[Ritz]

Cerulean Nights, on 28 March 2012 - 11:45 AM, said:

All of the sprites are drawn in vector, using unique shading methods we have come to evolve over the course of the project. None of the sprites are actually hand drawn in the traditional sense, there all no brushes involved whatsoever! The process that these get created is this - animation guru scanline99 makes an animated rough sketch of a sprite if it's needed, then I convert it to Photoshop vectors and shade them using our special method. Color steps in illustrator was inane way of doing things, so when we joined the project we pretty much scrapped anything done in that style. We did this for everything you see in the game sans the grass, level blocks, and background elements. I'm very glad to hear that you can see how much work we've put into this, we are both very proud of what we accomplished and really taught ourselves a lot. So much so that we teamed up in the real world and created our own game development company. If you see a game coming out soon that shows our staple art style, you'll know it's us!

"Photoshop vector", "No brushes involved"? So, uh, pen tool and gradients? That sounds even more finicky! Make that your next blog post, do a quick and dirty demonstration of your general rendering technique. I've got to see this.

Also want to hear more about this development company setup. Are you guys actually sharing an apartment or something? Feel free to postpone this project immediately in favor of an original IP, just 1) no phone or tablet games, and 2) make sure LOst isn't the one coding it.

[scanline99]

Ritz, on 28 March 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

I wasn't actually expecting a reply so quickly, or at all! Good man.

Shit, you guys are actually painting these now? Just the sprites, or has the Illustrator blending process been phased out entirely? I'd love to hear some insight on how you're getting this flawless airbrushed look in Photoshop. Don't tell me you're just using a soft-edged brush for everything, I'd die. Who else is working on this? I can tell you didn't do the background. You've raised the bar too high, rest of the team can't keep up. Glad you saved this project.

As CN said, when I say "paint" it's not actually using soft edged brushes (thankfully, so you can breathe a sigh of relief - I'd die too!!!) - it was a collective term, sorry to have given off the wrong idea. It is a vector technique developed to closely recreate the aesthetic of the classic concept art as well as to preserve our sanity when animating the assets in-game. It's a laborious and time-intensive process, but when it comes to animating, it is far more forgiving than straight up painting - the animation would boil like crazy otherwise. As CT says, his skills were employed to actually hand-paint the island and clouds for the background as it was agreed his style would help to mix things up and create a greater level of interest in the whole composition - it's certainly the icing on the cake .

To underline, CN and Vincent have been very much by my side working on the other assets, and this is not something I 'saved' single-handedly, it's always been a team effort. Together we had hoped to create a certain level of finish for the game and fingers crossed, it came off.

[MathUser]

Pretty fun. Gonna be rough waiting two years for the chemical plant zone demo.

[RGX]

Before I comment, lemme provide my specs for research purposes.

OS: Windows 7 (Professional)
Processor: Intel ® Core™2 Duo CPU T9550 @ 2.66GHz 2.67 GHz
Installed memory (RAM) : 4.00 gb
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670

I was able to run the game in full quality with no issues, no lag whatsoever. There was a few instances of the game not loading though and I was getting black screens but simply restarting the application resolved the issue. I'm just upset I wasn't able to run the game in full-screen, I tried right clicking and selecting "Direct 93D fullscreen" but the option was faded. Is it because my computer can only go up to "1366x768"? I would really like to be able to play in full screen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alrighty then, I gotta say I'm "beyond" impressed. Calling the art beautiful is an understatement and my god the smooth animations... Not to mention the title screen.

@scanline99 You are the man, no doubt about it. I was not expecting that type of animation quality, I love it to death.

BTW excuse my ignorance, I haven't been here a while, is Vincent still doing the sonic in-game artwork? I would like to give him my props too.

Lastly, I love all the little flairs of style added such as the title screen, new level introduction, the animations given to inanimate objects such as the trees and how the the "total score" at the end of the act glows when the fanfare goes "Ka-ching".

