Well, we didn’t have anything special prepared for the big day. It kinda snuck up on us. Sorry.

So instead of showing something off, we wanted to hear from you! We asked what your favorite memories of SRB2 were on social media. There were plenty of people talking about downloading the game on to their school computers, nostalgia for almost every version of the game (and every mod you’d expect), big achievements in speedrunning, antics in netgames, and much, much more. If you’d like to take a real trip down memory lane, check out the many responses to our post on Twitter.

As for me, the big hype trains behind the v2.2 and SRB2Kart releases were big highlights, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss struggling to play Final Demo netgames on mom’s slow PC and slow internet. Well, okay, maybe only a little bit.

What SRB2 gave me that I’ll remember the most is the drive to learn and grow. To put it shortly, I may have never gone down the path of game development if I didn’t have a free Sonic game to make levels for as a kid. I wouldn’t have met any of the people I now consider to be my best friends, either, and they wouldn’t have helped shape me into who I am today.

Thank you SSNTails, Sonikku, all of STJr and Kart Krew, and everyone else who contributed to SRB2 and/or its community over the years.

I can’t tell you if I’ll still be here writing news posts in 25 years, but whether I am or not, I think SRB2 will still be around in one form or another by then. After all, it’s proved to be a great platform for people to have fun playing and creating, and that’s not changing any time soon.

I look forward to seeing that future. I hope you do, too.

Hello everybody! If you’ve been paying attention to our Discord server and our social media accounts, then you’re already aware that the latest OLDC pack is out. There are some pretty good maps in it that you should definitely check out, especially since we’ve just put out a patch that fixes issues in four of the maps. This round is a little different from previous one, though — from this round forward, OLDC no longer stands for Official Level Design Contest. Instead, it stands for Official Level Design Collab!

We made this change for several important reasons. First, we felt that removing the contest element from the event would create a more positive atmosphere in the community. There aren’t any winners or losers anymore, just a bunch of cool people making maps. Second, this solves a long-standing issue we’ve been running into with submissions for the multiplayer categories. Multiplayer has simply not been as popular to make maps for as single player, so submissions for match, CTF, circuit, etc often ended up with no maps to compete against. We addressed this by holding maps back from release in OLDC packs until they had another map to compete against, but this means submitters would have to wait a minimum of 6 extra months before their map would be released, and we ended up with a few maps that waited well over a year. With the contest aspect gone, multiplayer maps will always be released in the pack they were built for. We hope this will inspire more people to submit new multiplayer maps. Third, shifting gears away from being a contest makes it easier on us to host the event. There’s a surprising amount of behind the scenes work that goes into running a contest, and we seem to have less free time to work on it every year. With a collaborative format, we can simply release the pack with no extra work required. Several minor things also contributed to this decision. We hope this change to the event will be a net positive for everyone! Also, we expect to revise the OLDC rules later on — we’ll let you know how that turns out. Please note that OLDC submissions will remain closed until the new rules are published.

With that out of the way, I’d like to briefly address the other half of this article’s headline: Sonic Team Jr. now has a Mastodon account. Mastodon is a free and open source social media platform that recently gained traction in the wake of events on a certain bird-themed website we use. This post from Fedi.Tips explains more about it. We’ll still be on our bird- and face-themed accounts, too.

That’s all we’ve got for you today, but we’re hard at work wrapping up development on the upcoming v2.2.11 patch. We plan to upload a build for our prerelease testers on our Discord server as soon as possible. Why not join and be among the first to help with testing it? Some newly-added features have introduced bugs, so we’re trying to fix them before prerelease — please be patient! Until then, keep being the awesome community you are, and thanks for playing!

Hey everyone! Round 1 of this year’s OLDC has ended. There were a lot of great and amazing maps created for this OLDC round. Let’s see the results!

The winners of the single player division goes to Othius, Kanna, and Spectorious with their entry, Foliage Furnace Zone Act 2. An incredible sequel to Foliage Furnace Zone Act 1 with a lot of neat barrel canons interactions and a scorching hot furnace theme to go with it! Congratulations!

Now onto the multiplayer division!
The winner for the Battle CTF division goes to PeneBoi with their entry Quartz Quadrant. A very fun and vibrant map featuring Sonic CD’s Quartz Quadrant in Battle CTF! Congratulations!

The winner for the CTF division goes to Blast98 with their entry Aquatic Territories Zone. An interesting CTF map based underwater with bases! Congratulations!

You can view the full contest results here. If you haven’t checked out this contest pack yet, you can download it here.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the OLDC 2022 Round 1! The deadline for OLDC 2022 Round 2 is December 1st, 2022 at 23:59 UTC (6:59 EST). See you next OLDC!

The Official Level Design Contest is back! This round has 14 single player maps, 2 CTF maps, and 3 Battle CTF maps, totaling 19 entries by 18 creators. All aboard the contest train! Be sure to vote for your favorite maps when you’re finished playing. Check it out!

Please submit your votes before July 11th, 2022 @ 6:59 PM EST (23:59 UTC). Thanks to all our contestants, and have fun!

Hello everybody. Many of you have noticed that the Message Board and Master Server have not been available for the last few days. They’re back now. In the interest of transparency, I’m going to explain why they were down.

As Easter came to a close, we suffered a security breach. The password of one of our administrators was brute-forced, giving the attackers access to administrative permissions. These permissions included the ability to see email addresses of members, but not their passwords nor the hashes thereof. The attackers proceeded to spam the forums, edit posts with offensive text, and change emails and passwords of some other staff members.

