Hello all!

I'm looking to get into speedrunning this game & had a couple questions. I've posted a couple videos showcasing some IL speedruns w/ more intended routes than in any% (no major skips for now. I will definitely enjoy learning any% sonic story later). Is there an ideal category for this, or could this be a potential category? Would anyone else be interested in speedrunning the game in this way?

I have a couple good videos showcasing this type of routing (all intended shortcuts, no major skips) for Speed Highway & Red Mountain. I'm sure it's not as impressive as what you legends have seen/done but I would appreciate hearing what you think. I'm mainly starting by having fun with these videos as I learn the game & show off the awesome OG graphics & hardcore level of play. The game design is awesome & hopefully playing the game in this way will bring back memories for casuals who may remember these levels & not experienced the OG visuals.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcTxxZy7y0TOGs9uoi6Gt-MFg3mijMXMF

https://youtube.com/@groundedgameplayx

Thanks for your time! I'd love to hear your thoughts.

What is considered glitches and not glitches has been a huge dicussion in sadx speedrunning.
Multiple people have tried pushing for stuff like glitchless or no major glitches/skips but ultimately it's been shut down every time due to inconsistensies and lack of a clear ruleset or the abbility to determine what is intended vs what isn't. You can try to show your concept in the discord but I can almost guarantee you it cannot become a official category. If you want to run glitchless there are few runners and namely one by the name LunacyPheonix who does run it as a unofficial category. I like the passion though, but unfortunately it's just too complicated a topic.

the vast majority of speedtech in this game is based on making clever use of the standard movement mechanics and level geometry and there's very little used in runs that can be clearly labelled a glitch. Many of the stages are also designed in a very open way that it's hard to tell when you are out of bound. As DreeGon said there's been many discussions in the past about this topic but at the end of the day if you were to make a category like this it would come down to making countless, largely arbitrary and hyperspecific decisions on how certain sections of a stage are to be played, and in my opinion this would not only be a huge pain to decide on and moderate (and would likely result in a ruleset many wouldn't be very happy with due to the sheer amount of decisions you have to make), but also very inaccessible to new runners cause they'd have to know what all these decisions entail in order to follow them accordingly.

I understand that for new runners many of the strategies may seem intimidating so it would be appealing to have an official "no skips" category of some sort, but imo its lack of practicability with this game would massively outweigh its benefits. While, yes, the top leaderboard spots use largely every strat and trick available, this of course does not mean that you have to make use of everything as a beginner runner. You can freely pick any strat that seems appealing to you and add it in, and leave out those you don't. With an official category ruleset, there will likely still be strats you wouldn't want to go for as a beginner, as I've said, most optimizations in this game are movement based, whereas other strats that you may be interested in using would be banned (for example, there are strats that look very glitchy / out of bounds that are very beginner friendly while advanced alternatives can easily be considered glitchless / inbounds). If you just submit to the main leaderboards, you can freely pick and choose which strats you want to do and also freely adapt your playstyle over time. Even without a glitchless category, most runners start out with only very rudimentary strats and add in more and more as they improve and feel comfortable.

Sorry if this is an unsatisfactory answer, but this is a complicated problem and you have to deal with a lot of different questions when making a restricted category which I personally don't think is worth it for this game.

Note, this is my personal opinion on this, this doesn't neccesarily reflect the consensus of the whole moderation team

edit: I also just saw you're using a modified version of the game, you would have to take off the mods for leaderboard submission if you plan to do that in the future. Feel free to join the Discord, we can help you with getting started with a good setup