Terrific job guys.

One final question. Is everything being done completely by scratch? Were all the community-made assets scrapped?

[Ritz]

You guys really don't want to tell me your "special method", do you! Hold on though, I've got it: You are still using Illustrator, but you're masking gradient meshes with objects and warping them between frames so you only really need to render a sprite once, right? But you're still using blends for the edges, right?

This post has been edited by Ritz: 28 March 2012 - 12:34 PM

[Gambit]

If Illustrator has been used recently by anyone it was probably me back in fall of 2010 to block in the basic shapes of the corkscrew so I could take those and shade them with Photoshop. Other than that I don't think anyone's really touched it. In fact I never exclusively used Illustrator for my work on the project to begin with.

[Neo]

Josh, on 27 March 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

Also, spindashing into the speed-up at the start of act 2 didn't cause me to uncurl like I normally do.

Actually, the uncurl happens when you cross the bridge object immediately after. There's no good reason why this should happen, so it's actually a good fix.

Anyway, played it, and it's about on par with my expectations. It feels about as good as the original, and the graphics that don't look dumb are actually decent, but all the artistic licenses taken and the general lack of consistency make playing the original a better alternative.

[Cerulean Nights]

RGX, on 28 March 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

is Vincent still doing the sonic in-game artwork? I would like to give him my props too.

I took care of a large part of the in game sprites, including Sonic. That's not to say I didn't do it all myself, scanline99 provided the animation frames and helped with touch ups and Vince also helped where he could. Scanline99 took the liberty to remodel the look of the Sonic sprite based on the original artwork, and we went from there. I did the same with all of the badniks as well. They aren't simply pixel perfect tracings of sprites as they were when we joined the project, they are a re-imagining of how the sprites could have looked if they had the technology back then.

And no Rtiz, Illustrator is not involved at all with my (or scanline's) art, unless you count the logo and that's for different reasons.

This post has been edited by Cerulean Nights: 28 March 2012 - 01:39 PM

[RGX]

Cerulean Nights, on 28 March 2012 - 01:38 PM, said:

I took care of a large part of the in game sprites, including Sonic. That's not to say I didn't do it all myself, scanline99 provided the animation frames and helped with touch ups and Vince also helped where he could. Scanline99 took the liberty to remodel the look of the Sonic sprite based on the original artwork, and we went from there. I did the same with all of the badniks as well. They aren't simply pixel perfect tracings of sprites as they were when we joined the project, they are a re-imagining of how the sprites could have looked if they had the technology back then.

Please forgive me, I didn't know.

I'm glad to hear the in-game artwork contained group collaboration. Also I noticed that as well, I wasn't really fond of the pixel-perfect proportions of how the project was originally set up anyways. I'm really happy to see the quality in the animations and how smooth they are.

[Deef]

The http download kept crashing for me and the torrent took quite a while, but ok playing now.

· It's immediately apparent that the black screens are too long. A loading icon would be nice imo. Although the time things take to load seems kinda random.

· The title music and animation are superb.
· The game accepts input when the window is not in focus.
· Wow @ the demo play hehe.
· The model was about the one thing that didn't blow me away, but it's fine.
· The model animations however are great.
· The EHZ remix is just amazing. Huge props, best EHZ I've heard by far.
· Rings looks just perfect, but seem in need of some AA.
· Waterfall animated so well too.
· The glowing dots in the underground background was an excellent touch.
· As was animating the trees.
· And the animated bobbing flowers. All of these animated things deserve their own mention.
· Springs look out of place in their simplicity.

· Upon completing act 1, nothing happened. The score remained, the trees continued to rustle, Sonic was still controllable on the locked screen. Forever. Menu still works but menu selections have stopped working. That's all I can play, I have to Alt F4 out and then that can randomly hang as well.


