ArcadeStriker's RingNET

The KartKrew Interview

Published in text format in January 7th, 2024

As I had started working on SRB2Kart The Documentary, researching about the game's predecessors and development, there were a few things that I thought would be worth asking about to the people that would know the most about it, which would be none other than the team of developers at KartKrew, responsible for the game and its future sequel Dr. Robotnik Ring Racers. And sure enough, they delivered!


This interview was conducted on September 24, 2022 and originally shared to the public through a dynamic reenactment with Ace Attorney characters, which you can watch here.


I'm very happy with the result of the video version and I would recommend you to check that for a better experience, but I'm finally making that available in text form here with collapsible questions for those who requested a text version.


DISCLAIMER: At the time of bringing this to the new website theme, Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers is already out as of April 24th, 2024. So besides this talking about the game in future tense, there's also probably some details mentioned or hinted here that might be familiar to you now :]

1. So first of all, can you provide a brief introduction of yourself? And what would you say that are your greatest skills?

Chromatian: I’ve been a level designer for both Vanilla and Kart since 2007. Outside of SRB2, I play a variety of games, with Phantasy Star Online, Ys, and The Legend of Heroes being the most frequent.

VelocitOni: I do general sprites and graphics, usually not the level specific stuff but instead everything related to the global gameplay aspects and visuals you see no matter what you do; lately though I’ve dabbled in level visuals though. Also I think I contribute OK ideas sometimes idk (I try to help with Snap the Sentinel more, but destroy my hands by spriting hands every time)

Tyron: I permanently made Kart worse with HORNMOD, got so tilted about the Master Server going down that I offered to host it on my own hardware, and ended up on dev for Ring Racers somehow. When not malding about input delay or audio shitposting, I’m playing board games for old people and getting my ass beat in awful fighting games.

Gunla: I’m a level designer and occasional artist, predominantly with level visuals and sometimes character art! My major contribution to the community for V1 is likely Kart Rev, which is a major vanilla map balance modification. I assisted in some of the post-SRB2Kart patches starting with V1.2 but was brought on later to KartKrew proper. Aside from Ring Racers, I’m an event organizer & streamer for the Smash Bros. games in my local area, and enjoy working on documentation/data statistics.

TehRealSalt: I’m a game designer, lead programmer, mapper, and graphics artist for the latter end of SRB2Kart development, and all of Ring Racers. Outside of Kart Krew, I work on my own indie games “Snap the Sentinel” and “Captain Fetch”.

Charyb: My big two interests are street fashion and game design! Pretty unrelated to each other, I know. Before COVID, I used to go to a lot of cons and participate in fashion shows or other j-fashion related events. After COVID, I barely get out, and since I work remotely as well, I spend most of my time cozy at home doing gamedev. I’m also one of the community leaders in the Vanilla SRB2 community, and I’m really passionate about making it a healthy environment. Since it’s the entry point to creative endeavors for a lot of young people, it’s important to set them on the right path and offer a safe place to explore things.

Chengi: I do a small mix of character sprites and level design; though with the latter I tend to be more comfortable with the texture and environment design side of things. Outside of Kart though I make a living as a freelance artist, in addition to doing Graphic Design.

toaster: I’m an artist and programmer in general, though for Ring Racers and the SRB2 family programming is the more-used skill. I have a deep structural knowledge of the codebase and enough stamina and lateral thinking to re-engineer the dilapidated plumbing we’re built upon. My nickname on the Kart Krew discord has repeatedly been made some variant of “based” by Oni because when there’s some miserable show-stopping bug nobody wants to touch, I’m often the one who figures it out and powers through. (Also, Encore’s palette remap feature is my baby)

Lat': I can sprite and map but I'm better at programming than either of these. Although I haven't done much in SRB2Kart pre-release, I participated in the early patch cycle, released several addons, and am more actively contributing to Ring Racers' development. Outside of that, I play other games like Phantasy Star Online 2 or the Persona Series, and work on other addons for vanilla SRB2 and am aspiring to eventually start making something fully original someday.

MK:I mainly just do level design and occasionally produce my own music or remixes. If im doing neither of those im mostly chilling with friends.

SteelT: I can do programming, and a bit of mapping, mainly for vanilla SRB2 though, never done so for SRB2Kart or Ring Racers.

SeventhSentinel: I've been involved in the SRB2 scene since around 2009. I primarily do level design, and sometimes I contribute music and sounds to Krew. Most of my musical work goes to Snap the Sentinel, however.

2. Can you provide any comments about how you got involved with the SRB2 community for the first time? (If possible)

Chromatian: A friend of mine found the game online, showed me a 3D game that looked like Sonic 3, and I was sold. After learning about making custom maps, I started searching the community for more content and feedback. This was back in 2007.

VelocitOni: Unknown, I got into SRB2 around 2006-2007-ish because it just magically appeared on my windows XP computer one day, my strongest core memory was unexpectedly loading up in Christmas Mode and I was glued (thankfully after loading up my first mod, Ghoul’s Forest, and nearly being turned away). Joined the community itself in 2010 though.

Tyron: Someone linked me the SRB2Kart 1.0 trailer, I hosted it for my stream community to try out the next day. I had never heard of or interacted with SRB2 or Kart before that point. Crazy how I could have completely missed out on this if I had just checked the channel a little later…

Gunla: I lurked for several years starting in 2015 after stumbling onto SRB2 and then emerged around late 2018/early 2019 for Kart V1.0.

TehRealSalt: I have been playing SRB2 since 2004, joined the MB in 2007. I was just searching for Sonic games on Google and happened upon it, and all of the maps for the game felt magical.

VelocitOni: 2004, literally how

Charyb: I showed up around 2010. I had found it by accident when searching for Sonic R because I was catching up on Sonic entries I had never played, and it looked so unique and I had never heard of it before. I went from a player to a community member when I played Tortured Planet for the first time and got excited about the idea of composing a soundtrack for it. I never intended to stick around beyond getting a little practice with music, but… here I am today, and the community provided some of the best friends and eye-opening experiences I’ve had in my life.

Chengi: I've been playing SRB2 for at least a decade and a half -- I used to go to my public Library all the time and bring my 2008 Windows Vista Compaq Laptop and download things off the official site + mb and play it when I got home (since, at the time, I didn't have internet and would only get it like, a year later).

toaster: 1.08 in 2005/6. I was a literal child and enraptured by the process of working on videos game and their mods. Real ones remember the mspaint rounded rectangle tool spongebob.wad

Lat': I wanted to download Super Mario War (that game is great by the way) when I was around 8 or 9, instead I ended up on Softonic and found SRB2 2.0.1. I wouldn't actually start going into the forums until around 2012 where I quickly got banned for being a mix of annoying and bad at English, but that didn't stop me, heh…

MK: I used to be a ROM hacker and dreamed of creating my own ROM hack. SAGE 2009 came around and it showcased SRB2 2.0.6 for the 2nd time in iirc. I was instantly hooked to SRB2, mainly for ringslinger. Time passed and i learnt to map in 2015 and decided to share my progress and post maps on the MB for the community.

