Sonic - Into The Void

I would suggest you do a bit more work before revealing anymore information on this project of yours. The palettes need a lot of work, some clash in a way that makes my head hurt (Pinball Pike), and others are too saturated (Midnight Aurora and Delta Base).

Having a bit of new art here and there is cool and all, but we are in a point with modifying these games that a new story and palette changes are simply not enough anymore.

Make something that is completely yours, new level art, new music or music from other media that suits the zones well and new gimmicks, enemies and even new bosses.

That's just my two cents on this.


Edit: Oh, I see you already uploaded the game (stated in the first sentence)... Well, I still suggest you take it further.

Edit 2: So I downloaded the game to give it a spin and the first zone's layout has way too many death pits, and spikes. As well as way too many obstacles that prevent me from reaching full speed for more than a second. Homing attack felt like it was almost useless, like it was thrown in there for the sake of having it. =/

 

Tried only the first level. It is hard to see anything when the foreground and the background are made out of 4 very saturated colors.
Too many bottomless pits for the first act of the first zone.

 

I'll definitely give this a try later this week... but I gotta say, based on what I see above... and perhaps that is a tad unfair, this feels all too much like a palette hack (possibly layout hack)

While there is nothing wrong with that, I'll echo previous sentiments and state that you're gonna want to bring more to the table if you want to attract eyeballs. A new ability, perhaps?

I'll give you a suggestion you can implement if you want... it's from an idea I had in the Sonic 3 Complete thread recently... what if you had a section in Midnight Aurora Zone... where everything but the white colors turned to pitch black? If done right, this could be a nice new gimmick for your level... just be careful with this gimmick in that you don't make it painstakingly too difficult... there are ways to do it in which it can still be played through without too much difficulty.

Also if I may... perhaps the Star Light level NOT be at night... considering you already have a night level... Just some thoughts.

PS While it looks original, that paper thin HUD font is gonna be a real bitch to see at times... e.g. try finding the HUD in the Pinball Pike screenshot. Have fun with that!

 

Personally, I think this hack needs something more unique; maybe some kind of interesting gimmick or ability never seen before. Not only will this set it apart from the rest of the palette/layout/spindash hacks, but it'll also improve your programming skills greatly. You seem to have a sort of in-depth concept, so thinking of an idea shouldn't be an issue. I think KingOfHarts' idea would be worth learning how to implement.

 

Hooray, 4.0 is out! To celebrate, I'm going to pick this hack apart!

After being screwed over by 3.0, I was hoping for 4.0 to be an improvement, let's see if the below gives that impression.


So, you broke the Sega Sound, probably from porting the S3 driver using this insane thing. I should know, since I did that back when I was a copy-and-paste hacker.

Your 'Press Start Button' does way too well a job of blending into the background.

I started the game, attacked the first enemy I saw, got an extra life. I have no idea how you've broken that.

What's with the wannabe Lightning Shield? It doesn't attract rings, it doesn't allow you to double jump. Wait, the wiki page on this still identifies it as a regular shield! You know, the classic shield sound effect can be used in the S3 driver, it's still in there, you just gotta find its ID and use it.

Good golly, I recoiled at that signpost art. If art edits are supposed to be one of the major features of this hack, at least do it appropriately. I know that art is subjective, but come on, there are plenty of side profiles of Sonic to use or at least base an image on!

So, Midnight Aurora act 2, there are Speed Shoes monitors at the beginning... why? That does not work well with this level design, I'll either fly into an enemy, spike pit or a bottomless pit, which you have way too many of. In fact, one is placed right next a spike pit, which you have to do some precision platforming above, speaking of which...

