General Project Thread & Feedback

I was actually very impressed with your bridge, and used it as a reference when creating mine. Don't beat yourself up about it, it just didn't fit the art style .

 

I like reading these visual updates on the game's progress though my only criticism would be that the team is focusing too much attention on the game's marketing efforts (in search of attention, admiration and praise) as opposed to just working on the alpha release. I see this critical mistake in Sonic fandom constantly; overzealous promotion of projects that barely have a couple of levels done. This does not mirror the actual games industry for example where releases are promoted close to the game's release.

Then again if they just want to fill us in on the backstory of the game's development leading upto the alpha release then that's cool. I just hope there are several orders of magnitude of more work done on the actual game with just say one guy working on updating the s2hd.sonicretro.org page.

I mean how many of their resources did they dedicate to the initial screenshots and artwork (and infamous countdown) that ended up on having an effect that was the reverse of what they intended. I just have a feeling that the alpha would be complete by now if they just focused on working on the game.

PS. I am not trying to be negative here. If anything the media they showed represents substantial progress on the game and I am still definitely looking forward to having something playable and therefore commend the team for their efforts and work ethic.

 

I believe almost all the effort is going into the alpha at the moment. From what I gather, LOst is spending pretty much all of his free time on coding for S2HD at the moment, possibly why he rarely checks/posts this message board, so I reckon the extra stuff is just to keep us interested while everyone is working hard in the background.

 

Aerosol: I'm writing the descriptions to be fun to read and informative. Would you honestly rather that I just put up, 'This is the EHZ bush. It was round and looked like a cutout. We changed it with a new grid pattern to give it depth'? It seems most people are enjoying them, which is the intended purpose.

We're putting the vast majority of the effort into the alpha, as a few have said already. We're going above that to create these developmental pieces for you guys to see how things are coming along. There's plenty more in the pipeline as well.

 

No you didn't. Been a long couple of days. On the off chance someone hasn't seen the new updates, take a look:

<iframe src="http://s2hd.sonicretro.org/images/changeloglevelart1.png" width="1200" height="1000" scrolling="no"> </iframe>

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<iframe src="http://s2hd.sonicretro.org/images/changeloglevelart2.png" width="1200" height="1000" scrolling="no"> </iframe>

 

My opinion on everything:

Personally I'm just glad this actually got somewhere. It appears it's still going, too. The visual changelist things are decent reads. To the guys in charge, just do me a favor (and you probably already have) - back up the code and all that on more than one computer / storage medium. You wouldn't want one real life occurrence to halt this forever, now would you?

+ - If anyone has suggestions on how I can word that to sound less demanding, let me know - it isn't meant to be that way.  

 

Ha ha. We all have backups of everything so there won't be an issue with that.

 

You have no idea how much we have backed up. We've had one hard drive crash on us so far, and we've all dealt with deleted files and flattened Photoshop layers a time or two. There's multiple copies of everything, stored on our private drives and uploaded to servers.

 

*Sigh* All I ever wanted was an answer to my astonishingly simple question . I'm awfully tired of repeating myself when everyone else is getting answers. Have you all got me blocked or something? This is so pathetically frustrating...

 

Well, that's good to know. Consider that fear alleviated.

So, yeah. Good stuff.

 

Amazing work on those EHZ objects! The cohesiveness of the chosen art style is really coming through, and the pieces are looking like they belong now.

However, one tiny little suggestion: A few variants of the bridge logs - since the cracks are much more defined now, the fact that they're all the same really sticks out more. Having a few different looking logs varied between would really liven up the bridge.

 

You do realize the last time someone tried to answer your "simple" question that you didn't like the answer and spent an entire post picking apart their response, right? What makes you think anyone on staff would want to discuss the situation with you?

As for your comment about concepts being used for production of a commercial game:

As someone from the games industry, I can assure you that no commercial venture I have ever worked on has used concept art from "the community." Concept artists are paid freelancers or are on staff so as to guarantee the company has the right to use their work. The staff for S2HD is asking for concepts from the community to use in building official art for the game - sounds to me like they are accepting community input. As a bonus, you've actually been given more freedom to art your concept however you see fit - MaximusDM uses 3D models, some other posters have used vector, some have used raster, I think some even used watercolor - it's whatever you want. It may not be the type of input you want to contribute, but it's the type of help they're looking for right now while they try to roll alpha out the door (I'd call this more of a vertical slice than an alpha, but I digress).