SteelT: 1.09.4 in 2008. Didn’t join the community itself until 2010. I was searching to see if there was any free Sonic games, ended up learning about SRB2 on some site that I don’t remember. First experience to the game’s modding scene was by joining a server that had The Mystic Realm added.

SeventhSentinel: Growing up, my family didn't have the budget for game consoles. The first one I owned was a green plug-and-play unit with Sonic Chaos and Sonic Spinball on it. After that was returned to the store (because I was playing it too much, apparently), I had few options besides scouring the internet for anything I could play with Sonic in it. It didn't take long for me to exhaust all the web based games, so I looked for ones that ran on Windows natively. I remember SRB2 being one of the first games I ever downloaded onto my mom's computer. It wasn't long before I discovered the forum and made an account. Took me a while to join #srb2fun, though. I was too young to understand what an IRC client was. The main highlight of my early days was getting such a bad score on an OLDC submission that I abandoned the account I submitted it on out of embarrassment.

3. Have you heard about or played JmanKart back in 2007? If this is the case, what can you comment about it?

Chromatian: I’ve played it once. It was a separate entity from Kart entirely, so it isn’t part of it’s history.

VelocitOni: Never got to play it, absolutely knew about it though at the time

TehRealSalt: I only got to play it offline. It was just a pure SOC + map + skins mod of vanilla SRB2, rather than gameplay edits like SRB2Riders was, so it was even more primitive, but it was cute.

SteelT: Never really got to play it that much online.

4. What was the first proper SRB2Kart incarnation you ever stumbled with? (Riders, D00DKart era, KartZ, indev Kart)

Chromatian: I spoke with Chaos Zero 64 back during the development of SRB2Riders. I suggested making a few maps for him, and he agreed.

VelocitOni: Broke CZ64’s DMs wall down as an assertive child (he might have thought I was an adult because of my typing LOL), he agreed and said I’d be working with Chrome and MotorRoach in 2011 or so (SRB2Riders). I specifically wanted to only improve the kart mode because I saw potential, a chunk of ideas even to this day are things I thought of then.

TehRealSalt: SRB2Riders. Never got to play any of them online until I got onto Kart Krew proper, just tinkered with all of them offline.

Charyb: SRB2Riders 2.0. Back when you could turn with mouselook, LOL.

Chengi: I got my start with Riders in 2.0. I don’t actually remember if I got the opportunity to do any netplay with it, though.

toaster: I hadn’t played a single round of Kart until I actually compiled my first indev build around 2017 or so, but watching the team’s old videos was enthralling.

Lat': SRB2 Riders in 2.0. I actually didn't like the Kart mode at all from it, I only played the Riders and footrace stages with friends, wouldn't be until Kart Z where I gained some appreciation for it despite the jank.

MK: Super Kart Z for me, the last iteration before V1 Kart released.

SteelT: Riders in 2.0, don’t recall if I ever played it online.

SeventhSentinel: Riders was my first. I loved Sonic Riders, so it was very exciting to play a version of it in SRB2. Too bad the multiplayer had long since died by the time I found it...

5. When did KartKrew formally become a thing? While I'm aware that it must have been around 2013-2014 as Kart and Top Down were starting development around that time, I'm wondering about how the group formed before that and then got its name.

VelocitOni: Yeah, that’s the exact period. Zarro left as the lead coder and disappeared entirely around 2013 before he came back in 2017-2018ish (Sryder took over for him). We moved to making TD with CoatRack because we got bored of Kart, but I cheekily called the group “Kart Krew” as a reminder to return to it sometime. The group is just the same group of people who’ve gotten steadily bigger and bigger from the SRB2Riders era.

6. Speaking of the name, if this can be answered, who came up with the KartKrew name?

VelocitOni: Hi

7. Any comment from the KartKrew members that joined later on about how they arrived at the team?

Tyron: You don’t really get invited to Krew so much as you get knocked out, abducted, and wake up in the developer channels a few hours later. The team actually conspired to keep my membership a secret until I accidentally scrolled the Kart Krew channel list and saw it, at which point I assumed it was a role hierarchy fuckup and DM’d Sal assuming something was wrong.

I have no clue why they did this (but it was pretty funny).

I was originally brought on for my sysop work on the Kart Master Server, plus a few scattered projects like HOSTMOD that were considered worth folding into the main game, but at some point between then and now, everyone somehow got the bizarre idea that I know how to program in C, which has led to a couple feature additions—plus I busted out my production stuff for the first time in years and have been adding some original music.

Even if there’s a pretense of bringing someone on for a specific skill, in the end, everyone does everything they can to move the project forward. It’s more about how well you mesh with the team.

Gunla: I got a Discord DM after coming home from work one day and got kidnapped because everyone felt bad about watching me cope with v1 mapping for several months on end. They specifically waited for me to get home for this, and I was extremely confused.

As Tyron said, people aren’t really brought in because they have a specific skill but moreso are able to mesh well with the team, both from a development and friend standpoint; I mostly did character spriting and less mapping in v1, the inverse has taken effect as I have more or less become a monster who spends a large amount of time churning away at levels in ZoneBuilder.

Chengi: Oni originally approached me in quite possibly the most polite way possible and asked if I wanted to be a part of the project -- to which I accepted. Now the man literally pings me for memes and wants me dead in netgames for braking with Quad orbinauts at the middle of every U-turn.

Charyb: I didn’t really join “later on” -- I was here from the beginning. But up until Top Down development I had mostly lurked. I woke up one day and the development channel had transitioned from public to private and I wasn’t included, so I went up to the front door and pounded and went “WILLLLLMAAAAAAAA!” and Dino let me in. (More accurately, I told them “Noooo let me in, I was just about to make a hub for Top Down, I want to be a part of it, I promise!”)

TehRealSalt: I always really admired Kart Krew before I got added (embarrassed about how much I watched their old netgame videos when they came out, lol). I only got added since I was friends with SeventhSentinel, and Sev got added IIRC just because he asserted himself :p. Apparently he was pushing for me on the team for a while, but I got added properly when I was visiting him and they were playing a netgame, and they added me just so I could be in the voice chat. Oni told me after the fact that my inclusion was a huge gamble.

