see in the image above with updated designs, a Sonic character from one of the series’ first spin-off games, and a Sega arcade icon using a design of theirs look from an overlooked 90’s reboot. In order to ensure a sooner launch, the SEGA characters will launch separately in version 1.0 and 1.1 respectively. As with the SJBCP, all my characters will be available separately so players and server hosts have more freedom with what they want to host from the pack’s contents. As for what else is coming? Well, there are about 50+ ideas on the docket including returning characters but seeing as my drive to work on characters has not come back in full force yet and there are still other things I want to try messing with at some point, do not expect to see each and every one of them in Ring Racers unless by some miracle I end up developing a new, faster process for developing characters. Even if said process may not kick in until later this year when the number of events I have to attend is reduced and I have more weeks to myself and not having to prep for something every other week.

Anyways it looks like I made my point; this blogpost has been in the workings for quite some time and has gone through a multiple number of changes so it’s best I post it before I find myself with too many drafts to balance—especially with the growing number of subjects I want to discuss.

The Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart Custom Skincolor Extravaganza

Going into this article, you’re probably wondering where did I get an idea like this from? Well, back in 2019 I spent quite a bit of time making custom mock-up colors for Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart and I teamed up with a user in the game’s community named Xkower to produce Collabcolors, a community-made color pack for Vanilla that operated as its own .exe. However, you could not bring these skincolors online into net games unless others also had the .exe and players without it would be displayed with the wrong skincolors. Vanilla Sonic Robo Blast 2 would give server hosts the ability to add on extra skincolors in Version 2.2.5 through scripts, whenever they be traditional skincolors, wild and wacky skincolors meant to be jokes, and a whole slew of animated skincolors.

Before jumping into the project, it's important to note that the game is capable of displaying up to 256 colors and cannot (outside of OpenGL mode) display any color outside that palette. Since Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart was built from version 2.1, various changes that would occur in the palette to expand the versatility of the colors featured in the jump from version 2.1 to version 2.2 don't exist. However, you can use a program called SLADE to convert graphics in the 2.2 palette into the one featured in 2.1 and vice versa, and the alterations will be immediately noticeable. For instance, this is what happens if you take the 2.2 palette and convert it to 2.1:

*Pale yellows, depending on the shade, are converted into light yellow, light orange, or light beige.

*Rose pinks become pale pinks, matching the ones already in the game.

*Seafoam greens become light cyans on the lighter end and teals on the darker end.

*Royal purples are converted into light blues or dark magentas depending on the hue.

*The four brightest shades of magenta are lost- the brightest of them becoming might blue and the rest turning into the lightest shade of magenta available in a palette.

It gets a little better if you take the 2.1 palette and convert it into 2.2, with the only change worth noting is the different type of teal used between the two palettes. But anyways with the above notes in mind I began to backport the more unique colors from vanilla Sonic Robo Blast 2 version 2.2 into Kart. The list of converted skin colors, in addition to the customs mentioned further down the article can be found in this gallery. As everything in this portion was a “Vanilla” color by technicality, I opted to merge them with Kart’s vanilla list:

1. White
2. Bone (A shade of grey not in Kart, in Vanilla it serves as a counterpart to Silver)
3. Silver
4. Grey
5. Carbon (A shade of grey not in Kart, in Vanilla it serves as a counterpart to Nickel)
6. Nickel
7. Black
8. Jet (A darker version of Skunk in Vanilla instead of being a dark steel blue)
9. Skunk
10. Fairy
11. Popcorn
12. Artichoke
13. Pigeon
14. Azure (A light grey/steel blue mix instead of a teal/purple mix)
15. Slate (Fills the upper half of the color ramp with greys instead of lighter steel blues)
16. Bluebell (Resembles a lighter version of Kart’s “Jet” color)
17. Sepia
18. Beige
19. Walnut
20. Brown
21. Leather
22. Bronze (Vanilla’s version of the color Leather, with dark browns that fade into a dark grey)
23. Tan (Uses the pale yellows which do not convert successfully to Kart, so light orange is used)
24. Salmon
25. Pink
26. Rose
27. Brick
28. Cinnamon
29. Ruby
30. Raspberry
31. Cherry
32. Red
33. Crimson
34. Maroon
35. Lemonade
36. Flame
37. Scarlet
38. Ketchup
39. Dawn
40. Peachy (Has a more dominant use of peach and pinks compared to Kart’s Peach color)
41. Quail (A light brown that fades into lavender)
42. Sunset
43. Copper (Has a more “rustic” look compared to Kart’s version)
44. Creamsicle
45. Apricot (A shade of orange with peach for the highlights)
46. Orange
47. Pumpkin
48. Rosewood
49. Burgundy
50. Tangerine
51. Peach
52. Caramel
53. Cream
54. Gold
55. Royal
56. Sandy (Resembles Royal but has a greater amount of brown in the color)
57. Bronze
58. Copper
59. Quarry
60. Yellow (Uses dark yellows in the back half of the ramp instead of golds)
61. Yellow
62. Mustard
63. Crocodile
64. Olive
65. Vomit
66. Garden
67. Lime
68. Lime (Resembles a lighter version of Handheld than is more yellow than green)
69. Peridot (A color that combines army greens with dark yellow to emulate lime green)
70. Apple (A shade of yellow-green in-between Vanilla’s Lime and Kart’s Handheld)
71. Handheld
72. Tea
73. Pistachio
74. Moss
75. Camouflage
76. Robo-Hood
77. Mint
78. Seafoam (A pale green that fades into teal, adjusted to give the former more exposure)
79. Green
80. Pinetree
81. Forest (A darker green in comparison to Pinetree)
82. Emerald
83. Swamp
84. Dream
85. Plague
86. Algae
87. Caribbean
88. Azure
89. Cyan (Retrofitted into a successor to Vanilla 2.1’s teal color, uses color 247 to sell the effect)
90. Aqua
91. Teal
92. Cyan
93. Wave (A light blue that fades into a dark purple, converted to Magenta)
94. Icy (A lighter Jawz)
95. Jawz
96. Cerulean
97. Navy
98. Cerulean (A dark navy blue darker than the above two)
99. Platinum
100. Slate
101. Steel
102. Thunder
103. Rust
104. Wristwatch
105. Jet
106. Sapphire
107. Periwinkle
108. Blue
109. Blueberry
110. Nova
111. Pastel
112. Vapor (Similar to Wave, but uses light blues to make the color appear more purple)
113. Purple (Doesn’t use magentas in Vanilla, unlike the “Purple” in Kart)
114. Moonslam
115. Ultraviolet
116. Dusk
117. Bubblegum
118. Purple
119. Neon (A darker version of Kart’s Purple color, known as Indigo in Kart Z)
120. Plum (Darker version of the below color)
121. Violet (Resembles Fuchsia but uses dull pinks to transition into the magentas)
122. Raspberry (Fades into magenta at the end instead of being a shade of red)
123. Fuchsia
124. Toxic
125. Mauve
126. Lavender
127. Byzantium
128. Pomegranate
129. Lilac (A lighter version of Pomegranate)
130. Lilac

Most colors in Vanilla, excluding the very dark colors, end with a dark color of the color’s shade. In Kart, all but the lightest colors fade into pure black (color 31). You may also notice that several of the ported Vanilla 2.2 skincolors share their names with several of the Kart colors. No color between the two are 100% alike but to go over exactly how all the skincolors with the same name compare would take too much time out of this read, and the skin olors that were chosen to be ported over were the ones that I felt offered something new to the table or showed just how a skincolor like Peridot would work in Kart without the necessary colors they used in 2.2's palette in the ramp.

Of further note is Color 247, the bright neon cyan or teal. This color is never used in SRB2 and SRB2Kart’s internal graphics at any point, only seeing use to render transparency in textures in vanilla SRB2 and on skincolors in SRB2 2.1 and 2.2 (though in only one instance each). Meanwhile, Kart does not use color 247 for any skincolors by default, only using the darker teals that occupy Colors 220 through 223. It is still possible to see the color in-game if entering a colored sector that turns the sprites to a bright teal such as the underwater section of Paradise Hill Zone and through modding, players can add skins and sprites that use color 247. If the EXE is modded directly, skincolors that use color 247 can be added and will apply onto character skins without issue.

