General Project Thread & Feedback

So.. I fail to see how this Sonic 2 HD thing is going to be a better game than sonic 2. Are you going to add more levels? Are you going to aim for more difficult challenges? Are there more areas to explore?

Because if you're just presenting the same game, the same premise, and/or the same old shit with better art and sound .. well.. maybe you should work for George Lucas and save us all the last 98 pages of drama.

 

Do express yourself in a civil way, or I won't have any will to continue such a discussion, with interlocutors with a severe a kiddish behaviour branding out about how I should be fuck retard, stupid or (*put any offence*) I should had hit my head when I was kid. Is not earning you respect in the adult world, nor in my eyes.

I've stated these facts with proof of art-style clashing and my reasons of not choosing any of them for. Do argue with those, even if you do like all the games there in question (which is entirely personal, of course!).

About the OLD Mockup art-style is not by any means reflecting the current Art-Style especially for BG and part in foreground.
We are heavily developing stuff which has by any means surpassed what you see now. You'll see a more definite and complete S2HD's unique-style pretty soon tough.

About the Bumper Item and other Badniks, it has been used Gradients or Blend tool to achieve shiny Metal effects. (which is composed by complex overlays and path gradients you must ALSO observe. Not cheap point & click, this requires hours of work.

 

Did you watch anything animated ever? By your logic, Disney are a load of failures because their flat shaded characters are over painted backgrounds.

G-Guilty Gear Style?

I...I can't even come up with a proper response to this. Not because it's a solid argument, but because it's so broken I wouldn't even know where to start.

Japan Style? Uber? Where the do you come up with these terms?

More importantly, what you are doing, and what you are saying you're trying to accomplish doesn't match up at all. Seeing Odin Sphere's attention to detail and how they accomplished this isn't a giant mystery. It all has a painted like quality, something that an artist would actually have to go in and mess around with all the little details here and there. They didn't use a gradient tools, they didn't blur edges, they did a majority of the art themselves.

I didn't understand any of that.

What I'm gathering from that large image though is that you have a large vector art, then you do some subpar anti-aliasing technique between the shades and call it a day.

If it's done manually then this is even more disappointing since the end result looks like something a filter would spit out. No unique touch or twist to spice it up, just going by the numbers.

No Vincent.

The amazing game was already developed. You're just trying to pretty it up.

This was amazing



This is subpar



Especially when you had people come by and contribute gorgeous artwork. Artwork that was stylized, and did justice to the original artwork and still looked fresh and new when it was redone.

But you and your idea of "UBER", let IceKnight run a rampage to get everything pixel perfect, and took a shit all over their attempts and tried to get their level of quality, which was far above what was presented so far, down to your low low standards.

 

First off, I am an adult. That said, years of experience in the real world should have taught you that age has absolutely no definitive bearing on intelligence, maturity, or ability to express yourself. I choose my tone of voice before speaking to accurately reflect my emotion and general feelings towards a particular subject. I like to call it communication, but you may have another term for it.

Sarcasm aside, I don't know what to do here. It seems that no matter what all of us are telling you about our feelings towards the art style, no matter what several other communities have said to criticize the style of art, and no matter what the people who actually care to speak on this project are saying, you seem to be stubbornly stuck firm to your current viewpoint. If I'm respectful, I'm turned down. If I'm an asshole, I'm turned down. If I provide the most solid examples and reasoning to support my viewpoints, I'm turned down! How can you call something like this a community project when you stubbornly refuse the kind of style and overall direction that the public actually wants to see in the first place?!

I've followed this project from the beginning. I've experienced its ups and downs; I fought against several authority figures to support it; and I pushed as hard as I could to get this project a place in this community where it could flourish and be seen by as many like-minded Sonic fans as possible. It's supposed to be a mutual collaborative effort, and yet there's so much conflict on every possible side I could think of. Conflict in art styles, conflict in direction, and conflict in what the public is willing to accept in the supposed final product. What are we supposed to do here? How do we work things out?

When I read the post you made in this project with the supposed aim of clearing things up, I was enraged. Never have I seen a presentation of standards and supposed direction for a project that conflicted so much with what I thought we were trying to accomplish; not only that, but I never saw reasoning that I thought to be so utterly ignorant of several artistic styles and directions that other video game media has taken. I try and ask myself what went wrong, and I can't think of anything. I don't think you have bad intentions, but I don't see a solid, enjoyable future—or at least a game as good as it could be—with the standards you've put in place. It pains me and frustrates me to see all of these roadblocks in the way of success because I really want to see the ideal view of this project brought to fruition. I'm passionate and selective, but I feel like the general viewpoints I have in regards to this project and game design in general are ones that will produce—or at least associate with—quality.

