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I liked the SAGE demo, but one thing you might want to look into is Tails. I tried playing both levels as him, and in the first level I don't think I needed to descend from the very top of the level more than one time, outside of refueling. There was simply nothing keeping me from flying over every obstacle and other bit of level design without a care. The second level was better in that regard, but it was never really disincentivized.

(And I've never liked a wall jump mechanic in any Sonic fangame, but that's just me.)

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(It may be worth mentioning that I'm not a good Sonic player. A lot of you probably find the Sonic games easier than I do, and my level designs are going to reflect that disparity. I've never even managed to beat Sonic 2, and my playing leans more toward exploration than speed, so I prefer S3&K. That said, once you've learned the levels, you can breeze through them without taking much damage... kind of like Nimbus, I guess. SWAG is designed to get better the longer you play it.)

Bobinator, on 23 February 2014 - 12:16 PM, said:

I've thought about it! Probably not as a rom hack, though. I'm tired of small resolutions.

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Jazz 1 is definitely cracking around the edges at this point, though by now I'm pretty sure I know more about how it works than anyone else in the world, so I may not be the most neutral judge. That said, @KingofHarts especially, Jazz 2 remains one of the greatest multiplayer FPS games ever made, despite its being a 2D platformer.

Bobinator, on 14 February 2014 - 04:50 PM, said:

There are quite a few separate utilities for editing various parts of JJ1, and I've used every one of them. J1E is the primary level editor (obsolescing J1CS, which could edit fewer properties and erased some data while saving). It handles level layouts, collision masking, tileset graphics, animations, object properties, and the like, as well as bonus level layouts. JJ1MOD (and its predecessor JGP, which I still find myself using some of the time) edits almost everything else, most usefully the individual sprites used in each planet for enemies and other objects. J1LES is a complement to J1E -- it lets you edit the basic level layout and very little else, but it's much faster to use than J1E, so I spend most of my time in there. And then every once in a while I pull out a hex editor.

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Let's see what I can think of off the top of my head... check out the "Tilesets" section at The Spriters Resource, which contains direct rips of nearly every set in the game. (It's missing the boss planet variations, which occasionally have slightly different graphics from the regular versions, for whatever reason.) Most of them are unsurprising, but for example Megairbase has some green striped tiles that were never used, and some sets (Turtemple, Pezrock) have some extra-large tree graphics. Jazz 2 also ships with a number of unfinished versions of JJ1 tilesets, mostly from the Jazz CD episodes A-C (including a stage at which Exoticus and Lagunicus were two parts of the same planet), though there's also a version of Marbelara with a bunch of brightly colored bricks that didn't make it into the final game.

As for the game engine, hmm. The behavior used by the sliding wall platforms in Industrius has the potential to move vertically as well, which I use pretty much all the time. The game supports a sixth weapon type that never shows up in the official levels. (And sort of a seventh, in that you can select it but there doesn't seem to be any way to make it fire anything.) There's an unused behavior that works kind of like the Dreempipes turtles, in that the object sits still above water and moves around below water, but you can define the path it takes while moving. You can turn Jazz into one of the tiny turtles, but it's seriously unfinished/broken and I'm not sure if it's possible to turn back again. There are several more water colors/modes besides the two that get used in Dreemipes and Lagunicus. Probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of.

Miscellaneous content... Jungrock includes an unused (in JJ1) sprite of Jill from Jill of the Jungle. Medivo has an unfinished secret level that can't be accessed from the regular levels. There's a third main Diamondus level, which was clearly made when the tileset had a slightly different layout than it does now. The first Scraparap level contains some partially deleted layout data that doesn't match any tileset in the game.

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