Still, there came the name conflicts and having to rename them all. The names chosen were influenced by some of the colors from the original Collabcolors, as well as the Mega Paint Drive (my spiritual successor for collabcolors) created for Vanilla and in one case, Super Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart Z. Furthermore to ensure compatibility with the hundreds of characters in Kart already, none of the preexisting Kart colors had their names altered or ramps changed, and no character from the default cast or Bonuschars would have their prefcolors changed for consistency.

• Jet -> Ink
• Azure -> Ghost
• Slate -> Marble
• Copper -> Rust
• Yellow -> Banana
• Lime -> Sunflower
• Cyan -> Frost
• Cerulean -> Peacock
• Purple -> Gemstone
• Raspberry -> Magenta
• Lilac -> Thistle

Following reconfiguring the Vanilla colors to better work alongside Kart’s, it was time to adapt the skincolors from Collabcolors. In the end, the ones I ultimately went with were colors I considered unique enough from both the Vanilla and Kart skincolor selections or had some other niche to warrant their inclusions. Understandably, this would mean a lot of colors from Collabcolors would be scrapped or receive major changes, and the colors that I did pick were the ones I considered “useful”, and which ones would work the best with custom characters in mind. In order to avoid dragging the number of colors through the roof, owing to the smaller number of available spots for extra colors in the .exe compared to Vanilla and the presence of the Vanilla recreations. The final list of add-on colors became:

1. Diamond
2. Raven
3. Chocolate
4. Earthworm
5. Yogurt
6. Pearl
7. Strawberry
8. Soda
9. Bloodcell
10. Mahogany
11. Fiery
12. Spice
13. King
14. Hot Dog
15. Carnation
16. Candy
17. Nebula
18. Steampunk
19. Amber
20. Carrot
21. Cheese
22. Dune
23. Brass
24. Lemon
25. Casket
26. Khaki
27. Light
28. Peppermint
29. Laser
30. Asparagus
31. Army
32. Crow
33. Chartreuse
34. Slime
35. Leaf
36. Evergreen
37. Tropic
38. Iguana
39. Spearmint
40. Patina
41. Lakeside
42. Electric
43. Turquoise
44. Pegasus
45. Comet
46. Lightning
47. Vacation
48. Ultramarine
49. Depths
50. Dianne
51. Exotic
52. Snow
53. Moon
54. Lunar
55. Onix
56. Lapis
57. Orca
58. Storm
59. Midnight
60. Cotton Candy
61. Cyber
62. Amethyst
63. Iris
64. Gothic
65. Grape
66. Indigo
67. Magenta
68. Disco
69. Mulberry
70. Boysenberry
71. Plum
72. Elderberry

The original plan called for 70 new skincolors but an extra two snuck in. The final result at least meets my specifications and 102 extra colors along with the original 100 is plenty enough. So then comes the tricky part: Getting everything into the game proper. Vanilla 2.2 has support for custom colors through addons- Kart, as you likely know, doesn’t. Thus, the only way to add the skincolors at this time would be to modify the .exe while steering away from changing/resorting the values of the skincolors. The only solution I could decide on would be appending the new skincolors to the end of the list after Lilac, starting with Bone from the Vanilla recreations and ending with Elderberry in the customs, keeping them as is from there or using the M_MoveColorBefore and M_MoveColorAfter functions in Vanilla to re-order the new skincolors alongside the 100 Kart colors while preserving their values.

The last bit I’ll mention (since this article is getting rather long) is the invcolor, short for Invert Color. This is the skincolor’s opposite on the RBY spectrum. Red uses Green, Blue uses Orange, Yellow uses Cyan, Black uses White, etc. This doesn’t apply to every skincolor, for instance Ketchup (a red skincolor) uses Mustard (a yellow skincolor) since they’re part of the same “condiments“ theme. This aspect of the invcolors would carry over to these new skincolors as well, either using the color’s direct opposite or another color based on the same theme. Vanilla 2.2 lets you pick which shade of the invcolor is used (out of 16), while Kart only has one shade (using the sixth color from the top of the ramp).