This was a major dick move, and it's ridiculous to think anyone would see through this without trial-and-error: Midnight Aurora act 2, at coordinates 081F03AE, 078F0300, there are a series of floating platforms above a spike pit. I jump on them, they collapse, so I assume I just have to be quick and get across the platforms before they fall. I reach the third, jump, there is a swing platform that's only visible once I've reached the point of no return, I miss the platform, fall into the spike pit. Now I thought that I couldn't hate this hack any more at that point, but oh no, I try again, this time, trying not to jump past the moving platform, miss, fall, and I notice that the third platform hasn't fallen despite me having landed on it. I come to the horrible conclusion and facepalm, hard... You expect us to know that that one platform that looks identical to all of the other ones doesn't fall?! The fact that this is one of the first obstacles encountered in 3.0's version of this act leaves a very negative impression.

Onto another mess-up, the Spin Dash has... changed. It's now the Educational Dash, remember those digits, kids! Why do I get the feeling that you used that one guide on that one less-than-reputable site that overwrites part of the Spin Dash's art in VRAM with the Centisecond timer? Oh, right, because I did that.

To the right of the leap-of-faith/trial-and-error spike pit, there are two ring monitors and a Speed Shoes monitor, one of the ring monitors is horizontally mirrored. Also, see my above point of Speed Shoes placement; I grab the Shoes, hurtle to the right, over the spikes sitting next to them, only to find myself jumping into an endless bottomless pit. If I had the words... Oh, I do: STRAIGHT INTO THE VOID

The Spin Dash sound effect also exists in the S3 driver.

Oh, by the way, I'm still stuck in act 2 of the first Zone, the level where you're forced to backtrack if you don't make an unforeseeable jump. After that large U-curve, you're supposed to stop, drop to a lower 'hill' and perform a Spin Dash-Jump toward an adjacent two-platform hill sitting on the other side of Backtrack Canyon. Oh, and don't go for the lower platform, an invisible wall awaits you, that and an Eggman monitor. I continue on and see another drop in that path.



Oh boy, I wonder what's down there! Monitors? An alternate path? No. A bottomless pit. Why trick us, have you ever played through the original GHZ!?

Onto act 3, you used objects to limit your playfield. What, because you couldn't put the beginning of the stage there? Oh, right, you can't program, not even the most basic thing, such as changing the few, obvious lines that check how far to the right Sonic is, so it can spawn the boss.

Oh but wait, I'm a dumbass, because, evidently, you can program! Just look at the boss, how he ascends during battle, which is great until he goes through the damn ceiling SECONDS INTO THE FIGHT and become unbeatable, oh, and a death barrier kills you when you try to pursue him. Why? WHY?

"only Midnight Aurora's and Hydroruin's boss are altered for the ideal release" Good God, I'd hate to see the bosses that aren't ideal! (Oh, if only I knew...)

TO LEVEL SELECT!

...and onto the next zone, Non-Lethal Lava Land. For a layout and object hack, you sure are careless with your objects and layouts: Backwards Caterkillers in narrow corridors so you can't just jump over them to destroy them, lack of lava markers making lava a joke, lava markers placed on harmless ground making me despise this zone, pistons too damn high for you to just push against until you can walk over them, instead needing to jump over them and kill your momentum, which will almost certain kill you also. You know the part, that section ripped right from Sonic 1, like the rest of the levels. That place also happens to have a few swinging platforms over lava, the third one crushing you into the ceiling, do you even care?

By the way, act 2, coordinates 12EE048C, 125A042C. Deadly floor. Also, here 0AE400CC, 0A54006C, another dick-move: a gap requiring you roll or Spin Dash through, with a Caterkiller waiting on the other side. What's that? "Roll into his face"? That'd work if the Caterkiller's collision wasn't buggy. You know, if you're not going to fix it yourself, just use ReadySonic and make it easier for us poor sods that have to endure all this.

To act 3. Getting bored of repeating myself, go to boss. And if anyone reading hasn't reached this boss, don't. Just quit and use the Level Select to skip this abomination. No, I'm not toning it down, this boss is fucking awful! Don't believe me? Look at this:



If I wasn't so sure such levels of vulgarity would get me banned, I would have quoted my initial reaction to this trainwreck! Lava that doesn't hurt you, Eggman setting fire to the lava because you don't understand that the fire doesn't collide with objects, and more fireballs than stars in the sky! What the hell were you thinking when you made this!? It's bad enough that the best you can do to edit bosses is to add objects and mess with the layout, but you couldn't even do that right! I'm so glad this is getting replaced. If any good can come of this thing, it's that you can learn from it and make sure it never happens again.

