An idea for a hack?

First off, I don't have any prior experience in hack design. This might end up being my first excursion, if I can get some help getting this off the ground.

The inspiration for this possible hack comes from a hack for the original NES Super Mario Bros, called "Air". There's a video of this hack being played at http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/movies.cgi?id=434 ; the patch that creates the game can be found at http://u-1.parfait.ne.jp/dl/air.lzh or http://rapidshare.de/files/6946065/Airpatch.IPS.html . The video essentially is the way the game is played, but if you see for yourself, everything done there is very tough to pull off.

Sonic should have the opportunity to do something like that. Through at least level brainstorming, and possibly (when I learn how) actual placement of objects, I hope to create a hack where the player is required to show off some of the crazy things possible just to be able to complete the game. It would use the Sonic 3 engine, as that allows a wide range of possibilities for level construction. Some things I have in mind:

-After getting a shield, put up an obstacle where it looks like Sonic is forced to take a hit, but in reality there's a narrow path through it safely, and in fact that path is required because there would be a section later on that DOES feature a mandatory hit.
-Put an obstacle at the beginning of an act 2 that can only be cleared by bumping the signpost into just the right spot at the end of act 1, to get the necessary shield. How will that spot be found? Trial and error, lots of it. Like Air, completing this game on the first try should not be a reasonable goal.
-Make a path that leads to what appears to be a dead end. Make the player exploit the vertical screen-wrap view glitch to go through solid objects and on to the next section.
-Only one life to start.
-For the players who just want to call it game after Death Egg 2 rather than get the final ending with Doomsday, don't let them do this. There will be exactly seven big rings in the game. No normal rings anywhere, except for five scattered 10-boxes found in obscure places in Death Egg 2. Find some trap that could only be cleared by Super Sonic, and make the player get all of those objects in order to progress beyond that point in the game. Missed the special stage 15 levels back? Well, you'd just now be learning that you've made it impossible to complete the game. Harsh? Yes. Welcome to the purpose of this hack.
-Is it truly possible to make a special stage impossible to get perfect in? If you place a ring in a position where the other 31 spots on its row and column are red spheres, is there any way to get to that ring? Does perfect only trigger when you actually collect a ring, meaning a 0-ring level would not get one? Does each stage simply have an independent variable, equal to the number of rings it takes to get perfect, meaning that you could just set this number higher than the actual ring count and lock out the perfect that way? Like the levels, the specials are going to be edited to be difficult. Six of them need to be impossible to get perfects in.
-As for the other special stage, there will be exactly 1 ring to get for a perfect there. This ring will be required to get. How? It will trigger the 50000-point perfect bonus, which (according to my plan) will be the only source of an extra life anywhere in the game. This might require adjustment of other factors—eliminating time bonus, limiting the point increase for getting multiple enemies in a chain—whatever it takes so that there's no way to get 50000 points for the extra life, except by getting that one ring.
-Why would you need the extra life to go along with the one you start with? My plan is for one of the levels to be so long that any attempt to clear it in one try would get a forced time over, and you would need to get to a new starting point later in the level to make it to the end on the second try. Level transitions (for the Lava Reef 2 and Death Egg 2 bosses) cause the timer to reset to 0 after any form of dying; if you use a checkpoint for this purpose it will reset only after time over. Lava Reef in particular could be adapted for this purpose easily, if the autoscrolling segment were extended to last a very long time.
-Tails and Knuckles could possibly be implemented with separate spawn points, but in general they'll be more dull (you can implement a section where the player is required to have a water shield to proceed, but unlike Sonic, you can't do the same for flame and lightning; and Tails in particular can degenerate just about any level design you throw at him). Because of the different skills you'd need to make the player use, having S-T-K sections would require three completely separate levels inside each map, and you might run out of space. I'd lean toward making it a Sonic-only game.
-Obviously remove the level select and debug codes. If you want to play around with those, there's always the original game. This version will not be designed for giving the player a free ride.

By revealing all these probable secrets, I've made the game (if it ever materializes) much easier than it should be for anyone who reads this, since you'll know exactly what to expect. The goal is to provide it to random people who haven't heard of the idea, and challenge them to solve the game. It'll take complete knowledge of what's possible in the Sonic 3 engine, along with technical precision just to get through the traps (I'm picturing two sets of alternating spikes and gravity switches, offset from each other, in Death Egg, where a player would have to move exactly the given distance to the right each time, and would hop back and forth from floor to ceiling, among other things). Eventually it might become well-known as a challenge for dedicated players. Or...it might not. That's the risk you take by creating these things.

Does anyone want to see this project pulled off, or is it just too much of nothing for nothing's sake?

 

Some things will definitely require the use of ASM changing...at the very least the signpost bump bonus will have to be eliminated, to prevent the trivial solution of bumping it 500 times for the extra life rather than getting the one hidden ring in a special stage. That and I don't know if there's a visual editor for special stages.

I definitely want the Sonic 3 engine and not an earlier one, since there are so many more mechanical possibilities in that game, especially the different functions provided by the shields so they can be required in ways other than "you have to have a shield to take a mandatory hit at this point". 3 also has a point to forcing all emeralds (so that a 14-zone completed game is possible, but a 13-zone completion is not) whereas 2 would just change the ending after the same number of zones. If it means development has to wait until after S3 level creation is better understood, then I'll wait.