Any-who, that’s all I really got on this without dragging on the length of the post. I wanted to make this post and all the accompanying mock-ups more for the “What-If” novelty than anything else. Even if nothing comes out of these ideas I wanted to get them out into the wild anyways and I’ll admit it was fun re-creating all these in the time that it took.

Too Much Karting

I think it's pretty obvious by now that I latched onto Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart for all the time since it came out. Though I've stopped playing online due to various circumstances I'd rather not get into, I'm still working in the background on custom racers to fill some stat blocks that aren't occupied by the base roster and what stat combinations aren't occupied by it.

Last month I released Wayne, the main protagonist of Hylics 2, after having started on it last August and afterwards getting sidetracked by both re-making my OC's (with more to come) and well, you know the other thing that happened around the time. What drove me to finish him earlier than I had thought was the occasional response/message on Discord of people looking forward to seeing him done (and to those that did, thanks for the motivation). Even then I still have five, maybe six other racers on the agenda, and maybe a few others on the backlot that I started on or am waiting until I complete a few more main racers before I tackle them proper. Recently I decided to get back into the swing of doing art since I've been sitting off doing it since late 2019, and since I've been feeling burnout and the desire to do something else (including character bios) I decided to take another break from making kart racers. Whenever it's a full break or a semi-hiatus, I don't know.

Now you're wondering, what the heck else do I have for this game? Well I had to significantly scale back my plans following the hard drive failure and the realization that eventually I need to do something else, including maybe gamedev stuff at long last, so I trimmed down the list of characters on the agenda so there's a chance I'll be able to call myself done with SRB2Kart when it comes to new racers.

• Berecca and Van, from Ninjala, are still the next in the queue, and with the decision to redo their hair so I can pump more detail into them, they'll understandably take a little more time than I initially thought including their signpost arts (I seem to struggle with them especially but I'll think of something). Stats-wise I'm sort of torn on making both of them focused on raw speed, so there's a chance one of them could be focused on acceleration and take the 2 speed, 4 weight slot meant for another racer that I plan to make sometime after as a "special send-off" to Version 1 barring character remakes and touchups.
• Solid Snake and Raiden, from the Metal Gear Solid series, are the other main duo for the pack that I've wanted to get to since at least early 2019 and you all likely know by now from previous update posts about Kart. These two are by far my biggest reasons for wanting to cut a lot of my further ideas for Kart and since they're both reasonably detailed and would almost reach up to Dr. Dude in height, I'd like to get every other major racer done before moving onto these two so I can pool what's left of my time with V1 into them (and if they bleed into V2, no big deal).
• Gil from Tower of Druaga is the only other significant racer that I want to get out for v1 and are comfortable with mentioning here. He's about 45% done with the base head fully drawn out, but lack of feedback on him especially compared to Wayne led to him being saved for later, and then when Wayne was done I didn't exactly have it on me to resume him at that moment.
• Roger, Zax, and Tan-Tan are still planned for V1 and they'll be worked on alongside other racers- Roger's wings will finally be implemented into his sprites and Zax will get a more robotic-looking (and rather large) arm on his left arm among a few other minor details to put in some more detail.

Of course the rest is TBD but at this rate consider these plus a few remakes down the line and some other surprise additions. V2 prep is also being considered (as in, the new palette and lookback frames- the new kart body isn't available until it does release) but not a priority.

Ye olde SRB2Kart

 Well it's that time of the year again. For those of you wondering about the status of my Macintosh, yes I got it back, no I didn't get most of the content from the hard drive that failed. I'll touch up on the subject later in the moth so it doesn't hog up this post but lets just say it's not the same Mac and in a nutshell it's a brand new computer.

So where to begin. As you all know I routinely make content for a little game called Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart and this whole debacle with my Mac's hard drive going dead really set me back quite a bit. I planned to finish and release one of the characters I was developing by late September but my unfamiliarity with Windows when it comes to making art plus the screen size being rather small meant I decided to just take the six weeks off. Luckily some members of the community helped me recover some WIP's I shared previously so I didn't have to start completely over but I did get knocked back a few steps when it came to some of the racers.