Big time thanks to the staff for all the hard work - it's been pretty cool to see the bits and pieces of Emerald Hill coming together!

 

To be fair, his question is extremely simple and I've seen it been danced around or ignored entirely.

Will there be a reference guide for people to attempt to draw in the new established art style?

Yes or no pretty much answers that.

 

Excuse me, but you don't seem to get what this is all about at all. So tell me, is this a difficult question - "Hi! Just wondering whether we're likely to see a guide on the new art style at some point? Thanks!"? Please... tell me why the hell the staff shouldn't want to "discuss" that?

And what's wrong with "spending an entire post picking apart their response"? Should I have spent half a post? Or maybe a quarter? Surely not an entire post! Sorry if you don't like that I'm not 100% thrilled with all this.

Now why did I react like that? Because it's the same "canned" response I always get from Canned Karma. A bunch of rubbish that looks impressive but doesn't actually answer any of my questions. And manages to insult the efforts of the community all the while.

Yep, great then. If taking a few cues from some concept art is all that separates this from a closed project, then I'm surprised it's still here.

Oh goody! Lucky us... Come on now... is this so special?

And that's why I want to know what's going to happen on the community side AFTER the alpha is out. Don't get me wrong, I love this project. I want to contribute. But there's little reason to do so as it stands. For a start you don't even have a clue HOW your work is being used until a release comes out. This last month or so has proven that. Of course I don't reeeally expect any of this to change. Which is why I am asking why this is still confusingly labelled a community project? And shouldn't that label be removed for everyone's sake? I know I'd love this project that much more if it was a little more honest.

Like I said. How is anyone supposed to be a part of this project when it's not clear what the project is? We were told something was being worked out with the site staff. But haven't been told anything about that. I don't know if that talk had anything to do with the community side of the project or just the openness with the staff. Nevertheless it would have been nice to know.

The way I see it is that right now there's room for two types of people here.

1. Fans

2. VERY motivated concept artists who want to do something for nothing, and don't even care if they aren't clued in to what's actually going to happen with their work. Seems like Maximus DM is the ONLY PERSON who is actually willing to do that. I mean unless he's been in private talks with the staff over his work. In which case he can correct me on that :S.

See I never thought that this was a fan forum. But that's what it has become.

And yes - I realise I've made this all far more complicated than my original question. But that's just a result of my frustration with being ignored... otherwise I would have just let it slide...

As a side note. Very little was ever done to raise awareness of the project. So effectively blaming the community for not being good enough or interested enough is pretty lame.

 

No, none of my work has gone to anything as far as I am aware. I've gotten a wacom tablet for what its worth. And I've been playing around with that.
Nothing Sonic related because submitting that is only really to make the forums look active because it doesn't actual contribute anything to the project besides stuff to look at for fun with your pants down.

If they honestly take my artwork or anyone elses' into consideration when recreating this stuff from scratch; who knows. Only them.

I've been HDing some sprites from other games to get used to the tablet in trying to get it to do what I want it to do. So its a bit of a learning experience.
No real point in sharing it here anyway since these forums are for Sonic HD. But I'll just say that its sprites that I think should be completely hand drawn, unlike Sonic 2 which I think is a mix of 2D and 3D art whether Staff thinks so or not.

 

Buying a tablet was one of the best things I ever did (well... as far as my art goes). Now I just need to upgrade my tablet (it's tiny) . I'd be very surprised if they hadn't made use of any of your concepts. The lava door in particular I thought was awesome.

 

I can't recall exactly what all you've submitted up to now, Maximus, but I do know for a fact that most of your stuff has been for Chemical Plant. The simple fact there is that we just haven't done any work with that stage yet. It's my personal plan to actually go around the forums here and gather up everything relating to Chemical Plant that I can find that I think could be relevant, and then archiving it all so everyone on the staff can have easy access to it when we're working on the level.

Your renders are large and detailed, so I have no doubt in my mind that we'll at least find one thing to take from them and use in our work. In fact, even just one thing like that can cause everyone to start thinking about things a bit differently and lead to all sorts of new ideas. Concept art will be very beneficial to us once we get what's in front of us done.

 

Sorry for the subject change, but:

Just wondering, to what extent are people added to the credits? Just the staff, or down to people who made a couple of concepts, like me?