General Project Thread & Feedback

I won't let it go until I get a solid response from the S2HD staff. It is not an unfair question. I will be satisfied with either answer as long as they give me a DIRECT answer. Even a one word answer will be lovely.

Are we getting a guide?

Yes or no.

P.S: These "Community" projects jabs will no longer be tolerated.

 

Steveswede has the right of it. Sonic 2HD began as a community project to bring people together to create one cohesive game. We have the people necessary to do so on the staff, and a great pipeline to make that happen. The way the art is created is a three man process involving Vincent, Cerulean Nights, and Scanline99 all working together to create the character sprites you've all seen. This is why we haven't put a guide together - each person has their own distinctive techniques they're bringing to the table to facilitate the art creation. Getting a guide together would require Vince to explain everything he knows about making Sonic character, CN for badniks, and scan for animation theory. It's not a feasible thing for us create now, not with one of our team members preparing to move cross-country, another bogged down with personal art commissions, another working 50+ hours a week all on top of getting assets and coding ready for the alpha AND preparing the visual changelogs so you guys can see where we've come from. We just do not have the time to create a fully fleshed-out guide condensing a year's worth of art direction change accumulated by three people into something concise for new contributions. And apparently people didn't like the old guides that were put up, judging by the responses.

You've all seen the results we're getting, and no one has had massive complaints about the art. Some of you are irritated that you won't be able to contribute to the final product because of this, but the fact is that the game is coming together better than it ever has now, and you guys are still helping out by providing us with concepts to work off of. We'll still be crediting the work done by Retro members in the final game.

S2HD is a fangame, and as for the community project portion of that, I've already talked with ScarredSun about how that will work with the community aspect going forward. I can't talk about it right now because there's things in the works that are being finalized right now on Retro. Once I'm given the okay by her, I can talk more about it.

360: if you call a small team of people working hard once they've got a working method to create a great product elitist and unfair, then that's your choice. I'm not forcing anyone to accept those conditions: if people want to contribute concepts, they're free to. We're past the point of asking people to work on final artwork for the game. I don't see how Steveswede understands this and no one else gets it.

Zemulii, insulting people rarely gets them to provide the answers you're looking for.

 

Finally! A no and with actual reasoning behind it instead of just assumptions from the outside! People can stop asking now that they've heard it from the horse's mouth. I wasn't bothered so much about a guide or not but rather the fact that an answer to an on going question never got a direct response. That shouldn't have been so difficult.

But problem solved! Carry on folks!

And the "Community" jab threat is still very real people. Holy shit, let it go already.

 

Kinda glad considering most art submitted was garbage...

 

This is not fair. I think a lot of it was great, the only problem was the lack of consistency between them, and something really had to be done about that.

I some some of the final art is really lacking in quality though. The bush looks atrocious, and really clashes with the rest of the art, something I though was being avoided at all cost. I looks like some cheap Photoshop distortion was used to shape it.

 

No. A small team of people working hard on a project they are passionate about is noble. Admirable. Commendable. The same team asking for art submissions that will never be used for purposes of the team's own personal inspiration so those team members can take the credit later is unfair. Elitist. Selfish. Locking everyone out is one thing. The new submissions conditions are something else: unacceptable.

 

You can complain all you want, it's never going to change anything. They have a system, it works (from what we can tell), they're going to stick with it.

And Canned Karma is partially right, people don't "have" to submit anything if they don't want to.

If people want to submit artwork that they will lose all credit for, just to speed up the project, they can go right ahead, nothing is stopping them. Hell, anything to make this game come out faster would be a godsend. If they don't have a moral problem with it, then there isn't a problem with it.

If this was a commercial venture, I could see why this would be a problem. But this is a fan game. A fan game on a massive scale mind you, but a fan game nonetheless.

It's still a bit selfish, but I wouldn't say elitist (mainly because this is SonicRetro).

 

They... they will?

Nice. That answers my un-answered question.

 

You get credit in name only. I highly doubt people will be able to say "I contributed the design for Shellcracker", because it's not entirely true. You would've contributed the concept of it. Then it'll be more like "I sent in a picture of Shellcracker and it allowed the team to have inspiration to do something completely their own way". That doesn't sit well with some people, while others just don't care and will continue to contribute.

The moment people submit their artwork, whether or not they get credited for doing so, it will no longer be theirs.

At least, that's how it's coming off in every single description of how it's working.

People want credit in saying the artwork and designs they submit is theirs, not just "This guy helped us do our own thing".

Obviously that goes against how the project is set up now, but there are still going to be people who complain.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I don't have a huge problem with how it's set up. But no one seems to be getting clarification on some of the finer details that a lot of you assume and then assume the rest of us know as well.

 

Now that I look at it, I must agree. I know EHZ is abstract, but that doesn't look anything like a bush. The previous version was at least round and looked vaguely like a bush. The new one just looks like a bunch of floating squares (including those gravity-defying ones at the top) and it's completely flat. Come to think of it, the new one looks more ‘originalpixelfaggy’ than the old one, due to its shape and those floating bits, and it really suffers for it IMO.

 

My thoughts exactly. I should have elaborated. It doesn't look like a single consistent object, just a bunch of floating squares, like you said. The top and the bottom are very flat, instead of curving into an oval shape like the original. As I see it, the holes in the original sprites are an effect, a way to represent texture and transparency, but they were interpreted too literally by the S2HD staff. The result looks completely out of place, as it doesn't look like anything else in the entire level.

 

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't accept this, most of us already have.

But the fact is until CK explains how the community aspect of this is going to work (which I'm assuming he's still waiting for the go ahead from ScarredSun), there's going to be a lot of confusion, WHETHER OR NOT you believe there should be.

And being credited for THEIR work is different from being credited for working. The latter is what we seem to be getting, and even if you accepted this, some people won't.

The bush looks dumb. Simple as that.

 

Right, time to break the tension a bit, I think...



Just noticed this on the title screen mockup. Is it just me or does Sonic's hand look a little strange? The thumb in particular looks a little bit like the other fingers that aren't raised and could do with a bit of extra definition to make it look more like a thumb that's tucked in. Also the two held up fingers, IMO, could do with being a bit more spaced apart, as at the moment it looks like they are coming from the same point on the hand (but this might look better if the thumb was sorted).

 

The thumb does look a little bit off, but not terribly so. It still looks like a thumb at least.

I don't see what you mean about the finger though. They are close but they still looks like they're seperate fingers. The way his glove fits might be the problem with that, and that's just how he's designed.

 

I think a subtle change could make it look a lot better though like removing the shadow effect where the thumb meets the palm of the hand, because the shading currently looks pretty much like the shading at the bottom of the other fingers, which is why, in my mind, they look too similar. And maybe some extra shadow where the thumb is tucked under the other fingers would help too.