Hey y'all, for quite a while now I've been working on a full-on remake of Sonic CD with a small team. Our goal is to redo the entirety of the game, including assets, level design, and more sweet stuff. So far, the team is me (programming, art), aRBee (music), Cyber1204 (art), ChillWay (art), Daan Demmers (music), and Kanimy (art). You can keep track of development on my Twitter: https://Twitter.com/Axanery Here's a link to a WIP video of Palmtree Panic: Here are some screenshots:
I love the attention to detail present in the sprite work, especially the chain coming out of little planet. Nice work so far.
Oh good, another reason to live. Looks just gorgeous, wishing you and your team everything you need to complete this endeavor.
This looks great! That final screenshot is very intriguing to me with the dual Sonic and Amy icons and their reflections on the tiles
Very nice looking. The sprites are amazing, and especially Sonic himself. What is the code based on, or is it done from scratch? I'm going to disagree about the chain though. I think it's a detail best left out. It looks very strange to me as is presented, and someone not familiar with the story would look at that and say "WTF?!". I would also be careful about glass reflections, because it might not look right if it's only going to reflect certain things, and not other things.
That Palmtree Panic background art is slick as fuck. It's so easy on the eyes, and the multiple layers look very nice in motion.
The underlying engine code is the Hatch Engine (https://github.com/aknetk/HatchGameEngine) created by my friend Aurum. It's the third iteration of an engine we used several years ago for a now-defunct project called Sonic 3'Mixed. It was made to replicate the behavior of the Retro Engine. He was eventually hired by Evening Star and I've been working on expanding it now. You may also be familiar with it from Sonic Galactic. The Sonic game code itself is based on OpenMania (https://github.com/Axanery/OpenMania), a Hatch framework. It's incredibly incomplete, so I've replaced almost 90% of it with my own code or code ported from Sonic Mania into the proprietary scripting language of Hatch (Hatch Script Language). I don't think the chain placement is final. I do hope to have an animated cutscene at the beginning and end eventually, and it would definitely play at the start of the game, so there would be no unfamiliarity with the concept of the chain. I also plan to have a cutscene when Palmtree Panic starts of him hopping off the chain and then having it in the background of act 2. The final code for the glass reflections isn't hard at all. It's a matter of layering. If you're familiar with the after images of Sonic while in Super Sonic or Running Shoes, it's almost identical except upside down and only 1 copy. The copy would be on a layer in front of the glass tiles and behind all the other tiles. The copies would be applied to both enemies and Sonic.
will you implamanet the unuzed true final boss? i always had hopes some one would finaly make him a playable fight
On the subject of unused content - any chance we'll see your team's take on the missing Round 2? I know we don't have a lot to go on information-wise, but we have more idea of what it was supposed to entail than even in 2011 when the remake launched. I'd be excited to see what your team could come up with based on what scant information there is. Would be great to finally hear that Little Planet theme as stage music like it was intended to be...! ...Admittedly, this would also mean remixes would be needed for Past and both Future time zones; with that and designing a stage completely from scratch, I'm guessing it'd be a much heavier workload than any of the other stages. So even though it's something that'd be great to see, I also completely understand if it's something not being considered for this project...!
Actually, I believe R2 was in the works, as I knew about this project's existence already via Daan Demmers/Ramiro Bandicoot's (now aRBee's) YouTube channel. I've been checking up on that channel ever sense he posted the Mania styled Tidal Tempest tracks years back. My concern, however, is that it seems like he's going the "Relic Ruins" route with that BGM, and if there's one thing I'm not a fan of, it's elevated "fan/hoax music". Maybe he wasn't aware of it, but D.A. Garden/Little Planet has been confirmed to be the present track for R2, as it's a holdover. Sonic CD's my favorite game in the series and R2 is the one missing link I want more than anything else left to discover in 90's Sonic, but it's going to feel wrong if it's not using the right BGM, I'll admit (which would also need past and future arrangements of, which is something we don't have). There's lots of good information and speculation in this thread we had over the summer. https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...-level-discussion-post-origins-edition.41136/ The OP is missing this image for whatever reason... https://info.sonicretro.org/images/5/5b/SonicCD_MCD_Development_LittlePlanet.png Some things included R2's visual aesthetic was possibly less like a straight up Marble Zone and more like a jungle ruins trope with a heavy emphasis on underground gameplay and gimmicks, such as Amy falling into a(n ant lion) pit early on and shrieking on her way down. It being jungle above and ruins underneath also makes more sense of the BGM provided in a way that a strict Marble Zone pastiche wouldn't have, and honestly, it even matches the Toei animation clip (at least somewhat, it's still a little mechanical for a stage that was only supposed to be 10% influenced by Eggman, according to Little Planet's conceptual map). We also know it takes place during the day time, it had Marble Zone's swinging platforms, and some fan based gimmicks, similar to what Tidal Tempest ended up having but perhaps on a much bigger scale. Also, this map is really good for Zone transitions, if you want to go that route. Actually, if I may offer one other consideration in terms of BGM, something I've noticed for the past decade and a half is that, more than any other song, Collision Chaos 'G' Mix is a fan favorite song that is often attempted but almost never nailed, with fan arrangements feeling flat or empty (or even grating). I think it's because people can't quite put a handle on the genre of it. If broken down, it sounds like a combination of New Jack Swing and New Wave (the part people aren't getting), so if the plan was for something authentic in the soundtracks (perhaps for one of the acts), I would have Daan listen for some inspirations in those genres. In fact, Screwstache already has and it's the most on point cover of the song ever made. https://soundcloud.com/big_screwww/sonic-cd-collision-chaos-good-future-remix It has all the warmth every other arrangement lacks. Just something else to pass along if you want to, depending on how true-to-the-original you plan for CDX to be. I apologize if I'm a bit overbearing when it comes to the music, but it's one of the very few things about the franchise I hold pretty dear to be honest. That all said, even though I knew this project was happening, I'm still excited (and a bit anxious, no doubt) about it! An expanded Sonic CD is something I've wanted ever since I was a kid, and felt a bit like I missed out on getting after Taxman showed what he planned to do but couldn't.
