Sonic Mania Plus SPOILER THREAD with UNMARKED spoilers!

In the video's description, it says "Go behind-the-scenes of the development of Sonic Mania Plus in our first of two dev diaries!", so I think there will be just 2 dev diary videos for Sonic Mania Plus. I'd definitely welcome more than that though, if those involved ever got a chance.

 

Oh nice catch! Hadn't looked at that. Looking forward to the second one, and yeah like you I'd absolutely love to see more if they're able to do any (though I understand the team is spread around the world and it'd be hard to do too many more logistically). But yeah, definitely the more the merrier!

 

Yeah, that was a nice bit of insight. The animations they've made for Ray and Mighty look so good.

At about 1:51 in the video you can see this:



Mania mode "Sonic Classic Heroes" style :v:

 

3:24
They even reminded us of small details we had forgotten

THAT is a very good sign. You know, given how much we tend to bash Sonic Team on a semi-regular basis, it'd be nice if we had more stuff like this. Seeing more staff than just Takahashi talk about development in Sonic games with dev art/assets. Even for Sonic Forces, I'd like to hear them talk and show what they've done.

 

One other thing this video's made me realise - the Generations poster of Mighty and Ray misspells "Armadillo" as "Armaddilo"! Only recently bought the PC version of the game during the Steam sale and took a screenshot of the poster when I encountered one - just double-checked it and it's definitely the same in-game, and not a case of an earlier revision of the texture being used accidentally in the video or something. How have I not noticed that before? XD

 

From the video:



An earlier shoe design for Ray.

 

I wonder why they redesigned Ray's shoes anyway? I'm glad they did, just surprising that they took cues from Archie's Ray design.

Had they not then multiple characters would have basically wore the same shoes which might look a bit lazy. I also wonder now that Mighty and Ray are back what are the chances they show up again in the future?

 

Hoshino's listed as a creative director of Sonic Team in this video. Is this a new title, or no? Interesting contrast to Iizuka's (new) title as the series producer.

 

Mighty's shoes were already slightly redesigned from SegaSonic to Chaotix. So it would have been weird if Ray was the one character who had the same shoes as Sonic.

From what I can gather, it seems that SegaSonic may have begun development before Sonic 2. At the time the only Sonic sidekick characters Manabu Kusunoki would have had to refer to for design standards were the Sonic the Hedgehog Band. Since they all wore the same shoes as Sonic (and the same gloves, except Sharps who naked wings), it's possible that Kusunoki took that to be the series standard and so gave the same shoes to Ray and Mighty.

What I do find interesting is that Mighty was given a yellow-ish skin colour (tummy, muzzle, ears) for his Chaotix character illustration, but the in-game graphics and title screen kept his original tan skin.

Curiously, the one game that did give Mighty yellow-ish skin was Gale Racer (made his tail yellow too, it was black in SegaSonic), released a few months before Chaotix.

 

I almost wish they went ahead and kept Mighty's skin color yellow and possibly made the shoes yellow as well. Would have set him apart from Sonic just a bit more.

 

Walked in to GAME today to check out their gaming headphones and lo and behold, Sonic Mania Plus on store shelves (Switch version). My heart skipped a beat in to momentarily thinking it was mistakenly put on sale - and then I saw the sticker indicating to "pre-order you copy now" or something to that effect indicating the boxes were just placeholder.

Still fucking amazing to see a Genesis style Classic game on actual store shelves though. Hope Mania Plus does well and outshines the original in sales. Adventures should help.

 

I knew it was a pre-order placeholder, but I had a similar feeling on friday when I went to a GAME store too. A friend works there and he pre-ordered the game for me a month ago, so I'll know quickly when the real thing gets there. :v:

 

Oops, it looks like they forgot to add Ray's "wings" to the sprites where he's hanging still from the monkey bars:


PS: Hire me as a betatester pls. =P

 

Well, considering that his walking, running, standing, and idle sprites don't have them either, I'm guessing it was intentional, not something they forgot. It does look kind of strange when he suddenly grows “wings” in his gliding animation, but I've personally gotten used to it insofar.

I mean, considering that Tails’ spinning tails still don't make a lick of sense, and in the 2D games Amy magically makes her hammer disappear whenever she isn't using it to attack, I've gotten used to a lot of weird things happening in this series...

 

Yeah, flaps would look weird enough on normal sprites to simply not showing them as long as they are not needed.

 

RE: Ray's hanging animation - since we now know he has two different ones to accomodate his unique style on the monkey bars, is anyone else hoping the alternate one will see use in other situations too? It'd be great if when hanging from things he'd occasaionally use the grabbing-with-tail animation instead of the normal grabbing-with-hands one - particularly when partnered with Tails in Encore Mode; it'd be hilarious to see him carrying Ray around by his tail, haha! XD

 

This is more like having Tails' tails disappear when he doesn't need them. It's Ray's distinctive feature and he looks very odd without them.

I mean, of course they don't have to be seen in every single frame, but it's way too obvious that there's something missing in those.

 

something like this would be an easy fix, give him lil armpit flaps that get bigger when they're needed. it looks off when he's raising his arms and there's nothing there.

 

I think they are there, they just naturally get hidden by the arm... and the fact that they are his fur colour. If you look hard you can see some flat dark colour with no normal body shading which would probably not be like that otherwise.


Subtlety.

However I do find the hang glaring now it's been pointed out. Could still be subtly there to the point of vanishing? but Looks gone.

 

To me that just looks like his tail, because it starts at his butt and there's no separation between the tail and where the skin flaps would be. The dark patch is very likely just the shadow under his arm. When you look at the sprites in motion there really is no clear trace of any skin flaps or “wings”. If those are in fact them, they are very subtle as you said, but to me I still think the sprites look very nice, even with some ambiguities.