We took down the forums briefly to assess damage and reset the password of the affected administrator. However, we did not notice the email on their account had been changed, so the attackers were able to break back into the account and continue using it. They set the forum software to begin deleting all user accounts. The Message Board was then taken back down. The Master Server partially relies on the Message Board in order to run, which is why it became unavailable.

To fix this, the forum has been rolled back to the state it was in on April 14th, so expect some posts and addons to be missing. If your account was deleted in the attack, you can expect it to be back, complete with all of your posts and other data (as of the 14th). The staff member whose account was compromised has voluntarily stepped down and will no longer be an administrator. We rounded up the staff, including SRB2 & SRB2Kart developers, to assess their security, change their passwords, and enable 2-factor authentication. All staff members are now required to enable 2FA in order to use moderator/admin powers. Additionally, we’ve set stricter password requeriments for all new accounts.

Although the Message Board was functional by the end of April 19th, we kept it closed to the public because not all staff were immediately available for the security check-up. Some staff have still not responded, so instead of keeping the place closed, we have temporarily disabled their accounts as a precautionary measure. Staff members whose accounts are disabled should contact an administrator at their earliest convenience.

We appreciate your patience and support during the recovery process. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to us via this forum on the SRB2MB, our Discord server, @SonicTeamJr on Twitter, or our Facebook page. Have a great rest of your week!

Hello everybody! It’s come to our attention that some minor fixes were left out of SRB2 v2.2.10. Sorry about that! Here’s the TL;DR of what changed:

• Adjustments to several item animations
• Several sounds replaced with higher quality versions

Since these are so minor, we won’t be issuing a new version of the game just yet. Instead, simply download this PK3 and put it in your SRB2 folder. This won’t autoload, so make sure you add the file yourself using the Add-ons menu!

My work here is done, so I’m off to get a snack. Have fun!

Hello everybody! It took longer than we’d like, but SRB2 v2.2.10 is finally here! Here are the highlights of this patch:

• The file limit has been massively increased. (The skin limit is still 32, though!)
• The tutorial has been redone for the new default controls.
• Many new additions to Lua, including bot features, an improved input library, easing functions and more.
• Blending modes for midtextures and FOFs.
• Multi-tagging and more convenient slope copying for non-UDMF maps.
• Generalized slopes for UDMF maps.
• The ability to load folders for easier addon development. No need to compile your resources into a PK3 until you’re ready to release your work!
• A couple of updated graphics, textures & sprites.
• Way too many bug fixes to list here.

You can read the full changelog here.

Please note there is only a full install available for this release since every single one of the game’s files have been modified. You should be able to install it to your existing SRB2 v2.2 folder just fine, but feel free to back up your addons and saved games first.

Android players should be aware that the Android port of SRB2 is no longer officially supported. We know that’s disappointing, but we’ll keep the v2.2.9 APK up on the Downloads page for your convenience. The source code is publicly available on Lactozilla’s GitHub, so anyone with the necessary skills should feel free to update it themselves.

Our goal going forward is to get smaller updates out more often. We’d like the next patch to be made up of little more than a few quality of life features and more bug fixes. A lot of upcoming features and fixes (and many from this very patch) were generously contributed by the community. We’re grateful for your hard work.

That’s everything! Go grab the update from our Downloads page and get going! (At the time of writing, only a Windows build is available — hang on, Mac users!) Enjoy.

Hello everybody! Round 2 of this year’s contest is among the best ones ever. There are so many great maps in the compilations.

The winner of the single player division is Mikhael Blur with his entry, Bricked Busted Zone. This massive zone with solid platforming has music borrowed from our very own CobaltBW. The bright colors and architecture of the block castles look very nice. Congratulations!

Mikhael Blur also won the Capture the Flag division with his entry, Colorful Towers Zone, which shares Bricked Busted’s theming. The winner of the Match division is Diegão with their entry, Marble Acropolis Zone. InferNOr won the Battle Arena division with their entry, Misty Gardens Zone. Congratulations!

You can view the full contest results here. If you haven’t checked out this contest pack yet, you can download it here.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this contest! The deadline for OLDC 2022 Round 1 is June 1st, 2022 at 23:59 UTC (6:59 EST). See you then!

The Official Level Design Contest is back! This round has 21 single player maps, 2 match maps, 3 CTF maps, and 2 Battle Arena maps, totaling 28 entries by 24 creators. Get into an aesthetic mindset, drop into the vapor dome, and get going! Be sure to vote for your favorite maps when you’re finished playing. Check it out!

Be aware that in SRB2 v2.2.9, there are some visual errors with the character swappers. These issues are fixed in the upcoming patch, v2.2.10. Other various bugs are present in some of the submitted maps. Patches for these maps are likely coming sometime in early January. For now, we’ve eliminated every soft lock and crash we could find, so the pack should be pretty stable.

Please submit your votes before January 16th, 2022 @ 6:59 PM EST (23:59 UTC). Thanks to all our contestants, and have fun!

Hello everybody! Round 1 of this year’s contest has been a great success. Let’s see the results!

The winners of the single player division are Othius, Inazuma, and Spectorious with their entry, Hollow Hill Zone. This mysterious place is full of strange liquid. Players can climb up streams of it by jumping up. One section of the level has a very cool shrine that collapses. The stage has fun slopes to spin off of and nice custom assets to look at. Congratulations, all three of you!

Of course we can’t forget the winners of the multiplayer divisions:

Congratulations to MK.exe for winning the Match division with Uncharted Badlands Zone!
Congratulations to Ruberjig and Apollyon Woman for winning the Battle CTF division with Metallic Madness Zone!

You can view the full contest results here. If you haven’t checked out this contest pack yet, you can download it here.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this contest! The deadline for OLDC 2021 Round 2 is December 1st, 2021 at 23:59 UTC (6:59 EST). See you then!