SeventhSentinel: My memory of being added is pretty hazy, truth be told. What I remember the most is the sheer excitement I felt about being asked to join the team, given I had just very recently joined STJr. I'm very glad Oni added Sal. Some of my fondest memories are of developing Kart with her.

Lat': I was working on something else at the time which had neat looking particle effects like dust and explosions. I remember Oni DMing me to get them because they looked cool and ended up just abducting me instead.

It was several months before Kart's first release, the game still had Mario items and I didn't know anyone in the team whatsoever except a few by name, which made it extremely intimidating, and I wasn't even good at programming back then!

It took a long time for me to warm up and I *think* I caused quite a lot of issues in the process... I'm genuinely thankful for the patience I was shown, even to this day still, despite that. I feel that I've grown quite a lot from my experiences in Krew in various ways, and I love contributing to the game.

Plus, honestly? You're glad you don't have to see the old explosion effect!

toaster: It’s funny, this came up the other week – side note, Charyb is an amazing archivist. I was a talented but abrasive kid looking for places to cut my teeth on my burgeoning programming skills, a weird misguided attempt at recreating Top Down, and enough of a history with individuals in Krew that they inexplicably wanted me there anyways. This is back in the IRC era so no secret kidnapping into backroom channels occured, I was just offered an invite to their dev channel. Honestly, I’m really glad I have the friends I do.

MK:I was doing my thing, mapping and trying to create maps for Kart just for fun when all of a sudden Oni slides in my DM inviting me to join Kart Krew as a Developer. I was ecstatic as a lot of my energy in mapping was being put towards Kart at the time so I agreed to join. Of course this wasn't my first time speaking to a dev regarding contributions - the inclusion of Lake Margorite being added into Community Cup for the v1.1 update, is the other instance

SteelT: Oni slid into my DMs, and asked me if I wanted to join, for easier communication and help with the project, since I helped a lot with SRB2Kart. And also because james was pushing for me on the team.

8. I'm aware about how KartZ's successor was shown to be made in SRB2 2.0 as a base since 2013 until 2014 (the 2.0 indev phase), but what can be said about the transition from 2.0 indev to 2.1 indev?

VelocitOni: Coping

TehRealSalt: Coping

Chromatian: To explain the copium, SRB2Kart is using the 2.1 version of the SRB2 Codebase. For reference, every version of Kart has matched the then current version of SRB2. Riders for 1.09.4, KartZ for 2.0, and Kart for 2.1. Porting all of Kart’s codebase to be up-to-date with the current version of SRB2 lead to Massive Conflicts and problems. It’s not a fun process, and while it was marginally less frustrating for the older version of SRB2, the 2.2 update is enormous.

It’s so big, and our changes to the game were so deviated from it, that trying to maintain all of both codebases was a giant pain. For Ring Racers, we’ve cherry picked what we need from 2.2, so we can avoid all of those nasty conflicts, speeding up the process significantly. However, this DOES mean that the current release version of SRB2Kart is running on an outdated version of the base game, sorry!

9. Any comments about the strange drifting style in the 2.0 indev build where turning the opposite direction started a new drift? (The one that was released as April Fools) It feels inspired from the idea of Snaking in Mario Kart DS...

VelocitOni: That drifting style was actually based on Super Mario Kart and Super Circuit, wanted to ‘restart’ our standards with a nice 100% committal drifting style because it feels really fun when you master it in those two games. Unfortunately most of the level design already existed and didn’t accommodate for it, but we legitimately hated it less than the KartZ drift that ignored literally everything and did your visa papers (this was the start of the heavily committal gameplay style). It never actually played like SMK or SC because the acceleration physics pre SRB2_2.1 for low friction gameplay was awful. It stuck until Zarro helped in the porting process and wanted to bring more traditional drifting back, and I convinced him that losing your speed while turning was actually OK as a compromise.

10. When was it decided to replace the Mario Kart items with Sonic items? I'm aware that several of them are either enemies or items from the classic Sonic games, like the SPB being from Sonic 3's competition mode.

Chromatian: We wanted this as early as SRB2Riders, but back during the 1.09.4 era, custom content required solely executables for anything substantial, SOC was not robust enough for prototype ideas in. The amount of knowledge back then was pretty limited in the community, so the ideas were sat on for a pretty long time. You can see evidence of this in some of the YouTube videos of the older version of the game containing Rings(coins).

TehRealSalt: They were wanted for literally forever. They were implemented in SRB2Kart only months before release.

VelocitOni: I can get the (literal) decade old .txt sometime, but it’d be spoilers for Ring Racers LOL

11. Is there an answer for why hops while starting drifts were removed? I noticed that in Riders 2.0 and before they were exploitable to cut through off-road but this was patched in KartZ, so I wondered if there were more reasons beyond that for cutting it.

TehRealSalt: I wasn’t around when the decision was made, but from my knowledge: because it is a “literal” hop instead of a “fake” hop like in SMK. SMK has it just act like regular driving, but jumpstarts your turning and makes you not go into death pits. In old Kart it was literal vertical movement which means dodging everything (including offroad, as you noted), and friction doesn’t apply in the air so it just feels weird and different.

VelocitOni: Try drifting down a flight of stairs in KartZ and see how long it takes you to touch the ground.

Pictured in the following video: Drifting down a flight of stairs in "KartZ" to see how long it takes to touch the ground.

12. How would you say that SRB2 Top Down influenced the development of SRB2Kart?

Chromatian: Top Down was a break from our kart development to work on something different and tackle another aspect of SRB2 we thought needed more love (A bigger focus on a Single-player experience with multiple players cooperating).

Charyb: Top Down was where we began really appreciating high presentation values. Even if it was fated to only be a demo, we were very proud of Top Down. We didn’t get to pop off in SRB2Kart in a similar fashion as much as we’d have liked (due to having to focus a lot on purely mechanical aspects + a lot of legacy content) but we definitely are going to with Ring Racers.

13. Aside from [insert racing game with plumber here], what inspirations there were for SRB2Kart's presentation and gameplay?

Chromatian: Kirby Air Ride is a big one.

TehRealSalt: Fighting games.

VelocitOni: Sonic 3 & Knuckles

14. Just by chance, who came up with the idea of rebranding Pipe Speedway to Daytona Speedway?

Chromatian: That would be Blade. He’s the original author of the map, and we honestly couldn’t stand seeing the mario anymore LOL.

TehRealSalt: I think I remember being the one to delete the pipe geometry from the new version. I replaced the one pipe that was important to a U-turn with the water tower you see in the current version. But the rename itself was Blade.

