Conceptual Stage: Sonikaruga

Following my success at restoring Hidden Palace Zone (if you can call it that), I decided to try my hand at something slightly more difficult. Therefore I present to you...
<h1>SONIKARUGA</h1><h2>?????</h2>with apologies to Treasure

<h2>Brief</h2>
Sonic has a polarity which can be either white or black, which can be switched by pressing a button on the controller. Polarity is important:​

• Rings of the same polarity will increase Sonic's ring count, while rings of opposing polarity will decrease it - if his ring count is zero, rings of opposing polarity become lethal. Fortunately there will be rings which are always the same polarity as Sonic; however, there will also be rings which are always of opposing polarity.
• Sonic can stand on spikes of the same polarity safely, but spikes of opposing polarity will cause damage.
• Destroying enemies of the same polarity as Sonic will cause Sonic's point score to increase, but destroying enemies of opposing polarity will decrease the score. This is important since to enter the Special Stage you must gain or exceed a certain score by the end of the level.
• Sonic can absorb projectiles of the same polarity as himself, but is hurt by projectiles of opposing polarity. Enemies may switch their polarity and fire projectiles of different polarities each time, so look out! (Sonic still gets hurt by stuff running into him when he's not curled up regardless of polarity, so don't try that one.)
• Robotnik also has a polarity which he changes; if Sonic hits him while they are of differing polarities, Sonic is the one who gets hurt.

A possibility would be collecting all six emeralds to unlock Super Sonic, using the "neutral" (red/pink) colours in the palette. He cannot be killed except for falling into pits; for him, all rings increment ring count and all enemies increment score.​

 

Indeed I will. I'll also have to find out how to come up with some nice big level layouts full of evil design and paths which require you to have a particular polarity to get to them.

 

I don't think it'll take years. Months, maybe. It depends how much I work on it. I anticipate a similar timescale as Cinossu's S1EE.

 

It's not my idea to use, and I don't think as a game in its own right it would interest people. The changing-polarity idea has been done before, in a couple of different guises - Ikaruga is the obvious one, and Dynamite Headdy has a level based around the idea of flipping the level over. It at least adds an interesting new dimension to Sonic.

I don't have the skill to write a game from scratch on ANY platform. I can use Sonic to do things because I know to an extent how the engine works, but I can't write my own engine. That requires a knowledge of the Megadrive hardware that I just don't have.

 

EDIT: Nothing in this post was relevant, so I removed all of it. :D

 

Sonic 2 has far less free space and is far less flexible. Besides, Cinossu's given me some code so fixing all the graphics that depend on the first palette is relatively trivial.

 

drx, you rule. Sega sound is back in action, baybeh.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the colour change code not working is an emulation bug in Kega; LocalH, Qjimbo or anyone else capable of testing on hardware, do you have a Game Genie or equivalent device to test the colour change with (since I can't test on hardware or set up dummy objects)?

 

Great. Can you drop by the IRC and give me a bell?

Also, just thought I'd share this mockup of the title screen which drx has agreed to do.