That's it. I haven't gotten any further than Pinball Pike's boss, which is also terrible, see for yourself, I guarantee you'll drop a brick in your pants first time as I did. I could comment on the SYZ knock-off, but, honestly, it's left no impression other than that I hate these palettes. Over-saturated, if not ridiculously contrasting, colours... Scarlet-red Spring Yard with neon green grating, with a red city lying beyond a dark blue forest. And don't get me started on the camouflaged Caterkiller in Ember Gardens act 1. Oh, hey, I just noticed, when you go quick, you leave after-images. Just how much of this code did you lift from Selbi? I thought his restrictions were to prevent this!

You know, it's not just the hack that bothers me. You could say that this hack is a learning experience. As I said, I did some of the same stuff he did back in my early days. The difference being that I didn't tote the product around who-knows-where, bragging about how it was rated 9.4 stars on an irrelevant site, writing a goddamn wiki page on it describing it as a "complete overhaul" and containing advanced engine modifications. All while having most of page describe rubbish that everyone knows, seeming for the sake of having the page resembles Megamix's, even down to the wording! Because no one would recognise a ring without you telling us what it is. That belongs in an instruction manual, not a page on a wiki that simply focusses on documenting significant hacks, which I'm very uncertain that this qualifies as. I doubt this will even be talked about in two years, one of the justifications for having a page on a hack, as this hack is being killed off in the full version of 4.0.

Removing all of the clutter/junk that belongs in this thread and not on a wiki page, it boils down to "Sonic - Into the Void is a palette/object/layout hack of Sonic the Hedgehog by Blueblur93, containing an expanded moveset for Sonic built from various other sources." There's nothing more to say, nothing notable, besides the pointless story that serves only as an excuse for your changes, or lack thereof.

It's hard to criticise or praise this hack without resorting to "LEARN TO PROGRAM, DAMMIT". Heck, it's hard to write a conclusion without doing so either. What changes this hack contains fall flat for me: The palettes are unappealing, the bosses are foul and/or broken, I truly despise the layouts of most areas that aren't from Sonic 1, and even some of those have been corrupted to a state of unlikeability, the object placement is probably the best part, and even then the most mindless of mess ups are dotted around the place (see Non-Lethal Lava Land).

"ALL WILL BE REVEALED"... The extent of my sanity, perhaps.

 

After reading what Clownacy has written, I felt inclined to play through and give you my own feedback.
I only managed to play through Midnight Aurora Zone Act 1 and 2, until I got stuck. I used level select to access Act 3 and stopped playing afterwards.

First, I'll list a few of the things I liked:

• Your monitor design is unique. I don't know what it's supposed to look like when it's broken but I liked it as it's different. Could use some refinement, though.
• I like the invincibility stars. It makes me feel as if I'm going to warp, Sonic CD style.
• Same with the lamp post. I like the change although the palette and shading ruin the style a little.
• The special stage; the first one that I got into. It was a little difficult for the first stage (I didn't get the emerald) but I like how it's structured. I had fun and spent quite a while in it.

