General Project Thread & Feedback

No we can't, we can only see solid white silhouettes.

 

Karma, just to keep us interested, why not give us something every week. Like every Friday (or Tuesday or whatever) give us a glimpse of an official badnik, a screenshot, more specific progress reports (instead of just percentages, tell us what exactly needs to be done—like the AI of the monkey or whatever—even if we can help with it or not) announcements if a member's—such as ceruleanNights—art has been officially included, and/or some goodies, like a screensaver or desktop background.

Who wouldn't want an S2HD screensaver?

That was in a way done with Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, and Resistance 2, and boy howdy, did they keep the interest level in such games high. (They did it by means of a podcast)

I feel that if you did this, you would have us on a leash in terms of interest in this project.

 

Jayextee:
No. We'd been planning to show off teaser shots for weeks now, that's why there hasn't been much out of the staff in recent times. I'll repeat myself here: we will be showing off more.

PolygonJim:
It was meant to be a teaser shot :p But really, that's why we included the Masher and the EHZ shot. If you don't like them, that's another matter.

Hamneggs:
Noted, I'll bring it up with the rest of the staff.

 

The only fair thing to do is to implode all Sonic 2 HD posts into a single thread in the Engineering forum, unless we want to undermine the meaning of real community projects that should be encouraged. Either that or this has to change gears into a community project.

 

RAMPKORV: check out the thread I made in Site Affairs :|

 

The Masher and EHZ images were fine. But you need about 20x more of those kind of pictures a month. There is not a single reason you can even try to pull out of your ass as to why you can't show more. People will steal your work regardless of when you post it; No one gives a shit. Concept images are great too. No one gives a flying fuck if a frame is only half done, it gives people something to look at. You aren't building up hype for the Alpha like this, it's only pissing people off and making them not care about the project as it's dead to them if they are kept in the dark. My opinion is that this whole project should get merged into a single thread and moved over to E&RE, or rather shit-canned and moved to another forum. If you don't let anybody on Retro see any work from the game, why should Retro give you publicity?

 

That's the new project logo, and scanline99 made that for us.

Hmm, right now nobody has really submitted anything for Emerald Hill in a really long time (I seriously don't think anyone has done or tried to do any art for Emerald Hill since before I came around last year), so not really anything. There are some objects, music, etc. that people have made that are potentially going to be used, though a few of those were made by ex-staff so that may or may not count depending on your point of view. One thing I'd like to say now is that we won't always be able to straight up use something even if it's well made if it doesn't fit with the rest of the art, and so we may end up editing things or remaking them and using the submitted work as a base unless the original artist/s want to rework something and can replicate the art style needed.

Vincent actually made that original masher long ago. I think he made it shortly after the tech demo if not before. We decided that art style just didn't really work on badniks so we used a different one that still fits with the rest of the stuff nicely.

Oh, and we will be showing off what's under those silhouettes later along with some other stuff.

 

Bit late for a reply, but it's rude not too

Hey man I wasn't sucking up! I was just saying that his opinion basically summed up what I was thinking. It was 2 in the morning and I was too tired to write everything that other people had already wrote.

 

Why is there even the need to drip-feed it like this? As Tweaker said, this is like you're promoting the project... to the community that should be helping to create it. Not cool.

 

...I don't get why this project needs to resort to teasing. It was doing fine when the staff showed what they were working on and received feedback.

If people don't know what's been worked on already and what's not, they'll just avoid contributing altogether in fear of their work going to waste... And you never know when somebody will appear out of the blue with awesome stuff that can be approved right away.


So yes, I think that, in order to keep people over here happy, they don't need the cold promises of a big enterprise, but the warm sharing experience of a community, with real feedback on both sides.


Outside of the game itself, this project can be better than Sonic 4. Please don't follow their steps.

 

This was the smartest post here. Now, you'll have a big trouble convincing them of that. lol

 

We simply want to post some teasers periodically to keep interest up. If we just dump everything we have at once it would get a lot of attention but only for a limited amount of time. Obviously we plan on releasing a larger quantity of information at some point closer to the release of the alpha. Besides, like I said in my previous post, nobody has really stepped up to help on any of the level (EHZ) we're preparing for the alpha, at least not since early last year. Yes there have been various objects made by others, but Emerald Hill is essentially our baby. We really don't need help making it at this point, it's just a matter of getting it finished off. We've been telling you guys to work on other zones for ages now and nobody really seems to do really anything. Granted some of that is just lack of inspiration and motivation, but we plan to remedy that.

I'd love it if people would start making some more concept drawings of what a level could look like. We haven't seen any of that since the project started, and I really think that's a tragedy. I've said it before and I say it again, I check this forum every day for something new and awesome, and I usually don't see it.