15. If this can be answered, what was the last race map finished for SRB2Kart before release?

Chromatian: That would be Sand Valley Zone..

toaster: I thought it was Gramet (Editor’s note: Grand Metropolis). Actually, it probably depends on the meaning of “finished” - Gramet’s layout was complete but required cleanup quite close to the wire.

TehRealSalt: Sand Valley or Paradise Hill, IDK which. (Definitely not Grand Metropolis LOL)

VelocitOni: Sand Valley and Paradise Hill tying for 1st place POST-feature-freeze making Sal have a meltdown is unforgettable

16. Any fun stories from playing SRB2Kart during its development or after its release?

The team replied with these two playlists to answer this question:

17. Is there a definitive answer about why 3 Color Drive was left at Map Hell?

TehRealSalt: The same one we always give: it was made by D00D literally before the game came out in regular SRB2 without being able to even playtest it (he wasn’t on the dev team at the time). We thought it was a cute way to honor some pre-release hype but doesn’t really play well in SRB2Kart, since there’s lots of straight-aways. Works a lot better in Ring Racers, though.

18. What can be said about the difficult yet polished maps that were left at Map Hell like Crystal Abyss and Black Bliss, which clearly were worked on during Kart's development?

Chromatian: We’ve mentioned this a few times before, but Crystal Abyss was the only map intended for Map Hell. There was a lot of effort put into it, and we didn’t want that effort to go to waste, but there was no real fit for it the base roster. So we placed it as a secret chance. Other maps that were either too old, or not finished enough to justify being placed in a normal rotation

19. Were there any maps made during SRB2Kart's development that were cut before release? (Not counting any maps present in KartZ)

Chromatian: Two maps from me, actually. Waterway Circuit (this can actually be found in a v1 pack on the message board) And Ramp Park. Ramp Park was a redesign of Shy Guy Circuit from Super SRB2 Kart Z. Shy Guy Circuit eventually became Hill Top Zone.

TehRealSalt: Stardust Speedway Battle. It had a cool 3D eggman statue but the author didn’t use our playtest criticism so we left it out.

VelocitOni: Stardust Speedway, race version (same author), was also removed. It never got finished because instead of just ripping tilesets for textures, there was too much focus on making reimaginings of them. It actually had a time travel gimmick for lap 4 where everyone would be moved to Good or Bad Future. Turbo Speedway (a non-distinct circuit with Mushroom Hill textures) by Ryuspark also didn’t make it.

20. Any memories from when SRB2Kart was finally golden and announced its release date through a trailer in November 2018?

toaster Beyond the sheer bewilderment at the reaction? Two. There was this guy who was desperate for us to do an interview while we were fixing last minute bugs for the sake of the deadline on their article. And the last minute bugs we were fixing, which was to do with communication between the game and the master server (we added multiadmin and changed the number of gametypes, so the server browser got messed up)

VelocitOni: That guy kind of harassed us there ngl, that was annoying

Charyb: It was going to surprise many how much traction kart was going to get, but it didn’t surprise me at all. I hadn’t touched kart much during indev (I cared more about Top Down for a while) but when Sryder told me to check out some of the most recent progress and him and I played sometime in late 2017/early 2018 I was like “Oh, uh, this is going to be really big.” I’ve always loved following the gamedev market and watching trends or identifying untapped markets, so I knew kart was in a barely tapped genre on PC..It was going to surprise many how much traction kart was going to get, but it didn’t surprise me at all. I hadn’t touched kart much during indev (I cared more about Top Down for a while) but when Sryder told me to check out some of the most recent progress and him and I played sometime in late 2017/early 2018 I was like “Oh, uh, this is going to be really big.” I’ve always loved following the gamedev market and watching trends or identifying untapped markets, so I knew kart was in a barely tapped genre on PC.

21. For visual designers, how would describe the process of refining sprites and textures for Kart?

TehRealSalt For Kart? No process LOL. The parts of SRB2Kart that look consistent is purely because one guy (Oni) did all of them. For Ring Racers we established an actual defined style guide.

Tyron: OUUUUUUGGGGHHHHHHH THE FRONT FACING SPRITE IS EVEN WIDTH BUT THE BACK SPRITE IS ODD WIDTH HOW DID I DO THIS” - Oni, yesterday

Chengi: We have a lot of our own internal style guides that people like Oni have established for our art direction. Our sprites have very specific levels of antialiasing and color depth to create a really nice pre-rendered look. Our texturing process has a little bit more variety to it as it can go from super simplistic, three-color textures with minimal antialiasing to more defined textures with lots of dithering, patterns, etc. Sometimes we even just take photorealistic textures and reduce the color to make it look as clean as regular pixel art.

VelocitOni: Twerking right now to the fact that most of my SRB2Kart art was made when I was 15. All of my Ring Racers stuff is a way better example of what can be done today, a lot of people don’t realize that the crusty things they see predate v1 itself by that long. If I had any chance to completely redo everything from the ground up though, it’d have been drastic (remove all outlines, reduce shades dramatically, 16-Angle sprites, reduced anti alias etc etc). I have to compromise a lot.

22. For any of the track designers: How would you describe your experience designing levels for the game?

Gunla Everyone tends to have different methods and speeds, but for race levels, things usually start from a general top down physical sketch, and then I usually map the layout over the course of a few days (though for a lot of battle maps it’s usually doable in a single mapping session).. From there, gameplay testing becomes the focus, and once the layout is solid enough, visuals become the last major touch.

There are several mapping tools and standards practiced in-dev that have allowed the mapping process to be much faster overall, which in turn makes it more approachable; we’ve largely moved away from sector scenery and dense but small details in favor of more stylized textures and heavy use of midtextures to make sceneries pop and feel more 3D than before (it’s also just much easier to maintain!).

The power of having a development team eager to test and see new content means that pain points often can get solved in maps and the kinks can be ironed out far before the map becomes more troublesome to adjust.

Chengi: The first thought on my mind is usually how I want my level to play, how I want it to feel to drive, what gimmicks to include, how I want it to flow, etc. Once I'm finished with that I usually draft out a potential layout sketch and block that out. If I'm sure about how I want it to look visually I'll make a couple textures in advance, but typically never enough to get ahead of myself.

Charyb: I could not stand mapping for v1, because the process was too hellish in too many regards. I am extremely keen to how bad some of the workflow obstacles in srb2 are, and they were dealbreakers to me, on top of the additional stuff like v1’s checkpoints. You’ll see a lot of maps from me in v2 because with the assistance of amazing coders like james, we’ve made it possible to make ambitious maps in a fraction of the time.

To me, a map that’s not properly planned out will always suffer by nature of not having gone through proper idea curation. I conceptualize a bunch of setpieces which feel fitting with a given theme, cull the least interesting ones. Then I build the remaining ones in a modular fashion and see what kind of nice connecting geometry I need to put it all together.