For the moment I'm going to spend a few weeks playing catchup with these custom racers so I can finally get something out- in the meantime I've been making some custom "Kartmaker" templates with the intent of helping out others since it became the de-facto way to make racers for some time and there's certain racers that require custom ones to work due to extra frames or having too large of a body to support an 80 x 80 pixel space without resorting to the larger 160 x 160 space-per-sprite template (leaving a lot of wasted space).

Anyways, here's what's on the radar for my projects for SRB2Kart.

• As teased earlier on this blog, the OC's are still the biggest project I'm developing, containing Justin, Matt, and Amy. All three are being made and will release simultaneously as a pack separate from the SJBCP. Justin and Matt are 8,3 and 7,4 respectively, while Amy is 7,9.
• Roger and Zax will start work sometime after while I'm busy with other racers. Their stats (4,2 and 8,6) will not be changed and they will be joined by newcomer Tan Tan with a stat spread of 3,1.
• For the regular SJBCP pack, the first new racer released since last July will be Neku Sakuraba from Square Enix's The World Ends with You, with 8 speed and 6 weight. He's been stuck as a WIP for a while and I'd like to get him finished so the fast middleweight section has a new rep.
• Following the completion of Neku Sakuraba is another duo of characters that I've had on the mind since last year: Berecca and Van from GungHo Online's little multiplayer Switch game Ninjala. These two Ninja-Gum powered children will be speed-focused lightweights at 9,3 and 8,4 respectively.
• The last major characters on the lineup and the final duo will be too reps from Konami's Metal Gear Solid series: Solid Snake as he appears in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (along with other games that feature Snake with that particular look), and Raiden from his big starring role in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Since a Snake racer has already existed for a while, I'll be giving my interpretation a more unique feel with a larger overall build and slower yet heavier stats (2,9). Raiden meanwhile will be the pack's 9,7 representative and like with the Ninjala characters, Solid Snake and Raiden will both release at the same time.
• From there, future reps will be slowly worked on over time, with a dose of slower, acceleration-focused characters to balance out the large number of speedy racers in the pack.
• When it comes to remakes, the current Vinesauce duo will be taken out of the abridged pack (a smaller-scale version of the pack intended for netgame servers with lots of characters) around when either the Ninjala or the Metal Gear Solid duo join the pack. In their place, both streamers will get a full respite from scratch and will be joined by one extra member, Imakuni, a streamer more closely connected to the Sonic series than either Vinny or Joel. Outside of this, Scott might get a from-scratch resprite (plus Beat but that's more on the fence compared to Scott) and one extra character, a remake of "Stevo" from a few net game servers, will be made and released as a separate add-on.

Further plans are TBD.

SRB2Kart: Going forward

Alright, clearly I lied when I said I wanted to put aside working on this game in favor of doing other projects because I ended up coming back to it in what may be my biggest death wish ever. Especially while my area continues to be under the threat of the virus sweeping the nation, but that's a story for another day.

Since SRB2Kart Version 2.0 never happened and likely won't happen for quite a while, I figured I'd bite the bullet and do my "Character Refurbishment/Renovation" project alongside bringing two new, highly-detailed racers to the roster. That basically means every racer from the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff duo to the Noid are getting some kind of alteration, either a full on remake in the case of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff to simply making the legs and feet of the racers on-model.

These changes to the pack will be carried out in what I hope to be two, maybe three versions of the Super Justin Bros Character Pack. 2.0.1, 2.1, and 2.2.

2.0.1 along with some minor changes not worth mentioning (really, they're super-minor) will feature the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff remakes as well as touchups to the Vinesauce duo, Scott Pilgrim, and The Noid while also putting in my Beat remake from last year as a bonus. 2.1 will be the debut of the Sunset Overdriver and a touchup to Slash Kamel with cleaned up hair and better two-tone support with the maroon color, and 2.2 will see the release of SRB2Kart's first pinball rep, Dr. Dude. From there the pack will very likely enter another period of dormancy so I can put some effort into other projects as I mentioned in my last post on SRB2Kart. I may dip back into the game every now and then to do light progress on more racers and fill out more stat blocks with little representation, but I'm not making any promises if I decide to go a while without working on a kart racer.

