Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Gambit - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

This thread will be used for all our announcements.

As we stated earlier, Sonic 2 HD's EHZ is now locked up to final adjustments and polishing. We will be showing off relevant assets to aid in production soon. We'll provide you the art style & guidelines for how things should look, along with a complete overhaul of the Database to streamline things.

By sharing our working methods, we're also sharing goals and a deadline. We'll be giving out our best, to direct artists and help them to improve (given that they'll be cooperative and motivated enough to do the hard work) towards a S2HD community goal.

All the topics have been (or will be soon) adjusted for this purpose, getting members into S2HD development as protagonists. What's this mean? In a nutshell:

New topics across the board. New thread for music, new threads for each zone's level art to reduce clutter and focus tasking, a new thread for characters, new thread for badniks/bosses, and a general thread for people who come up with ideas that don't fit into a specific thread. This new general thread will not be a dumping ground for everyone. We're going to set goals, and we're looking for a focus around them if you're wanting to contribute.

The first goal is to work with the staff to create Hill Top Zone. That includes concepts, actual level assets, badniks and the zone boss. There's a set way the tilesets are constructed, and we'd like nothing better than for you to be constantly asking Gambit for advice on this since he basically created the workflow for it single-handedly. This doesn't mean the tedium of making endless grass and ground tiles, since those are covered in the EHZ tileset.
You'll be given 3 months to rough this out. We're committing ourselves to helping you out with this, but rest assured—this is where the community section of the community project comes in. There's no better way to achieve the transparency so many have talked about.

Why Hill Top Zone? It's practical, from an asset creation standpoint, and the vast majority of EHZ has been completed. As you're well aware, the two share many pieces in common, and since EHZ's art is what we're basing expectations on, this will form a good base to get things rolling on. We're still lacking a really solid, jaw-dropping music track for the level. Also, I doubt any of you would complain at having two zones available in the alpha. Currently that's EHZ and EHZ only because that's what exists and what's polished. If you want HTZ in there, work together to make this happen.

Once the needed assets for Hill Top have been done, we'll be directing you to a new area to focus on.

To prevent confusion from clogging down this process, there are a few strict rules to follow:

-The S2HD staff will regularly interact with the community to approve your works. Needless to say we've got our lives and the alpha release on our priority list, so don't expect a reply after 5 minutes from your post. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.
-We encourage everyone to take part in it, even if some of you won't have your first shot at a given asset approved; until the deadline you can continue to improve them if you want them to be included.
-We will not tolerate useless bickering over tiny details, so try to be thoughtful when providing feedback and/or contributing. The art style is set so do not propose different artstyles or complain about a current one.
-What's developed for S2HD is for S2HD-use only. While we do not hold any legal property over it, it's a basic form of respect for the artists who have put hours of passion and hard work into it. Stealing / leaking will prevent us from sharing any sources.
-All artists must have complete access to the Database, so PM myself or Vincent your username and desired password in order to start submitting your own revisions.
-Upon hitting the deadline, the S2HD Staff will review all of your work and where it is needed update it to be further tweaked before final import to the engine.

If you've got any further questions related to a particular area, these are the guys you need to reach through PM:


Character Art: Vincent
Level Art: Gambit
Badnik & Bosses: Cerulean Nights
Backgrounds: Cornet Theory
Visuals & Animations: Scanline99
Music: ScubaSteve
General Q&A: Canned Karma