So many people are coming to you in frustration, but outside of that, they're desperately trying to show you what this project could be if just approached slightly differently. I don't want to knock any of the talent in this community—I feel several of our members are amazingly talented, and I respect their work profusely—but I'm beginning to question if we, as a community, actually have the talent and experience to pull off the ideal vision of the game we set out to fulfill. It feels like the current direction is that of extreme optimism—as if we can't quite live up to the highest standards possible, and that we're settling for a style that's just "good enough." I feel like we're so much better than that, though!

I may have gone on the deep end a bit there, but a lot of what I said, I still feel. I believe that you as an artist are far from incompetent at what you do, but I think that there's so much more we need to consider when making a game like this. We all have lives, and we all have distractions... so it's not like we can sort out the preliminary design in a week or two like professional game designers get all the time and money in the world to do. But I feel like we didn't really explore the proper direction and possibilities enough before going full speed into things. It's been well over a year since this project first started, and it feels like even though we've made so much progress, we've made nearly none. It's the wildest paradox I've ever experienced.

Maybe there's nothing I can do to convince you that things should change, but that doesn't mean I don't strongly believe they should. I just wish you could see that.

 

Just out of curiosity, why don't you show us some of this original art that was so much better in comparison to what we have now. I've been watching this project since I heard about it last year and I haven't seen anything in terms of art direction to get pissy about.

 

Agreed. I'd hate to see this project go belly-up because we can't agree on things.

 

So, I haven't really been following this project...

And, judging from what I've seen, I'm unlikely to start.

Some of the earlier art was quite nice, and looked hand-drawn, like you were playing a cartoon.

The current crop...

Well, I'll give you one thing: It's the best faux-HQ4X I've ever seen. I'm impressed by your ability to imitate it by hand.

...Seriously, this doesn't look much better than the blurry filter in Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection.

I feel a better style would be to go with something simpler: Hand-drawn artwork with visible shade changes (and fairly few shades of each color) on more-detailed backgrounds.

See: Disney.

 

We're not producing an animated Disney Movie, nor an Anime.

The way Illustrator manages to produce pixel perfect vector art amazing & properly aligned for videogame frames is freaking fantastic.
Using vector art not only allows many users to start and learn quickly and actually contribute easily, but to produce a malleable source which can be indefinitely tweaked for the better, just changing/adding/removing single vectors, with different artists working on them.
It is the perfect way to make a videogame and the choice I've chosen, brought up a fantastic S2HD Staff team composed of unique & talented artists mostly sharing the same tools to work at ease.

You exactly know Chimpo, drawing in low-art resolution how complex would it be it to make into HD.
It requires not only professionals, but experienced and dedicated staff with years of rough pixels work to make it look decent in HD, especially with animations. (and there's still the BG + FX clashing problems when you use different shading systems with antialiasing altogether)
The way Odin Spere is done without clashes is mainly due the amount of colourful shades without steps (both framework and raster work), which instead happens in the two other examples posted SF2THD and KOF.


Then about fantastic Billy's work that inspired my greatly to invest all of my free time, despite working fulltime job of course,
I have a question for you:

How can you make a comparison with just an OLD arranged Mockup screen to test Uber shades with a single and fully texturized Billy's single artwork?
Give us time to release the newer stuff, as we've not only dealing with stills but problems to create animations out of them and HD tiles, BGS and several other stuff which will look -mark my words- as gourgeous as that single screen. (playable eh! )
Also I take the opportunity to all of the artists out there, to produce HD levels + Characters and Items which blends in nicely with the Uber shading we have.. go on ahead!

Said this, I'm not fond at all with Billy's Sonic eyes, chubbyness, shoes and shape.
Sonic work on the initial changes, with many and important ICEKnight's suggestions to stick close to the original in some parts, had helped it not losing the original soul. (How can you compare an upscaled filtered Sonic with the current one? Really!)
The viewers of the Tech Demo and the increasing popoularity of S2HD continues to make me happy about everything it has been made since now, and I therefore hope for you, especially impatient and easy to judge guys, will give us time to release new screenshots of actual development.

That's it for tonight.

 

All that is riddiculous. This discussion had to happen some months before, when we started to move Über. If we transform our art into that again we simply wasted months Überizing them. This all started because of a piece of art people pefered the low shaded version without seeing a decent Über version of it.

 

duh.


xD...

 

Yay! One hundred pages!

