Sonic Horizon

So I've picked up the plans for D-Series: Black & Blue, dusted them off, and started retooling a bunch of the ideas into Sonic Horizon. I feel like this isn't a big enough thing for me to make a new thread for it in E&RE, but it belongs here more than in the ML.

I've started a blog, mostly for production notes and general minutia and recorded thoughts of whatever random idea pops into my head that might be cool to implement. It's probably going to be riddled with spoilers, as it's a very designer-point-of-view oriented blog, but eh. If anyone's interested, the URL is http://sonichorizon.blogspot.com .

For those of you who haven't seen my "For those of you who don't know what D-Series is" posts (I think this is the fourth time in about two years)...

Sonic Horizon is basically my attempt at a Sonic-based role-playing game. Because as far as I can tell, no real RPGs have ever been made with Sonic as the basis. In addition, Sonic Horizon is intended to be a series. Seven games, beginning with Sonic's first encounter with Robotnik on South Island and ending with him doing his part to save the planet from the Biolizard. There are a few reasons it starts and ends where it does. First and foremost, the idea for the plot to the RPG came from a sprite comic I co-wrote about four years ago. Not much of it ever saw the light of day, but myself and a guy who goes by "Scali" (we've since had a pretty massive falling-out, but he does deserve, and get, a large amount of credit for the comic concept) put together a comic known as D-Series. It was a prequel to my webcomic Project Omega (which started with the end sequence from Sonic Adventure 2), and followed primarily Robotnik through the course of his dealings with Sonic. Basically it was intended to show the reverse angle of everything that happened.

It got maybe a dozen comics in, and died just before starting the plotline to Sonic the Hedgehog. Project Omega, The CAD Room, and all other comics that TCR put together died pretty hard by 2004. A year passed, I spent time writing connected storylines that have only really been seen by four people. I sat down one day and thought about trying to make a Sonic game, and at the same time a conversation came up that RPGs fangame people seem to be afraid to touch with Sonic. I thought about it and went with it.

Sonic Horizon, I'm hoping, will be a smooth combination of the actual Sonic games and the ideas of D-Series. Split into two stories over the course of seven episodes, Blue Side follows Sonic and company, and will look and feel a good deal like the actual Sonic games. It will also be the most action-RPG of the two. Black Side will follow Robotnik and his crew, and will probably have extremely varying styles and genres (a good deal of Episode VI, for instance, will actually feel a good deal like a Mega Man game).

As of now, I'm still stuck in the conceptual design phase. Trying to tamp down some ideas so that when it comes time to start putting it together the ideas mesh well. I still have... not a lot of a solid idea as to how exactly battles will work (which is sorta huge, being an RPG and all). Still putting together thoughts and possibilities on battle concept and such.

The current focus is on putting together Episode I: Blue Side. Taking place on South Island, it contains zones from Sonic the Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic the Hedgehog (GG), Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (GG), and Sonic Chaos (GG). The current setup for E1 contains 7 towns that get revisited a few times, and approximately 90 action areas.

I'll post the more concrete, important stuff here, but for the time being this is a helluva lot of concept work, and I may have to build the Sonic engine from scratch (I would ask Saxman if I could work on the source code for ProSonic, which is the engine this was going to get built on, but I don't have NEARLY the amount of knowledge required to tweak it, and I'm not going to attempt to push him on it, as he wants to take it easy for a while).

Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions, complaints, offerings of cash, drugs, your body, etc. are more than appreciated.

EDIT: Also, feel free to comment on the Blogger blog. Input is awesome.

 

Sonic 2 on the Genesis takes place on Westside. It turns out the Game Gear version actually takes place on South Island (which only makes sense in noting the GG game came out before the Gen game. Tails being on South Island doesn't make any damn sense though)

 

It'll be a side-scroller, like the classic Sonic games, though I have considered doing some quasi-isometric stuff, but it'll likely stay 2D.

Honestly I think it falls into some shady category between hack and fangame, with a bias toward fangame.

Should have some more to update with soonish.