Visuals are not a coat of paint you put on top of a map; the visuals of a map should directly be referenced in the shape of the track and the places you go in it.

TehRealSalt: I just come up with 3 or 4 specific areas that I want to see in the map, and then play the individual turns to get to those areas by ear.

Lat': I try to come up with a unique gimmick and then come up with a stage around it, rarely the other way around. It's not always a great idea because that can clash pretty badly with the game's core gameplay to begin with, and some maps just didn't end up working well as a result, but when it *does* works, hoooh boy…

MK: I start with layout then gimmicks as they are the foundations of the map, then I add the rest such as textures and decorations. Once that's all done I do vigorous testing alone and with over devs to make sure the level is good and accessible.

I don't merge my work straight away as I want it to be the best it can be out the gate. Lots of design philosophies go through the mapping process such as: layout flow, how well is catch up, theming and so much more

Chromatian: I always aim to work with a new design style or gimmick for any map I make. Once I have what I want to tackle, I craft a layout. Music is a massive motivator, and really helps push out a unique design.

SeventhSentinel: I map pretty sporadically, so a big part of my experience is bothering people to help me figure out how the latest new mechanic works. I tended to make rough layouts by pure stream of consciousness, but going forward I'll be doing a lot more planning ahead of time. It'll help me get out of the habit of making maps out of glorified 90 degree turns lol

23. For any of the responsible for the gameplay: What was the direction intended when designing Kart?

Chromatian: The goal was to provide a kart racer that allowed for player skill in every aspect to shine. This meant that every item needed to have some form of counterplay to be avoided or defended against. An example of this is making invincibility react to thrown items. We didn’t have enough time to balance them all though. We especially hate Shrink and Hyuduro, the former because it’s ripped straight from Mario Kart. And the latter has gone through several strange updates as a sunk cost fallacy to keep it in the game.

VelocitOni: SRB2Kart is designed to be a casual-competitive skill based kart racer that gives the player full control of their vehicle and doesn’t feel as slow and on-rails as more modern “over-polished” kart racers. I explicitly kept emphasis on the fact that we should be able to do “V-turns'' and do crazy maneuvers all over the place, that’s an aspect from kart racers pre-MKWii that’s just completely gone because it’s considered “jank”.

Everything is meant to be gradual and momentum based because I strongly dislike binary states and execution (BAN INSTATHRUST), so boosts, drift boosts, handling, and acceleration are either curves or have many layers to them. For Ring Racers, we’re taking every aspect of that design to the next level because we have more time to just do everything we left out of SRB2Kart; also taking the “momentum based kart racer” thing to a stupidly literal degree.

The idea of graduality with everything extends to even more abstract stuff like disadvantage states and positions. If you’re getting ‘karted’ it should snowball just a bit, if you’re recovering well you should be able to steamroll. Nothing should ever be instantaneous or based on raw reaction time, things have to be built around prediction and planning (drifting before a turn happens, less braking time for trap items).

A lot of this is because the game is built around delay-based netcode, so it’s important to not give people with low ping too much of an advantage and instead focus on simpler ideas everyone can have fun with. I’ve said before that if perfectly precise netcode existed, SRB2Kart would’ve had real insta-shields (2 tics, reflect any hazard), then the design would’ve shifted toward perfect-play instead of minimizing mistakes.

Another important thing to me is just letting shit happen instead of trying to put artificial caps on behaviors, even if it’s whacky, especially the player. If you feel like you should be able to do it, then you should be able to do it, especially because it’s funny. The game must be clippable.

24. Was the Self-Propelled Bomb at one point going to chase and land no matter what you do like the infamous Blue Shell? Or the idea of being able to run away from it was always intended ever since it was decided as the replacement for it?

TehRealSalt: Watch our old videos for “Blue Lightning”, which was SRB2KartZ’s way of implementing it. Just an instant explosion onto 1st place with no counter play. The whole point of SPB was to never look back at that. :V

VelocitOni: Blue Lightning sucked, when SPB was conceived though…there was literally no point where I didn’t want the SPB to do what it does now. Even if SPB has problems rebalancing the race together, it’s better to do anything other than what the Spiny Shell does.

25. Were all of the tracks were worked on separately by different KartKrew level designers? Or were most of them made between two or more designers?

Gunla: Some level designers tend to work solo, but a large number of our more recent race levels have usually been group efforts. Often it can turn into someone working on a map and some texture artists get excited and say “Hey, if you’re gonna work on that I’d be happy to contribute a few textures!”. Then it spirals out of control and then suddenly we’re dabbing each other up to make some crazy good stuff.

Other times it’ll sometimes consist of 1-2 people who divy up the mapping and texture work in some fashion, which allows for general oversight throughout the mapping process, so that potential issues can get spotted even before it gets to testing. For myself, I’ve had several levels I’ve worked on by myself and a few that had as many as 5 mappers and artists combined providing assists.

Chengi: As far as Ring Racers goes, we've done multiple collabs, actually. Ramp Park was a triangle effort between the likes of Chrome, Oni and I -- Chrome did the layout, Oni a majority of the textures, and myself the other half of the textures and environment design. Dark Fortress was handled in a very similar fashion where it was Chrome's layout with texture assistance from both Oni and I, with myself doing the remaining chunk of environment design there, too. Beyond that I usually assist with a loose texture here and there, and there are a couple cases where it's just someone else and I going ham on the whole thing.

MK: I tend to work solo BUT there are sometimes where I can't ignore that I need help and that's OK! Helping each other can range from just a few textures to designing a gimmick. In fact i done about 2 collabs.

26. What can be commented about the music choices for the game?

Gunla: I can answer a bit with regards to levels; we tend to have a few rules in place, but often it comes down to wanting to pick BANGERS for music that’ll be memorable, catchy and cool to race to. A lot of the time you can tell who might have made a map by what the music source is, so it adds just the extra oomph of personality to someone’s work.

VelocitOni: The “rule” is even stricter for Ring Racers, but: do not use any mainstream music anywhere near Nintendo in any way, do not use actual Sonic music for maps unless it’s actually a course named and based after a Sonic stage. Obscure beats are what give things more identity, even custom community maps. Ring Racers has a tiny bit more fully original pieces though.

27. Any particular comment about Map Hell?

toaster: I was the one to implement the force-pick if everyone voted Random, but had no clue what it would do to the social dynamics of public netgames and streamers’ chats until it was too late. It placed a lot more emphasis on Map Hell than the 1/100 chance it should have had, and the joke just… got old way quicker than it would have otherwise. I hope that when a future stable 1.x patch is released and the community migrates to that version, people will appreciate the de-emphasis.