I've been hearing a lot of feedback, suggestions, and speculation so far across platforms like Twitter and my YouTube comments. Some of the speculation is definitely correct but quite a bit off. There's also a lot of music tracks behind-the-scenes that haven't been shown yet, such as ones from MegaBaz (especially Collision Chaos Acts 1&3 Good Future). I do take a lot of these suggestions but we do also have almost an entire plan laid out for the game and the expansion of level tropes. I do certainly plan to use quite a bit of content taken from Origins' revealed concept art, but this is still super early with a lot not shown so you haven't seen anything yet!
I hope it's alright if I offer my concept for an R2 implementation. Keeping with the alliteration naming motif and the theory of R2 being akin to S1's Marble Zone, I'm thinking "Rainbow Ruins" or "Heavenly Halcyon". The theme is essentially a more fleshed out Marble Zone with shades of Sanctuary Zone and Greco-Roman architecture, a la S3K's Marble Garden. All with rainbows and waterfalls over a bluish-silver landscape peppered with green grass and other flora growing like grass from a sidewalk, as though Sonic showed up as nature begins to reclaim the area. In the past, the zone was not unlike The Garden of Eden from Abrahamic faiths, lush and green with an ecopunk design showing an advanced civilization living in tandem with nature. In the bad future, Eggman's sins have turned the heavenly sight hellish. Fire has burned all the plant life away as lava flows. Imagine the first act of Lava Reef Zone if it had S3K Hidden Palace's architecture. In the good future, the area has been restored into a crystalline utopia bolstered by a sudden arctic chill. Basically the futures either represent either a fiery hell or an icy heaven.
Not bad! And by that, I mean pretty freakin' sweet! I love the sprite work, which adds more animation and expressiveness than the original while remaining faithful to the original design. It's a big improvement over Sonic's "mania" sprite set! Would you be willing to share the tools and assets you used to do the remake after some time has passed following the proper release? Everything about Sonic CD was good, except the level design. When I used to play SCD, I was so wrapped up in how good the music, art, and time travel were that I overlooked how boring most of the levels actually were. After playing SCD about 30 times, the one fault in the game just becomes too hard not to notice, and simple layout hacks are so much easier to make than any other type of mod.
The Hatch Engine from Aurum I mentioned before has support for a few different types of files. While Hatch does have its own proprietary animation editor and tile collision editor, I'm not using anything Hatch-related besides its script language and the engine. Because there's support for Retro Engine filetypes, I instead use Retro Engine-based tools to create sprite animations, create levels, add models, edit palettes, and create tile collisions in RSDK formats. The levels are converted from RSDKv3 (CD 2011) to RSDKv5 (Sonic Mania) to provide a baseline for the level before designs get changed (and save me painstaking hours of manually placing tiles). Hatch can use Tiled levels, but I do not want to use those. The assets are packed into a compressed Data.hatch file, which I do have an unpacker for but it requires a files list. Part of my background comes as a Retro Engine modder (if you couldn't tell) and I spent numerous hours with friends unpacking Sonic Mania and Sonic Origins with hashed files so I think it would be neat if someone would do that for this game too in order to extract the assets (rather than me just putting the unpacker and the files list out there). May also be interested in open-sourcing the game quite a while after release. This framework I've been building up (in comparison to OpenMania) has the potential to be one of the most robust 2D Sonic frameworks out there so that open-sourcing would be great for the community.
Sounds like there's more than one reason to get excited about this project. Here's a question; I see time travel seems to be assigned to its own button. How does that work? I don't have any problems with the original mechanics but I know it's contentious for most people so I'm curious how you're planning on handling it.
Nearly every single stage and time variant is currently ported and loaded. With that, I also had to start testing time travel and destroying robot teleporters to get good/bad futures, but didn't want to have to use the old, bloated way of doing it. One of the biggest criticisms I've seen with the original CD is the way to time travel, so I created a quick temporary way to time travel with a small speed threshold, a timer tied to the threshold, and a button that you can press after both are met. I am very, very open to suggestions as to how to fix the original time travel because I know that the way right now isn't going to please everybody. Another criticism of the original is that traveling to bad future in acts 1/2 is a punishment, so I tried to entice people by placing 2 special rings in the bad future variant in comparison to 1 in the rest (but that first one is tied to every single time zone, so you can't just go back and forth collecting them).
No matter what you're not gonna please everybody. Maybe a easy/medium/hard setting? Easy: Literally just press a button. Medium: What you have or something similar to it. Hard: The original time travel method (some people might want the option? Maybe?) Echoing others to say the look is fantastic. Really smart porting assets and layout from the Retro engine version. Gave you a huge head start, I'm sure. Good luck, and looking forward to seeing more.
can you make it so that the bad future has harder/ cooler bosses? i love a good "hard mode" like knuckles in s3&k i loved how he was a hard mode for the game and bosses. so hoping scd can finaly get a proper "hard mode, esp if playing through the hard mode is a good way to get the true final boss like maybe bad future is hard mode, unless you have all time stones, then ALL bosses become Hard mode variants and true final ending/boss unlocks?