Now, here's some of the problems I faced or areas that need to be looked into:

• Why do I get a 1-up whenever I restart the game and get any amount of points? It's a little odd.
• The homing attack's inclusion is odd. I don't really understand why it's here as, apart from a strange area in Act 1 where there are multiple blank monitors to chain across, it's not really useful.
• I can't for the life of me figure out how to progress in Midnight Aurora Zone Act 2. I keep going in a loop with no foreseeable path to advance.
• There's a lot of badly placed chunks. Chunks usually connect together with other ones in certain ways but here, there are many that either float in the air, cut off from each other or flat out don't work in the way you've placed them. The S bend in particular doesn't work too well when you cut it in half like that. You should take cues from the original to see what works.
• Same with objects: Many are placed in obscure places or used incorrectly. The use of object 44 (Green Hill Zone's solid wall object) is incorrect in a lot of places by either being placed manually (instead of snapping to 8 pixels) or using the wrong shading version (subtype 00 for left corners, 00 for left walls and 02 for right walls). Same as above; use the original for guidance.
• The palettes for Midnight Aurora Zone Act 1 - 3 have broken shading in the palette, causing everything to look a little off. Most noticeable with the shading on the wall pattern.
• While stuck in said loop, there are 2 speed-ups very close together with nowhere to actually utilise them. Seems a bit pointless.
• I see what you were trying to do with Act 3 (I did the same in Westside Island) but you've moved Sonic too far to the right and the background now disappears.
• The boss is weird. He's not hard, just annoying. I mean, the first time I went against him I died from an invisible object (I presume a lava tag) and the second time I just stood on a block underneath him (With the wrong art. Probably from another zone) for most of the hits before jumping up a bit and finishing him off with the invincibility I got earlier.

I'm not being overly negative to put you down; I'd like you learn from this. Please, feel free to take the feedback presented and make something of it.

 

Bite me. If you didn't want me to play it, you wouldn't have released it.

And stop your whining, I'll have you know I wrote most of that post as I was playing your game. If your game puts me in that bad of a mood, try harder. What, did any of the authors of hacks that watch Let's Plays of their hacks start bawling when the players flipped at bad design choices? If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Hilarious, so my points are invalid because there are too many of them? How the hell would you know my intent? How would know if I was really out to get you because your hack is new? Stop making things up to make yourself look good.

You want the truth? I was criticising what I will call a bad hack, and I'll criticise as I wish. I'll criticise every bad factor I can, because, hey, it's feedback. I could have just flamed, endlessly talked about how your hack lacks ASM level hacking, but I didn't. The only time I even did bring up the lack of ASM knowledge in a negative tone, I rebutted it by pointing out that you have made original ASM modifications, and even praised it. I listed what made this stinker reek, so you can improve. It's called "constructive criticism", you'll find that "lol, you can't program, this hack sucks" doesn't count as such. Learn to make the distinction. I wouldn't have posted on this forum of all places if I wasn't sincere in that regard. I'm just trying to knock some sense into you. So what if it's rough around the edges? It's hard to take you seriously when you do things like what I've mentioned before.

Excellent work misreading what I said. I already brought up how the wiki page didn't call it a Lightning Shield; I was pointing out the inconsistency. How it contradicts the presence of the Lighning Shield elements. If anything, it sounded like you used the sound effect because it was used in Generations, and since you like tying this hack in with that story, it made sense.

Your condescension gets you nowhere. So two wrongs make a right, is that what you're saying? You present a case full of holes. I expected so much more when you opened your own rant with "Dear X,". Though posts like those never end well.

Oh, that's nice. You're going to keep your hack in a sub-par state just to spite me? All of my points were valid. I'm not going to speak for others, you go ask 'em. Ask them if they like the leap of trial and error. Ask them if an unbeatable boss is a good idea. Oh, look. We already have someone echoing my points.

I'll say it again. I don't care that you're new to ASM, I am plenty aware of it, had you been keeping an eye on the history of your wiki page... Anyhow, that doesn't account for every flaw. I focussed on everything else, bad layout and such. And when you break a boss through not knowing what you're doing, just roll the change back. The game is now broken. Was I ever harsh about you not knowing ASM? I even avoided the topic in the conclusion, bringing up only to explain the short size of it.

To annoy you? Don't flatter yourself. Tell me, what does "why" mean to you? I was asking a serious question. Why did you make these choices? Was it even something you did, or is it some part of the engine bugging out? You're just dancing around the question.