TehRealSalt: Map Hell was only meant to be a way to have Crystal Abyss without making it appear in regular votes, since it was obnoxiously harder than the rest of our maps but we still enjoyed playing on it. The rest were kinda shoved in haphazardly by random mappers as the feature’s scope creeped, I never agreed with it being used for that.

VelocitOni: Handsome to seething Mr. Incredible meme, but it’s indev to post-release respectively. If it’s not good then it shouldn’t be in the game…but currently it’s working good for extra important archive purposes.

28. If this can be answered, who was the first to decide on Simon Stalenhag's Fluvial Beat Deposits as the main theme for the game?

TehRealSalt: Think it was VelocitOni. We were sick of the title screen being Green Grove on the generic Sonic Advance background.

29. Is it true that the Krew asked for Simon Stalenhag's permission to use the song in the game? I had heard something about that and always was curious about what was his answer or reaction in that case.

TehRealSalt: We asked for permission. He was cool with it.

Charyb: There’s a little bit more to it: We originally released without getting his permission. The small nature of SRB2 content at the time made this pretty standard, but I feel pretty anxious about it thinking back; I’m glad his reaction was so positive. In January 2019 (very soon after release) after giving it some more thought when it became part of the identity of our game, we touched base with him about it, and he thought it was cool.

30. If this can be answered, who was the first to decide on Simon Stalenhag's Fluvial Beat Deposits as the main theme for the game?

SeventhSentinel: I wish I had made time to extend Hill Top's music like I originally planned. I still think it turned out pretty good. Aurora Atoll’s music was ultimately a pretty boring choice for a race track, and I only used it because I already had it from when I was working on the single player version of the map. I need to learn to make a proper tropical theme with lots of energy. It’s something I’ve struggled with since I began writing music for some reason.

I’ve got some cool new remixes coming in Ring Racers. I hope people enjoy them!

31. What would be your most satisfying moment out of working on Kart?

Gunla: I had a map that took over a year to finish on and off work and when it was done I was genuinely just crying over it at some extremely late hour into the night (it hasn't been shown off publicly). Sometimes it can take quite a while for ideas to come together, and being able to finally put some of it to fruition is extremely satisfying.

Chengi: Making Joypolis for Ring Racers. That map was made with so much genuine love and care that I will never not be proud with the end result. Especially after taking inspiration from such an obscure source, packing it in with as much Sonic flair as I can, and fleshing it out to be an entire zone out of just two pieces of artwork.

Charyb: Learning how to use modern FX tools like After Effects to step up the animated texture game. It’s allowed me to create a lot of jaw-dropping assets that would have never been possible before.

toaster: The day I figured out why Encore’s software index remapping wasn’t working properly, which was also the reason transparency stacked weirdly in older versions of SRB2

TehRealSalt: Think the first thing that got me super comfortable with working on Kart was implementing the Staff Ghost system. The thing that has satisfied me the most on Ring Racers was making the new Shrink.

VelocitOni: Redoing the kart sprites themselves for SRB2Kart. Redoing the kart sprites themselves for Ring Racers.

Lat': While my truest pride lies elsewhere at the moment, I'm quite happy with the new gimmicks I've made for Ring Racers so far. I think modders will have a blast using some of them when they get their grubby hands on them…

Editor's note: It is possible to assume that this what Lat' refers to at the time of this interview would be SRB2Infinity, a Phantasy Star Portable-styled gameplay overhaul of a mod that would be released months after the interview.

MK: Making Toxic Tundra. Very happy with how it turned out.

SeventhSentinel: I felt really great after I finished Sonic Speedway. I wasn't sure I would be any good at designing for a racing game, but I proved that I could do it. My new tracks in Ring Racers also gave me some nice dopamine on completion; I could tell just by looking at them how much I had improved.

32. What would you say that was the most difficult part out of working on Kart?

TehRealSalt: Dealing with checkpoints / boss waypoints.

Chengi: THE ETERNAL, ONGOING STRUGGLE AGAINST FLOOR TEXTURE ALIGNMENT IN DIFFERENT RENDERERS. THE TORMENT WILL NEVER END. PLEASE SAVE ME

VelocitOni: Convincing dev that we needed bumping and item knockback (there originally was not going to be player collision, and items that hit you would just set your speed to 0 instantly), Sal’s always the experimental homie though. (Everyone has gotten way more open with being experimental post v1, or maybe I’m just thinking of a select few moments)

Lat': Figuring out that working alone on something for months may in fact not be a great idea.

Gunla: One character typos in code that cause everything to break and make me lose numerous precious hours of dev time. It happens more often than I'd like to admit.

Chromatian: Staff Attack was a stressful week of managing everyone’s ghosts and making sure that each person who claimed their course got to make a ghost for said ghost. It was probably our hardest crunch and we still talk about how awful it was to get it ready to this day.

SeventhSentinel: I struggled to learn how waypoints worked. To this day I have no idea how Kart's waypoints work at all anymore. We have a new system for it in Ring Racers that I have a basic understanding of, but I keep having to have other mappers fix my waypoints for me. Send help.

33. What would you say that was the most FUN moment you've had while working on Kart?

Chengi: In Ring Racers, when I was making my Sakura Wars map -- Hanagumi Hall. It's my second favorite SEGA Franchise outside of Sonic, and I wanted to make a map filled to the brim with fanservice, and give it levels of presentation that made it feel straight out of the games. It's probably one of the most niche, specific things I've made for the game but I care so much about the finished product that I'd gladly do it again.

Editor's note: Chengi shared a screenshot of a Sakura Wars map on their Twitter account in 2021- potentially the one mentioned. Note that by the time of Ring Racers's release, this might or might not be outdated.

Chromatian: Just watch these playlists:

toaster: Mine is a secret for now. I made it in 5 days with Tyron (and probably should have gotten more sleep while doing so). I hope you like it when you see it

Gunla: Probably making the SEGA Saturn battle map for Ring Racers. I actually took detailed reference shots of my Saturn to ensure it was a relatively accurate conversion, and then making the bios screen be the skybox felt like such an extra touch. The TV in the skybox also displays images of Saturn games we've referenced in Ring Racers, with some of those images being taken from output on a real console.

Editor's note: Gunla also had shared screenshots of this map in Twitter as well in 2022- once again might or might not be outdated compared ot the final game...but that's definitely a SEGA Saturn right there!

SeventhSentinel: I worked with Chengi to visually overhaul Sonic Speedway for Ring Racers. Every new texture he made put a huge grin on my face. I don't know how he does it. It was immensely satisfying to drive through once the overhaul was complete.

