no, its all the same hard mode youd get in the bad future, just getting all time stones sets everything to hard mode , thats it.
Ambitious yes, but certainly doable. Nearly all levels to be used as bases for new level design are loaded, lots of assets are made, tons of songs are finished, and almost the entire Sonic framework is done for Hatch. Our small team has been working really hard and I would like to think we know what we're doing.
Man, this looks great! Sonic CD is probably my least favorite of the classics so much so that I never even replay it. This project seems to give it the much needed facelift + (very hopefully) quality of life changes and improved level design and I'm all for it! + - I wish Knuckles Chaotix would get the same treatment some day
Been hard at work making a brand new framework for the Hatch Engine that anyone will be able to use when it is done, and then I'm going to migrate this project to the new framework instead of the old one. About 3/5 done with the framework itself, excited to see people use it if they'd like; it's very powerful, and mostly a port of Sonic Mania content directly. ChillWay, Cyber1204 and I have been working on some Quartz Quadrant assets recently. Here are some of them:
The whole thing is looking fabulous! Sonic's new sprite though looks silly. What's with the stance and the clown shoes? The sprite you were using in the OP looked perfect.
Well the shoes can certainly be adjusted. The general idea was to make a more Toei/Junio style sprite than just reusing Sonic Mania's with a different palette, as well as adapt Cyber1204's "big" Sonic sprite he made for fun a while back. I don't see anything wrong with the stance. These drafts were made by MeloSoni12, Kanimy, Cyber1204.
I think the current sprite would look perfect with different shoes. At the end of the day tho this is a fan made passion project. Criticism should absolutely be allowed but I understand that it’s most important for the people working on the game to be happy as this is a free fangame.
Well yeah it looks good. Anything Cyber makes is good. That sprite you highlighted, though… not for this project. And wouldn’t even work properly if it did. That is a 2x resolution Mania sprite he made. He used it as reference for his new smaller CDX sprite.
Looking great so far, what have been some of the more challenging things that you and the team have encountered so far? Game wise or otherwise.
I wouldn't say anything is particularly challenging right at this point. One of the "setbacks" (not really) was that CDX *was* running on OpenMania, Aurum's Hatch Engine framework that he made to create a baseline for objects in Sonic Galactic. There were a lot of missing necessary components. In ~a month or so it'll run on Gateway, my new framework for Hatch. It's entirely new from OpenMania. Lactozilla and I have been maintaining the engine because Aurum is now excitedly working for Evening Star on their 3D game, so missing functionalities and stuff have been added by Lacto and I into the engine. Some of these functionalities (either in Hatch's proprietary script format or in-engine) include proper level order, expanded music/soundFX, hitbox, cutscene, entity interaction, expanded object updating/rendering, scanline, default object variables, resource loading, multiple concurrent single-entity animations, global timers, palette, and sprite functionalities. Lacto has also greatly expanded the 3D and tinting functionalities, so 3D special stages and such can look much better or sprites can use interesting lighting. We just wanted to make a framework that can give beginners to advanced users the opportunity to make a full fangame in a Retro Engine-like environment but also so that we could update Sonic CDX and Sonic Galactic to use a more upgraded framework with more capabilities. In addition to those new engine functionalities I've also manually ported over 150 Sonic Mania objects to the engine for people to use, like gimmicks or enemies. The biggest challenge though has been tile collisions. They are handled very interestingly in OpenMania, but it is not entirely accurate to the Retro Engine which leads to a lot of improper collisions, especially on some slopes. I've been trying to figure out the best way to port these collisions but been having a hard time making some calculations so I've been procrastinating it. Once those are added, there will be an opportunity for other fangame groups to start testing out our framework. I've also been considering making a short one-zone fangame called like "Gateway Sonic" to have a proof-of-concept for others to build their games on top of. Within the last few months there hasn't been the most *direct* CDX progress as basically all my attention has been on this framework so the game can run much better and properly in the first place. Cyber1204 and ChillWay have made a few assets since the last set of screenshots and aRBee has been chipping away at the JPN soundtrack. That's not to say it's been slow, moreso "let me do a ton of work on the underlying code right now to save us so much time in the future".
What are your plans for time travel? Are you gonna leave it as is or put some kind of new spin on it? Personally I'd really love an option to just select a timezone and play the whole game in it.
