For the SatAM fans, Team Sea3on dropped a trailer for the first episode of their animated adaptation of their webcomic: AND the new version of theme song sung by Johnny Gioeli himself!
Done Any Sonic-specific developments inside it will be duly shared in this thread too - e.g. this art, which has now been coloured
So....Yuji Naka is suing Square Enix, claiming they removed him as a director twice from Balan Wonderworld, he was out of the project 6 months before launch but what is most importantly....he shared a bit about Sonic 1 development Was that known before? it's new to me at least, but maybe it's old info, just want to make sure
…What. So up to that point, it used the final boss/Mario formula much more blatantly? I… can't even wrap my head around that. Are there any rom hacks that make use of that idea? I want to try it out now. Edit: Oh and the Balan Wonderworld thing sucks ass. Not just leaving on his own terms ala 2006 Sega but he was removed, then brought back, then removed again? That's a Sega-style move, lol. My first thought was "that explains the game's release state" but IIRC and AFAIK a lot of its shortcomings are clearly based around his personal game design philosophies so I dunno. Edit to Edit: Game is on sale for $11.99 (consoles only; no Steam) until mid-May.
The idea that rights weren’t hit points until right before release is unfathomable to me. That one tiny change is one of the biggest factors in distinguishing Sonic from the sea of other platformers from both the 90s and the present day.
I'm gonna have to call bullshit on that one. Not that he's wrong about the rules change, but the timing. Screenshots suggest the winter CES builds had the final rings = health mechanic. The game was finished in May. We also have no idea how old the proto we have is, but I doubt it's within 2 weeks of final considering how much is missing (no final special stages, Sega chant, Final Zone, Scrap Brain 3 / Labyrinth Act 4, etc.). Not to mention the huge level layout reworks. So... yeah. No way the rings rule change was two weeks out from RTM.
Craig Stitt mentioned that earlier protos of Sonic 1 didn’t allow him to spill his rings. But later pre-release versions did and that made the game more fun: http://www.sonicdatabase.com/interviews/craig.htm So maybe Naka is misremembering about the 2-week thing. To be fair Craig doesn't actually talk about dying, but I get the impression that spilling rings to avoid death is what he's talking about.
Restoring Oil Ocean Zone's lost background, showing that it can be done without much effort. Really begs the question of why the devs didn't do this in the first place. Some leftover prototype scrolling in Aquatic Ruin Zone. I don't think I've ever seen this one documented anywhere.
I think people are misinterpreting this 2 week thing. The "2 weeks before finalizing" could be at a point of development where no more changes to the base specs of the game were going to change, not necessarily 2 weeks before sending the ROM out for lotcheck production.
Unused two-player-mode-exclusive scrolling code for Hill Top Zone. I haven't seen this one documented anywhere either.
Craig Stitt also mentioned it on the Sega Retro Gamers Facebook page a couple of years ago too: https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?posts/968030/ There he said: Although this is even further removed from 1991, and something he admits to only half remembering. And a couple more mentions of thr ring system in interviews (previously posted, but relevant again): http://shmuplations.com/sonic/ —Why did you focus on “speed” as your development theme? Naka: I think Super Mario Bros. is a wonderful game, but if you play it everyday, you always have to start from stage 1-1, right? Once you get good and memorize the levels, you can just hold down the B button and run through the stage. But even then it just takes too long. With Sonic, I wanted to shorten that time if I could. My idea was that you’d progress slowly and carefully through the stages on your first playthroughs as you learned the enemy locations, but after you got used to it, you could really zoom straight through the levels. Unfortunately, everyone who playtested it just went full-speed from the very beginning. (laughs) —(laughs) Naka: I was like, “You’re doing it wrong!” (laughs) But seeing everyone play that way led me to develop the ring system, where as long as you had even one ring, you could still play recklessly and get through ok. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132163/game_design_psychology_the_full_.php?print=1 I also heard that originally, when Sonic would get hit, the rings would not come out. Is that true? And then that was later implemented to make it more interesting. HY: Well, I think the way rings shot out of you when you got hit was there from the beginning. But the Genesis's power means that you can only show so many rings at once, so we experimented a lot at first with having the rings flash and not overlap with each other and so on. After a while, though, we realized that having a ton of rings onscreen would be a selling point -- it'd show how cool the Genesis was, and it was visually interesting. So we tried our hardest to make that happen.
Is this actually true? Don't we have multiple prototypes throughout development showing that the game always had the one ring rule?
I’m guessing the one ring bit is true but he’s misremembering the sequence of events. After all, it’s been 31 years.
hmmm. So we have a prototype of the game, which was apparently sent to a UK magazine in early (February/March) 1991. In this prototype, which I just booted up, any number of rings will keep you from dying, while having 0 will have you die. On the other hand, the HUD "RING(S)" element not flashing red when 0 would match what Naka is mentioning. So the question is, what is the "spec" in this context? Given that stuff like "how you get into special stages" and "what does Sonic do when the act ends" hadn't been worked on in the former or finalized in the latter in this prototype...
Now you have! I mean not very well - I don't have much time right now, but someone else can fill in the gaps.
What if the behavior was originally like the master system version? Maybe some flew out but you couldn't collect them originally, but towards the end they added that feature. Might explain why said staple was absent from Sonic 1 MS
Let me clear up the translation a bit, which I think might resolve some of the confusion I'm seeing in this thread: "For Sonic the Hedgehog, two weeks before finishing the master copy, we changed the gameplay mechanic so that you won't die if you have even one ring. This well-known mechanic was the result of improving the game until the very end, and I think that's one reason why people around the world to this day enjoy playing the game." *'master copy' means the copy sent to the factory for burning ROM chips
Well then he’s flat out wrong then. It wouldn’t be a surprise if he’s romanticising the details for the sake of the story, I mean, we all do it… Don’t we?
He's probably misremembering. He has historically gotten a lot of details wrong about the old games. I wouldn't be surprised if he's getting the ring thing and checkpoints mixed up. IIRC there was plenty of evidence that the latter were a last-second addition.