Two of the racers currently in the pack, Pipo Monkey and the Self-Propelled Bomb, will also be removed from the pack starting from 2.0.1 for various reasons. For the Pipo Monkey, his sprites feel outdated and have a certain ounce of "laziness" to them so I'm thinking of scrapping and coming back to the racer in the future. As for the Self-Propelled Bomb (aka the thing that chases after you in first place), the novelty of it wears off quickly and I feel the concept of a playable S.P.B. can be executed better with lua scripting, which I don't know. But if you are curious, here is a diagram showing how I'd like to revamp the SPB racer:

If the image is a bit hard to understand, I'll sum it up. Since I created the SPB racer, I always wanted it to better interact with the SPB item that when used chases after the leader of the race. In that the SPB itself jumps out of the kart when the item is used and makes a mad dash for the one currently leading the race (maybe with a "SPB cam" on-screen somewhere showing it trailing the leading racer) while a "SPB essence", a less-aggressive looking SPB with either a fully bare body or a smaller colorable ring continues to drive its Kart. When the SPB is either destroyed or collides with the leading racer, it remerges with its essence and returns to driving its Kart. Even if this full scope revamp of the SPB happens, it'll likely remain a separate racer from the pack as it already has two "sprite rip" racers in the form of Robo-hood and Gargoyle, both whom I'm waiting until Kart 2.0 before I start porting their redesigns from SRB2 2.2 over.

Anyways that's all I really have to say. I expected 2020 to be a year where I could take a nice break from Kart but after realizing all this stuff to do was piling up, I figured I'm jump back into action and finish what I had started.

Karted Out

For pretty much the entirety of 2019, I was a frequent contributor to the game "Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart", an extensive mod of Sonic Robo Blast 2 that I've mentioned years ago on this blog (and I mean years ago). How did I contribute? Well, I crafted a good haul of custom racers featuring both well known and obscure characters, some of which were created for special collaboration packs. However, with my latest creation taking me literal months to complete (though that can be attributed to it being a quad character update) with progress running through several conventions in the latter half of 2019, I thought I'd take a break from doing more racers for the time being. And even when I tried to work on more racers when saw break was "up", I started having trouble keeping focused on one thing and not zoning out.

So what's happening? Well I figured it'd have to happen at some point but I'm going to be taking a hiatus from working on racers for the time being. I might squeeze some progress out once in a while but my priorities are elsewhere. To make a long story short I'll give you guys a brief summary on why this may be the best course of action:

• Burnout. Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart character creation became the biggest priority of the year alongside sprite-ripping, and it became so frequent that I even had to call for a break from doing sprite sheets just so I could focus on SRB2Kart, and even after finishing up all my racers for the year, I still don't feel the audacity to resume ripping sprites. Pretty much every day I was doing one or the other and it was honestly getting less fun as I went, trying to shift back and fourth from project to project. And that's not even getting into the lesser racers that I worked on outside of the SJBCP.
• Some physical condition crap. Since August of last year some things began popping up regarding my arms/shoulders as well as my neck, in addition to allergy and sinus problems. And since conventions are going to be starting up soon for me once again (and by soon I mean in early May) I need to try and prep myself and my form when the time comes.
• Artwork. While I haven't started on anything major yet, there may be a point this year when I decide to whip out my art programs and make some art. Some of it will be available to the public, others may very well only be for a limited audience (and if you've seen my past project you'll likely know why). But my point stands that art still takes a while to do and I'd like to try and get some art worked on over the year if the problems under "Some Physical Condition crap" lessen up and I don't feel as terrible.
• Custom levels in games. I'm part of the team for a friend's Pac-Man project and I've become the team's main level designer (so yeah I did manage to get into working on a Pac-Man related project after all) and I've been considering picking up my Mari0 map pack again and working on it some more since I kind of neglected it for most of last year (but that can mostly be attributed to newer Photoshop being slightly harder to make retro backgrounds on since I haven't figured out how to make the transparent background a 16x16 tiled pattern when zoomed in). There's also Otaku-Ball, but as I've had no contact from Mr. Block for quite a while, that project is pretty much on hiatus too.
• Binging games. Oh yeah I play games too. Sonic Robo Blast 2 had a proper update, Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled is still having monthly "Grand Prix" events, I'm still collecting and strengthening Pokemon in Sword and Shield, and I recently got back into OpenRCT2.
• Kart's 2.0 update still MIA. Since Kart hasn't had a major update in quite some time while the newer 2.0 build is worked on, it's also been a sort of contribution to the lack of motivation to work a good deal on more racers.

