When designing a world, it's always a good idea to have some kind of theme or motif, something that you can then draw other ideas from. This is one of the things that makes concept art valuable - it takes an idea and visualizes it into something concrete that you can base the final product on. About a month ago, the texture contest ended for Arid Canyon Zone, and the winning entries were chosen. While I didn't think of it at the time of posting the contest, I think the level can be best represented by an old cartoon:

I find it a little odd that nobody has visualized this kind of crosscasting before, but it can be safe to say that most of the stuff you find in a Road Runner cartoon will be found in Arid Canyon. Canyons (duh), tunnels through the mountains, railroad tracks, etc. There's also going to be a few other additions, such as oil that you can slip and slide around in, and rope pulleys that you can hang on and ride (think Hydrocity except tilted sideways).

I'm a little stuck with Castle Eggman right now, so Arid Canyon gives me something new and fresh to flesh out. Maybe I need to get more concept art for CEZ.

Got any ideas that you think would fit good in Arid Canyon? Post them here. Note that all ideas you post become our property blah blah blah you can't sue us if we use it blah blah etc. etc. (I have to say that).

Update: When I'm talking about ideas, I don't mean something generic, like "mine carts" or "a space station" or "a pool of lava". What I'm looking for are platforming challenges or puzzles. For example, "take the ropes you can hang on in Hydrocity Zone, turn them on their side, and have Sonic hang onto the ropes, jumping between several of them, to cross a cavern."

This used to be the 10th Anniversary blog, but it seemed like such a good idea, I thought it would be better to be a development blog, where I can write about making SRB2 and some of the things going on.

Alam and Logan, admins of the SRB2 Master Server and two of the programmers that help me out, have bought a dedicated web server.

Now we can do all kinds of cool stuff, like have a blog.srb2.org, put the wiki at wiki.srb2.org, and probably even put the master server at something like ms.srb2.org.

Community member Cueball is also working on a project he calls "SRB2Live". What this pretty much consists of is integrating user accounts across all the different parts of the SRB2 website. The horrible 'Releases' section on the message board will also be going away, to be replaced by what I've dubbed, "YouSRB2". Think of it like YouTube, except you post your wads up with some screenshots, and people can comment, favorite, subscribe, etc. SRB2Live will also integrate all of the accounts - if you have a message board account, you can use it on YouSRB2, this blog, the wiki, and across all other parts of the website.

I also moved last month, I got a job in Florida. Can't say I hate it here. I've had too much stuff going on to do much with SRB2, but most of the Arid Canyon texture set is now finished and part of the game, so production on that level should start rolling soon! Think of yourself inside a Road Runner cartoon, hahahaha...now I'm starting to get images of Sonic going "Beep Beep!" and Eggman sitting alongside the road with some kind of ridiculous weapon.

Oh, I also came across these old sprites the other day. They're the first handrawn sprites for the back of Sonic. These even pre-date the old sprites that winners of the old SRB2Xmas 0.96cd got on their discs!

Hey there! It's time to post some more cool stuff!

Here are some isometric MSPaint sketches of Deep Sea Zone that Sonikku created as concept art. Maybe you can match up two of these rooms with the 1.1 preview video?

For those that are unaware, we released a YouTube video previewing some things from the final version last month.

I know it's not very fancy, but welcome to the SRB2 10th Anniversary blog! This is just a place to dump interesting things over the course of SRB2's history.

To start off, check out some of these old 'Loading' screens. Now you know where the current one came from!