[endquoteresponce]

Gee, you really think I'm out for your blood? I could have kept quiet, let this thing rot. Even you with your backwards idea of harshness took some of this on board.

The hack infuriated me, and for your information, the initial draft saw heavy editing before being posted, because I didn't want it break into flaming and over-the-top vulgarity, I did care about the hostility, I didn't want the post to be that way for the sake of being hurtful, but I wanted it to be heated, I wanted to show just how much this hack angered me with its cheap deaths, bugs, so I let it show through the text. The game starts off with nitpicky problems, with messed up monitors, then it becomes infuriating, like the floor-is-lava situation, my post got more aggressive towards the end because I was writing that post as I was playing your hack, where in the end (Pinball Pike boss), I ragequitted.

Hey, D.A. Garden, remember the section on Backtrack Canyon? That's your problem. You're going in a loop 'cause of it.

Anyway, before we go another round of tearing at each other's throats, I certainly wasn't expecting that boss behaviour to be intentional. Hey, it sounds great, somewhat a combination of the GHZ and LZ bosses. A good effort, though to get it fully working, it's as much familiarity with ASM as it is familiarity with the Sonic engine.

 

Clownacy, you are the one who is being rude and whining. Just because the author, got forbid, self-rated their work higher than it actually is, does not mean you should tear their project apart. You could have either pointed out bugs similarly to D.A. Garden's post. Words like "useless", "stupid", "dick-move", and attacking the author directly are frowned upon. That is anything but constructive criticizm.

 

Hey! I didn't use "useless" or "stupid". :U Besides, I'm not the first to use "dick-move". And the self-worth point isn't the only factor in my criticisms. In fact that topic was offhand. When I was ranting about the hack, it was because of the hack. I was pointing out bugs, it escalated with the severity, compare the early entries to the platform-over-spikes part.

 

Well, that's some immature shit right there. The guy does his best to make a hack and you want to start nitpicking and criticizing as if he was Sonic Team or something.

Trust me I have plenty of creative ideas for hacks and would love to make a hack more than anything, but I have ZERO knowledge of how to even hack.

So don't criticize this guy when he's just trying to learn and do something you yourself haven't got a clue on how to do. Everyone has their own style and their own method of doing things. Unless he was a professional making amateur decisions or mistakes, you need to shut your mouth Clownacy.

People on here need to respect the effort being put forth when obviously no one else on here has even bothered to release any hacks since the last contest.

 

Oh, this 'rudeness' point again? Haven't you heard of satire? Thicker skin helps.

In my second post, though, you genuinely got me mad. It was... what's the word? Well, you used the terrible argument of 'if you don't like it, don't play it', and that was your final word. That did less than a good job of setting the tone for the response. Your perception failed, too: You said you were speaking with the attitude I did, but you were just being snarky, making the most absurd of arguments.

Eash, not to pick a hole in everything you say, but what kind of philosophy is that? If I had a hack and the only feature was new palettes, which were awful, how does it contain even a single positive thing? The best thing to a positive I can think of is time and/or effort. There can certainly exist hacks with no positives. I'm not saying this is one of them, more on that later in the post.

"Being human"? I can certainly tell you in all the time I've been around, I have never considered my hack to be above all. What kind of god-awful mindset is that? That would discourage learning, progress. What's there to do when you're at the top? I think I missed your point though, you say that but bring up Megamix as a better hack. ?

That section above that covers this applys here. Damn, that part was messy. After the first post, I was ready to call it quits with the angry-act, I wasn't playing the ROM anymore. And your response... As I'd repeated in previous posts, my original post had valid points even if watered down, but I spent my entire response correcting yours. We were both hardly in any state to cool off. You were mimicking me and your argument just annoyed me into responding angrily.