Actually, now that I think of it, seeing Sal create the mobjscale functionality was pretty satisfying too, since I came up with the idea. I needed it so that I could solve rendering issues in Hill Top by shrinking the entire course. It gets used in pretty much every single map now.

34. How could you describe working with the SRB2 engine for whatever work you had to do? (Visual design, mapping, coding)

TehRealSalt: It’s strangely both convenient in some ways and unbearably obnoxious in other ways.

toaster: Fully cosigned

Lat': It's both great and awful at the same time, I don't know how this is possible.

MK: For mapping there are some obscure rules you need to adhere too since its an old engines such as: Having vertices on anything below the 4 pixel grid will give you slime trails and terrible optimization on larger scale maps - In Ring Racers we’ve designed most of the newer maps to MobjScale in mind to help with optimisation. Safe to say it's a balancing act with Mapping on this engine sometimes.

Charyb: The SRB2 engine is extremely accessible for simple projects. Great place for people to learn the basics of spriting and level design and get fast and easy results (like SMBX!) But the more ambitious your project gets, the more it will fight you and leave you high and dry when you’re looking for tools to do what you want to do. It’s the opposite of many game engines that have high bars of entry but plateau when you really begin to familiarize yourself with the tools.

SteelT: Pretty much what TehRealSalt said, it has its upsides and downsides.

SeventhSentinel: Mapping for SRB2 isn't that bad, but after mapping for Snap the Sentinel (which uses a more advanced mapping format), I totally lost interest in mapping for SRB2 for a while. It's current year and we can't just click on a vertex and use the scroll wheel to make a slope with it? I never had too much trouble with anything else I wanted to do.

35. Any comments about the Record Attack staff ghosts in SRB2Kart? Most of them aren't particularly difficult but I had heard that they were played without using their 100% of skill for them to be easier. There's some infamously tough ones like Toxic Palace's Staff Ghost though…

toaster: The record attack ghosts in their *entirety* were an exhausting thing. As the person who took point on organizing them by the end of proceedings, they had to begin in earnest after “feature freeze” for the maps, and get a significant number of people to record runs under fairly strict conditions (only one person could go even semi-hard in the early cups and had to “reserve” their slots on an online doc, etc). It was an absolute hassle we were obligated to partake in because SRB2Kart would have no viable singleplayer content otherwise, and while we’re still a ways away from the equivalent stage of development, it goes without saying Ring Racers has learned from that chaos.

VelocitOni: The Staff Ghosts are set to sandbag for the entirety of the level roster to give the player a chance to feel good while learning the game, because it’s easy to seriously underestimate just how bad new players can be. That stops around the first unlockable cup in Toxic Palace where it was extremely intentional to get bodied by the slowest character available to you in the base game. That was actually done to show the player how far the controls can actually be pushed, especially if they bumble up to that point and still doubted the mechanics (super helpful that you can just view the ghost’s replay itself for proof).

Every ghost past that point still sandbags to a certain degree (see my Volcanic Valley ghost iirc), and the gold medals would’ve been even harder around that point in the game if we had more dev time (Eggman’s Nightclub ghost was meant to take the secret roof-skip route around the end).

Chromatian: Staff Attack was an idea I tossed to the group. I really didn’t want the playerbase to fumble with the gameplay with nothing to look towards for reference on what was possible. I asked for several ghosts per stage so players can watch and gleam things to use in their own gameplay. Most were goofy, but a few show off things that might be interesting.

36. Any comments about Battle mode? Even though it hasn't been a popular mode, there's some people that still enjoy it today.

TehRealSalt: I just coded Battle mode in an afternoon because I was wondering why no one tried making it before. It didn’t really get a lot of polish, I don’t even like it anymore lol.

SeventhSentinel: I was SO excited for Kart to have Battle mode since there was next to nothing like it on PC at the time. I promptly made several maps for it, one of which was reskinned for Snap the Sentinel (wherein it plays much better LOL)

37. How do you feel about the amount of custom content and servers made by the Kart community?

Lat' I personally think that this is the pulse that keeps Kart, and more generally SRB2 going. If it wasn't for modders, Kart itself wouldn't even exist to begin with, and I'm personally amazed at the quantity and especially the quality of some of the content out there.

MK: I find it hilarious we have so much content. I'm happy the community stands strong to create racers, tracks, gamemodes…. Heck, it even has VR support!! Keep going guys!

Charyb: Absolutely amazing. It’s crazy how much imagination and talent goes into people’s creations. Some of of my favorite things to see are when people bring their personal OCs, worlds, or games (if they’re a dev) into kart. It gives me the same high that seeing a fun crossover episode in your favorite cartoon does.

SeventhSentinel: There are so many new mods coming out that we had to add more staff to the forums to keep up with submissions. The amount of content and the sheer talent and effort behind so much of it boggles my mind. It’s honestly quite incredible.

38. Any comments about Battle mode? Even though it hasn't been a popular mode, there's some people that still enjoy it today.

TehRealSalt: I just coded Battle mode in an afternoon because I was wondering why no one tried making it before. It didn’t really get a lot of polish, I don’t even like it anymore lol.

SeventhSentinel: I was SO excited for Kart to have Battle mode since there was next to nothing like it on PC at the time. I promptly made several maps for it, one of which was reskinned for Snap the Sentinel (wherein it plays much better LOL)

39. A lot of people have stumbled upon SRB2Kart thanks to streams and videos from some content creators like Lythero and Vinesauce, as well as Kart content creators like coraldev. Any comments about this?

Tyron: The chain of events between “Chrome and Oni watch my ancient Elsword videos” and “I am now developing Ring Racers” included a brief pitstop at my Twitch stream—we basically met there, and I wouldn’t know anyone on the team as well as I do if they hadn’t dropped in.

The longer I spend with the team, the more I realize that everyone is actually super tuned in to what’s going on in the community, even if they keep quiet about it and let people find their own fun.

40. How were the Community Cup tracks chosen to be included in the SRB2Kart v1.1 update?

Charyb: Around the time the Community Cup tracks were chosen, the modding scene was still relatively in its infancy, and there were only about 80 (rough estimate) community tracks total. We sat down in a long session and loaded up each and every one to check them out, and made a note of our favorites, and why. A lot of our favorites ended up being from the same author or two, so we limited ourselves to one at most per creator.

The reasons why we chose each one could differ, as well. Lake Margorite was one of the first community maps ever made, with a good bit of it being mapped out before the game even released. Kart Airlines on the other hand, we just found extremely cute, with tons of amazing little details in the visuals. I was working in the airlines at the time, too, so I found it especially charming and familiar.

VelocitOni: The behavior of the community member themselves also plays a major role on whether we should work with them or not.

