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.