I wasn't claiming it was stolen. About Selbi's code, I can understand bells and whistles that your average guide adds to your hack, but features that are relevant to the very identity of your hack, as a follow up to Generations, such as Sonic's Homing Attack, which he inherited during Generations, the fact that it wasn't something you made, and physically had to ask someone to give it to you, only for you to give no use besides the occasional monitor chains, comes off as that posterboy example of why such code isn't publicly available. As someone else said, it felt slapped on. Yeah, it's relevant to the story, but what else is it relevant to? What else is even relevant to the story? That after-effect certainly isn't!



I don't know if bringing it up again will do any good. You don't need to tell me how reviews and criticisms work. I didn't do anything wrong; I had everything the way I wanted it. I'm aware of DA's checklist style, I'm aware that I could have taken an entirely different approach. I didn't want to. I tried a hack that was rated 9.4 stars somewhere by someone, had a wiki page describing it as a "complete overhaul" and as containing advanced engine modifications, you kept on giving the idea that the hack was good. But when I played it, it... didn't match what I'd heard of it: It gave me hell. I expect a layout hack to not make me ragequit as much as you expect feedback to be in a positive tone. You see? Then a new version comes out, I'm curious of its improvements, I play it only to find what I would consider to be worse. I'm repeating myself, as this is the same point I've been making all this time, so if you already get my point and have been disagreeing with it all this time then this won't do much good. I wasn't out to get this hack because it was new, it's because, from my experience, it was absolutely insane. It pushed my boundaries of poor design in certain areas, so my post pushed my boundaries of what I was comfortable with posting here (the first dick-move being what turned the post from 'things wrong with the hack' to 'things wrong with you as a level designer'). You suggest that I cut down on the rudeness, and since the rudeness runs parallel to bad features of the hack, I suggest you cut down on those. That was the entire point of the satire approach. If you can't see through the 'rudeness', then that means I couldn't see through the hack's flaws. That's why I couldn't bring myself to praise anything: I didn't notice anything over the dreadful time I was having. I began as jotting down thoughts that ran through my head as I was playing the hack, thoughts that every other player of the hack would have. It may have been cruel, but anyone who encountered the Ember Gardens boss will react the same way I did. It's why it's the only part of the post that I didn't tone down to satirical, leaving it at pure critical, aside from the lack of a certain quotation. Who wouldn't want to skip it? If the hack is enough to make me go through all of this trouble, imagine what it does to other players. Had I enjoyed the game, I would've come here, sometime after clearing Pinball Pike, and cheerily praised the hack for making something good from 3.0; instead of coming here having ragequitted, voicing my extreme dislike toward it. Even had I thought of this as 'just bad', I wouldn't have been so heated either. It's because this hack is nothing like I've ever experienced before. In areas, I really felt like you were trying to be bad. Like those platforms above the spikes, like the Speed Shoes that trick you into a cheap death, like that would-be hidden area that's a bottomless pit. This even had an effect in the conclusion: the level layouts outside of their times of being evil were honestly alright, it didn't flow much in areas where you'd expect it to, but places such as Ember Garden act 2 were pretty solid, iffy objects aside, but when came the Pinball Pike boss, it didn't matter, it wasn't enough to negate the hell I'd been through. I cast aside how I liked Midnight Aurora's palette and whatever levels it was that kept me going this far, they were pushed to the back of my mind, I didn't want to play anymore. I wanted these flaws to be out in the open, it may have been overkill, but considering what you'd done up to that point, I thought it was just enough. I'd seen way too many dim folks who that post wouldn't have gotten through to. There's my side of the story, how about yours? What was your intention with some of these? Do you plan to change any?

Hey, Knucklez. What's this about stuff I can't do? Seems like a pointless blow. You haven't seen my levels, but I've seen his. In fact, I can identify the bad in this hack's levels.
Anyone can do better than 'selectively dropping platforms' or 'unseeable ledge that's required you reach to progress', it's common sense to not do that. So of course I pointed it out as if he knew better, because he did. Come on, I don't think so little of him!
Just because a hack's released during a drought doesn't immediately make it good, it should get by on it's merits, not the time of year. Anyway, I've already made my point. Good is good, but too much bad can drown it out.