41. How do you feel about SRB2Kart as it is today?

TehRealSalt: Mixed. I’m proud of actually getting something out, but extremely regretful of not waiting on all of our features we wanted instead of giving into Smash Bros Ultimate release pressure.

VelocitOni: Everything that I hear people like about it were things we intended, most stuff people dislike about it are because we had to rush. Most Ring Racers mechanics were planned post KartZ; you can literally figure out how to turn on rings and see them in the v1 SMK maps, and a couple old KartZ videos with them still exist. I feel like because we cut dev short, we at least definitely nailed the aspect of a more skill-based kart racer in terms of racing lines and consistency.

What has me mixed is that there’s no non-RNG catch-up mechanics, those keep actual equally skilled players in the same bracket to continually and actively defend their position. Instead, it’s based around front-running after the first few seconds of chaos (first person to touch a sector edge loses 12 places and has to pray for an item). When we were laughing at Chrome streaming KartZ footage which was so strangely somehow balanced, Sal said:

“[SRB2Kart] is in the weird middle ground where the punishments are really severe but there’s no catch-up”. Our next goal is to reduce unfair frustration and add as much consistent counterplay as possible. I’m glad people enjoy it though, I just don’t feel like it was done! (I’m sorry if this sounds more negative than it should…LOL). To be fair we just needed to get it out anyway.

I can’t forget the guy in the first public lobby who told me he took off work for v1, and the other dude who admitted to already putting in 40 hours in one day. I’m not surprised it spawned a big community and people are addicted to it because there was genuine effort put into making a competent game that’s also free, the kind of games where you can just look at gameplay footage and know who’s cracked, while having a decent skill floor that everyone can enjoy.

42. Were there features intended for SRB2Kart that didn't get finished in time and got scrapped altogether or moved to Dr. Robotnik Ring Racers?

Toaster: Rings.

TehRealSalt: Mixed. Rings, new waypoints, tethering, Shrink & Hyudoro reworks, boost stacking.

VelocitOni: Tumble, a bunch of items we’ve never talked about yet, Tutorial Zone (music was picked out 8-9 years ago), fast-falling, non-RNG based item roulette. Driftboost vfx literally got cut during feature freeze (I AM COPING), air-boosting was meant to be in SRB2Kart w/ that visual (this is why you can drift-store). There’s a lot more than this.

43. Are there any comments you want to make about the future Dr. Robotnik Ring Racers?

VelocitOni: Going from functionally an online arcade kart-racer to a thick substantial video game that doesn’t need to solely rely on modded content for longevity takes time.

44. Do you consider SRB2Kart will still have a place in the future after Ring Racers?

Chromatian: The last thing I want is for the history to be lost. I still play levelpacks from version 1.09.4, and I think the community will still mess with v1 alongside Ring Racers.

TehRealSalt: I am completely uninterested in deleting history for the sake of deleting history. I wanna even go the extra step and keep the Master Server available. I also hope the SRB2MB team is willing to keep the releases forum open for it.

VelocitOni: I was kinda originally so mixed on SRB2Kart being “unfinished” that I admit I wanted Ring Racers to just be an update “over” it, but I like the idea of just having two games even more. Now Melee players can play Melee while we work on P+ :V

Charyb: Even if Ring Racers is pretty much all of Kart Krew’s dream game, SRB2Kart is extremely important as a separate entity on its own. I was actually the one who said authoritatively that SRB2Kart’s Addons section on the MB must stay open when Ring Racers is released. It hasn’t been precedent to allow mods for “old versions of the game” on the SRB2 forum, but that’s not a good precedent. It’s not even good for vanilla SRB2, much less kart, where there are even more reasons to tinker around with old versions.

45. Just by chance, do you have any comments on Vanilla SRB2 (or your involvement in it, if you happen to have any?)

toaster: I was the lead programmer on SRB2 2.2 for a large chunk of its development, in addition to being the mastermind behind one of the character redesigns, so its successful launch (no day-one-patch required!) is one of my proudest moments. There is a lot of myself in that release.

Lat': I like to call Vanilla SRB2 my “Sandbox”, I tried all sorts of stuff in it that honestly have no business being here and it singlehandedly shaped my programming skills (for better and for worse). I may not play it as much anymore but I love this game to death.

SeventhSentinel: After we started designing Kart/Ring Racers like they were Sonic games, SRB2 itself stopped feeling like a Sonic game to me. It is still one of the best Sonic fangames out there, but my interest in it is currently limited to helping out with the backend stuff. I think it’s only a matter of time before my interest in it increases again, but it’ll be hard to make time for it with all my other projects going on.

46. Any personal projects to share?

toaster: I was the lead programmer on SRB2 2.2 for a large chunk of its development, in addition to being the mastermind behind one of the character redesigns, so its successful launch (no day-one-patch required!) is one of my proudest moments. There is a lot of myself in that release.

VelocitOni: Play Snap the Sentinel

SeventhSentinel: You can find it at snapgame.net.

Lat': Uuuh try SRB2Persona out, it's an amalgamation of Sonic and Persona, in the same engine, a turn based multiplayer RPG & dungeon crawler! (How)

47. Any thoughts about when I requested this interview? (Its something that I tend to ask after one)

Chromatian: I was initially worried you’d be lacking extremely important details about the history on how Kart even became anything at all LOL

48. Any special thanks to give?

Chromatian: Chaos Zero 64 was the one who started the whole thing. He not only made a fully functional Sonic Riders gametype in SRB2 (Gear types, boosting, tricks, drifting, level-ups) He also made a very respectable kart mode, more in depth than JmanKart. And even included a more balanced race gametype for standard SRB2 Gameplay. Some of those ideas from the race gametype we still keep in mind today. None of this would have been possible without him making such a robust mod so early in SRB2’s lifespan.

VelocitOni: Still fucked up that ZarroTsu crossed CZ64’s name out of his own splash screen and ran with it, I’ve been doing my best to rectify that for like a decade now by replacing almost every single asset and concept possible. I wonder what ChaosZero64 is doing these days…

49. Do you have any special message for the Kart community?

Tyron: Kart will live forever!

Gunla: It’s always really nice to see all of the passion the community has, from the multiplayer servers to the content people always make; I try to keep tabs and watch what people make in modding channels pretty frequently and it’s really nice to see everyone working on their craft. I hope that energy can be maintained for as long as it possibly can!

Charyb: Agreed with Gunla. Even though I don’t get to check out modded content as often as I’d like, I’m always surprised, amazed, and excited by what I see when I set aside the time to. I love it all, from the studio-quality creations to the outsider art.

SeventhSentinel: Be excellent to each other.