 

But right there is the problem—teasers. Why should a project that members on this forum have directly contributed towards, made possible in the first place, and outright inspired be something that results in not finished work being shown off, but teasers? How is this project a community effort when you just do things and show them off when you deem it appropriate? You've said that you're not just using it as an advertising front, but your words say one thing while your actions say something totally different. I see no good reason other than your artificial semblance of "people would be better surprised" that every single asset made for this project should be entirely public. In fact, I seem to recall that this was the entire point of that little database that SANiK made for you. When did it just become something to put whatever you arbitrarily define as "appropriate" to share? For fucks sake, what even defines that kind of criteria?

My ultimatum is this—I want you guys to be a lot more open with sharing progress. Like, entirely open. That's it. You don't have to honor peoples' requests to change a single pixel if it's out of line, you don't have to listen to people bitching about mundane things (in fact, deal—I will ban people if you don't like them doing it), and you don't have to wildly change your direction based on an overwhelming majority of peoples' opinions; hell, as far as I'm concerned, democracy is overrated as fuck and it will not help this project at all. But you absolutely do need to put some more "community" in this project, and this will be the absolute best way to make everyone happy and more involved while being the least intrusive to your current setup here. I'm trying to be fair here about this, and I can definitely say that everything being shrouded in secrecy is a bad, bad move if you intend on keeping this a global collaborative effort. I won't tolerate it any further.

You haven't seen any of that stuff because nobody's been inspired to! I've had this problem with Megamix several times where there were long dry spells because nobody saw any progress or new material, so they didn't have the drive, direction, or inspiration to do any work of their own. But if somebody shows up and commits a new layout, piece of art, or feature to the SVN? Huge resurgence of activity. This has happened so many times that I can absolutely solidify it as a solid method of inspiring people to help contribute towards progress. Progress inspires progress; the more progress there is, the more people willing to help contribute towards it. This is not only a self-satisfying cycle, but one that continuously improves its own odds at success. That's why I think it's ridiculous that you guys are being so stingy about sharing material! It's definitely not a big deal if there's a consistent flow; the more consistent the flow, the more people who contribute to the flow. Everyone wins!

 

Yeah that's because you never enforced it. For the past several months there's been stuff contributed for just about every other zone (and before someone gives me that "Hill Top is just a recoloured Emerald Hill" spiel, I'd suggest finishing Emerald Hill before thinking about its recolour), and not once did any "staff" member mention a need to prioritise and finish the first zone before worrying about what the underside of a Flasher looked like.

You can blame it on a lack of contributions, but I'll counter with a lack of organisation

 

I agree with what was said, but I think having a reserved forum for both Retro and S2HD staff to discuss certain things would be useful too, because even on widely open community projects, some things need to be made private.

 

I'm sorry, but that is exactly the kind of nitpicking that was slowing down the entire project before. I personally like this new Masher a lot more, and for a small piece of art that will be whizzing past the screen during actual gameplay, it is perfect.

Even though S2HD may get done more efficiently this way, I am slightly disappointed that the project is sacrificing equality between contributors. There needs to be a way to engage community members somehow. Because of its closed nature, there's no telling what would happen to a contributor's piece of artwork once submitted. Is the art already made? If I submit something, will it be changed by someone else? Will it even be used at all? The Inker database has become completely useless now.

I would enjoy seeing what progress has been made on the engine and such, in the form of videos, pictures...anything. I know that you guys are waiting for it to be perfect, but you could still share something. + - LIKE THE CODEBASE.  

 

Well, when I joined up the rest of the staff and I really thought I'd just make the grass and the shadows and all that since that's really all that was left, but awhile in my style for the grass evolved and the quality of the things we were producing increased and so we decided to go back and redo various things so that we could figure out exactly the direction we wanted to go in. The staff has really been focusing on the first stage the whole time and so we've really tried to tell people to work on other stuff since we didn't really need the help, or so we thought when we first started working to finish it. If we had realized right away that we were going to be refining things as much as we have, we would've obviously asked for more input.

 

I would have to agree with this. This is causing mass confusion between alot of people contributing on here. And now knowing that other art is being completed behind the scene has made it pointless. This should be closed or cleaned up. It would be good if this was sorted into something else so it just highlights the art that has been done, even if the art is not going to be shown. Then people who are outside the retro community like new artists would know what needs to be done. It would also keep us properly informed.

It's the least the Sonic 2 HD staff could do for the community.

 

The extreme bare minimum.

 

We actually do want to clean all this stuff up. Just have to decide on how first. The forums also need to be refined.