Main comments:

All of the music is just wow, wtf. All of it. Edit - Hadn't been able to hear the boss music. Just checked it in the DATA directory and yeah, the missing verses don't feel so good. =/ Otherwise, Tee Lopes, incredible stuff.


Bit sad that I can't get a nice framerate on my machine in a window. I know I'm comparing to a professional team but the Rayman Origins demo runs on my laptop at 1600x900 without a hiccup.
Execution glitches - random long loading, slow closing if at all, level won't finish.

This post has been edited by Deef: 28 March 2012 - 02:17 PM

[Dario FF]

Two things I wanna add:

• To get rid of the jaggies you should try linear filtering when scaling. Perhaps you're already using it, but it doesn't seem apparent.
  
• The resource loading code is just weird. When I opened it up this morning it didn't take anything to load at all(couldn't be windows prefetching since it was the first time I opened it since turning it on). It's really, really random. Once it got stuck in the act transition. And in another occassion eggman didn't even load in the boss battle. Just the car.

[Falk]

Dario FF, on 28 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

And in another occassion eggman didn't even load in the boss battle. Just the car.
[/list]

This should be a feature/easter egg. Bonus McDonalds level between zones.

[Deef]

Just a quick note in case anyone else got the problem of act 2 not loading.

I selected Window -> Scroll (which actually worked) and the new act started up. Then I set the window back to normal.

Edit - And now an invisible Robotnik for me too. Then I died, and even the above trick couldn't get act 2 to load again.



Nice title cards though; really like them.
I can't comment on the physics since I'm only getting about 17fps.

This post has been edited by Deef: 28 March 2012 - 02:36 PM

[SmashX5000]

Not much I can comment on in regards to the physics or how the game handles, because I can't play it. The game loaded 1 sparkle on the title screen and that's it. Of course, my computer can't really run computer games at all, so I'm not surprised.

Regardless, I watched some of the videos uploaded of it. Doesn't quite put me in a position to judge, but the physics just look a bit off. Still pretty good, but there were some things that just didn't look right to me.

I do have some things to say about the art and animation though. Firstly, Sonic's animations look kinda slow. Pretty dang smooth, but slow. The videos I watched, I felt like Sonic was going slower because of the animation. Smooth animation is nice, but you shouldn't sacrifice speed for smoothness. In particular, the walking animation looks like Sonic's going out for a leisurely jog. Anything with Sonic in a ball form looks a bit slower, but those aren't too bad.

I do like some of the extra animation not done on Sonic though. The trees swaying looks nice, and the title screen is pretty slick... though Sonic's hand movements just look unnatural. Also, the extra frames in the spring jump animation was a nice touch.

The boss battle, I liked how the machine looked, and some of the extra frames when Eggman gets hit, but the wheels don't seem to animate (and if they do, it's unnoticeable). This bothered me in the original game, but it was excusable in a 16-bit game. In an HD version, though, it stands out.

Two things in the environment bothered me too: The clouds and the flowers. The flowers look so small. It creates a nice sense of distant between the foreground and the distant background, but it also looks like a giant gradient mess to me. The flowers should be bigger. I get that that might be a trivial thing to complain about, but in a project that has a lot to do with graphics, I feel it should be pointed out. Similarly, the clouds on the water look fine, but the ones higher up are too small and plentiful. I don't recall those being there in the original, and in all honesty I think it drags down the look of the level a bit. Again, minor thing but in a project where graphics are important, it should be mentioned.

Overall, I like how the game looks and (based on what I've seen) how it plays, but there's room for improvement.

This post has been edited by SmashX5000: 28 March 2012 - 02:37 PM

[ICEknight]

Deef, on 28 March 2012 - 02:22 PM, said:

Just a quick note in case anyone else got the problem of act 2 not loading.

I selected Window -> Scroll (which actually worked) and the new act started up. Then I set the window back to normal.

I just waited a little longer and the second act started. Gotta be patient.

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 28 March 2012 - 02:31 PM