Canned Karma, on 29 March 2012 - 05:28 PM, said:
I'm glad to hear the majority of people have enjoyed the release. We knew there would be bugs people would discover that we hadn't found in our own testing. I won't even touch on the code side again because that has been beaten into the ground ad nauseam and our side of the situation has already been expressed by no less than three staff members on both the art and code areas. Suffice to say, there's more to the story and depending on how things go in the next week I'll be able to go into much more detail.
P3DRO,
You're entitled to your opinion. The fact that hardly anyone else has leveled those criticisms against us leaves me wondering if you're looking at the same game the rest of us are. What I will say is that your comments are insulting to the people who spent untold hours producing all the artwork you so casually dismiss. If you want a Sonic 2 remake done in your particular style, no one is stopping you. Far from it, given just how many Sonic fangames are represented in this forum. But give credit where credit is due. I've seen you do some great work on other project, but the arrogance of your response here is disgusting.
You're allowed to find it offensive, but it wasn't suposed to be, honestly. Everyone takes time on their projects, but I can't let it be the judge of my opinion, take for example those horrible fangames that people usualy do when a new Sonic game is released "Sonic Colors 2D", "Sonic Generations 2D", etcetera... They probably spent a lot of time in their projects as well, but it doesn't make 'em particularly impressive nor good. I'm not saying that S2HD is bad, not at all. I find the initiative nice and admire how you guys were able to stood 'till this point so far. You probably done more than 2/3 of the whole community, I'm not particularly good at beeing sensible to people, but I don't try to be arrogant, trust me. But yeah, I guess I could've expressed my point in a different tone so here goes a quick correction:
S2HD isn't bad, but I was expecting way more for a "reimagination" or a remake with the tools to recreate the original as it could've been if done nowadays. The engine needs some work as well some animations (like Sonic hand in the title screen, it's just weird). For a reimagination it could've been more creative. What pisses me off is that you guys have some great ideas for design (take a look at the archives in the concept art forum) to improve and make it even better and full of life, and you guys are spending this time and talent only opening the sprite in illustrator, resizing it and redrawing it, as it was. That's what bugs me, having a talented and competent team and working in something so simple and common while you could, like I shown in my previous post, reimagine the whole graphical style of the game and beeing only faithfull on the level design itself, like Monkey Island did.
The problem with 2D games nowadays is that, if they're not "sprited", they look lifeless and empty that's why for example the new Rayman game (Rayman Origins) tries to make their levels very stylish and with a lot of depht into it (You barely see straight lines, most of the tiles are in a beat 'em up view) or the remakes of Monkey Island like I previously mentioned, which are more faithfull to the previous title in terms of backgrounds, still tries to give a new athmosphere for the game also remaking the bgs in the art scheme that the series adopted after its third game. If the process was similar in those games as it was in S2HD the result would be way less impressive.
So unfortunelly all of the work you guys have done in S2HD was creating a Sonic 2 for PC with MSSA filter applyied. It sucks, but on the bright side, you only have Emerald Hill done so far, and if you would take my advice in serious consideration (which I doubt, of course) that would be the only real lost, and the only thing that would need to be redone. So you ask me, what should you do. I would say to be creative, be faithfull to the original level design but play with the tiles, play with the depht and athmosphere of the game. Put some light effects, integrate new things I dunno, like put a giantic tree in the background of Emerald Hill or a sunflower field on the foreground (to keep the flow of the background), add some vines in the tiles or hanging from the trees, make some beautiful waterfalls with Sonic 4's distortion effect, add some tiles to the background or foreground to give the impression that there are other paths to be taken (Sonic Generations did a lot of that)... Things like that. Make your game alive, Think outside the box you're limiting yourself and your game to a MSSA filter and not a proper HD Version. If SEGA would release a Sonic 2 HD Version do you think it would be this? They would probably throw light effects, textures, and everything that I said earlier on like they did in Sonic 4.
Your game has no life into it, no athmosphere. And I'm not the only one that think that since I recieved PMs here on Retro after my post and some calls in MSN congratulating me and saying that they agree with me. I won't of course give any names because if those prefered to contact me instead of agreeing with me on the thread they probably have their own reasons to do that and I'll respect it. So I'm biting the bullet here and giving you my personal notes and observations from a fangame developer to another and mostly from an artist that have work with game development professionaly. Don't desconsider it and don't think I'm trying to be rude or don't give credits to your work, I'm arrogant sometimes and I agree with that, but don't let it invalidate my argument. It's your call to make an ordinary game or extraordinary, a Sonic 2 with MSSA filter or a proper Sonic 2 Remake in HD.
But whatever your choice is, at least change that pallete on Sonic, seriously it looks terrible.