The SJBCP is currently at 25 racers, with some racers planned for a big overhaul of sorts as part of a "tuning update" to prep the pack for Kart 2.0. When I get motivation to work on more racers, the tuning update will be done alongside new racers, to the point where one update might be a new racer + a major tuning update or a new racer plus several minor tuning updates. These will tweak and fix colors and several other errors to update everyone up to current standards.

As for future racers...

• Sunset Overdriver (9 speed 6 weight) and Springman (6 speed 5 weight) will likely be the next two racers to join the pack, in that order. Along with or sometime after Springman, Dr. Dude (9 speed 8 weight) will be worked on.
• "MGS2" Solid Snake (2 speed 9 weight) and "MGR" Riden (9 speed 7 weight) from the Metal Gear Solid series will follow in the stead of the two/three racers. Snake will differ from the currently-released Snake racer in that this take will be based more closely around the Metal Gear Solid 2 version of the character. Both Snake and Raiden are intended to be worked on and released simultaneously but Snake may be released first/early if progress with Raiden is slow.
• Tracer (9 speed 4 weight) will likely follow after the MGS duo, with Neku Sakuraba (8 speed 6 weight) not long after.
• The "Ninjala Duo" consisting of Van (8 speed 4 weight) and Berecca (9 speed 3 weight), the main duo used for promoting the currently-Switch-exclusive Ninjala are on low priority as they're part of A) an upcoming game and B) two of SRB2Kart's most overused weight classes (fast lightweight and fast middleweight). We'll see if I feel motivated to work on them after the games get released.
• The Mr. Driller duo, containing Susumu (4 speed 4 weight) and Taizo Hori (1 speed 8 weight), are also low priority. Partially since both racers already exist in Kart in some way; Susumu being based on his older look from the first Mr. Driller, while Taizo is based around his debut game: Dig Dug. The versions I will work on will use the "modern" versions of both, using the looks/artstyle of the characters from Mr. Driller A, Drill Land and Drill Spirits.
• Other racers, which include the likes of Yuichiro Tomari, Coca-Cola Kid, the DMC Duo with DMC5 Dante and DMC5 Nero (as DMC3 Dante already exists), Mister Mosquito, and Asterix, are currently TBD.
• Maybe a few joke racers similar to 7 Grand Dad, but don't hold your breath on those.

And with that I've made my case. Apologies for January not being as eventful as I had hoped but I'm currently stuck in some crap that I need to get sorted out, even if that's more to do with my form and being too lazy to do work. In the meantime you can experience what I've done so far for Kart if you haven't already here.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart: Super Mario Kart Characters Pack

A while back you probably have seen me mention a game called Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart. I was routinely creating characters for the game until I decided to go on hiatus to focus on other projects, including but not limited to trying to work more on artwork, produce more sprite sheets for a site known as The Spriters' Resource, and work on my Splatoon 2 skills. Plus my workspace (aka my bedroom) was renovated over the course of eight days, resulting in me having to abandon it for almost all of the previous week.

Now I'm back, and my time has been swallowed up still by other things, but I'm still not feeling the drive to work on more SRB2Kart characters. Yes they're in production, but lack of motivation is leading to them taking longer than I hoped to finish them.

Anyways, back on topic. Before announcing the semi-hiatus I was suggested by my friend MMG Mike to adapt all eight of the racers from Super Mario Kart into Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart. Normally, something like this wouldn't be allowed on the SRB2Kart message board thanks to them being sprite rips, so I had to rely on other means of getting them out into the wild, and I figured this blog would be perfect place to host the project.



So I took a sprite-rip of the eight Super Mario Kart racers I had on hand (but don't remember where I got them from), carefully aligned them, gave them recoverable bits, Mario Kart 64 voices, and (courtesy of community member Tiniest Turtles) mini-map icons, and then declared them finished.

All the characters are given stats that best replicate their stats from their source game, though they should be easier to control now that you're dealing with a more modern, less dated drifting system.

=Download= (V1.0h)