And, why are we going through this again? Wasn't this dealt with quite awhile ago? I don't think anyone here wants all those efforts to Uberize the art to be wasted, eh?

 

Haha, thanks EL!

S2HD inner development,IS progressing quite nicely.
We don't have conflict in art styles. Upon following the Uber-Style move we're tweaking the art to fit seamlessly onto the engine.
So really, treating the Database or those Mockup as the final release would be a joke!.

But let's get into a much more important answer:

What are you detractors "suggesting"?

A clear direction trough words? We need to start drawing pro-rough pixel art? Or maybe Colour-Step all our vector art?
In fact you propose nothing but contrapposed styles that every single (detractor)community member wants the game to turn out like.

It won't happen as a matter of fact, but for a moment think you're in my place instead and just imagine if I call all the Staff artists and say: Ok, because part of the community want this, we scrap all the art! And start working with raster work!

A reasonable answer might be: "You're mad, man! I can only draw vectors, I'm no KOF spriter professional!".
And even then, would not be there other problems around with BGS which don't fit or problematic upscaled graphics with poor shades taken our from 256 colour gifs? Would that be the best move to take for S2HD? Would be there enough artists which could produce something like this and contribute seriously? What about the final result? I say it is for any wise one to do not know that answer.

So if we start "talking", lets do that with visual options and suggestions which can be included in our development process which works on really eye-pleasing Uber Shading.

Don't worry Tweaker, I do not take offence when you say I'm not a good artist, but I would be completely a miserable person to make this newborn and growing beautiful game slip into the dead sea.
You have seen it right, I have a job, live with my girly and I'm content with what's life proposed to me, thus sacrificing my bits of free time (usually night-sleeping time) to do my best to revive Sonic with "friends", not only "Staff members".
We are ready to pull this trough the end, because we trust our art skills and love them very much.

That is something I would love comprehension from these detractors. Just force "Asking" for immaterial options, will not work by words. (also what's up with all those users which bandwagons detractors, whom never had posted here?)
Are you really ready to create all what you speak from, and stay with us up to the end without eventually quitting for your own fangame?

I know it's hard for some of you, but I ask again to Trust my "Uber" vision and Trust our artists on this one, even if that OLD Mockup isn't that great or some shades is exceeding!
If at a set point we'll had in mind to release tools to make your own HD levels(All playable online with world raking or tournaments), or even character frames in future, would not also detractors being amazed to start working onto?

We'll do our best and everyone of us is determined to do it.

 

I'm happy to hear that the project is not undergoing any reforms that we can't afford to put time and effort into.

 

...Wow. And here I thought we'd taken care of this debate ages ago.

All the artwork created so far has been presented on here. You guys have seen the massive amount of iterations that have been created. I just don't get how so many people are up in arms now when the style we've settled on is the product of gradual changes over time. Changes which, as I recall, very few people were opposed to. And suddenly that's not the case. It's not like we've been hiding the art style of the project, so I'm really at a loss for where all of this is coming from. Tweaker, Chimpo, Blast; I know all of you have followed the project faithfully since its inception and contributed a great amount to it -- so it just doesn't gel with me that you're now at odds with what has been built up.

Give me something to go on here guys. Are you upset with the style of the game, or Vincent's vision for the project and his interpretation of what the HD style should ultimately be? If it's the latter, I'd ask that you set it aside and let us continue with the remasterings. S2HD is the very definition of WIP, and everyone on staff is very confident that the upcoming alpha build will be impressive to say the least. As I've said, we're committed to evaluating each submitted piece on its own virtues. We are by no means applying a blanket process to everything. Please bear with us until the alpha is out before making such final judgments.

Everyone has their personal opinions, but turning this into a mudslinging arena helps no one, S2HD least of all.

 

Actually, yes there will be more levels. :P

 

Wait... what? Where you did you get that idea from?

 

You forgot to actually put the part that mattered in bold.
Why should they start working on HPZ when they are not even done with the game itself? I thought HPZ would be implanted if they had the time, or stamina, to do so. Has there even been a confirmation that HPZ will be in the final game?
The main goal of this project was to created Sonic 2, upscaled to a higher resolution and with enhanced graphics. Ideas does not automatically become reality, you have to focus on what's important, in other words, the game itself, before you can start adding new content.

Let's start by making the actual game and then go from there, ok?

 

uh-huh. Now show me the detail, the inpretation, the touches that make the game stand out from the crowd and above automatic filtering, as opposed to smooth shapes and lots of colours blending together to create gradiented effects. Stop taking these kind of comments dead literaly.