How would you implement Chaotix's rubber band and carry mechanics into a Classic Sonic game?

This certainly would be a better plan. Maybe. Kinda. It depends whether the levels are still randomised.

Because if, for example, characters were only unlocked at the end of Act 5, you could easily spend the vast majority of the game with just Knuckles and Espio. If all the characters were unlocked in act 1, it wouldn't be much different from current Chaotix.

However if If the levels weren't randomised, you might get five acts of Botanic Base in a row (although technically that's possible anyway (unless there's a special check to stop that?)).

And I guess another issue is that even if you take Heavy and Bomb out of the equation... Mighty isn't an upgrade over Espio or Knuckles, and Vector is almost the same as Knuckles. You're not unlocking thrilling new skills that makes the save worthwhile, although again that's Chaotix's fault for not having, say, obstacles and areas only Mighty can overcome. And you'd still want to cage up Charmy for most of the game because he breaks everything.


... but in terms of being forced to use certain characters in certain stages... there is a precedent for this



You control multiple characters in The Lost Vikings 2, and unlike the first game, more turn up as the story progresses. You only ever have control of three though, and after the first "world", the characters selected are dictated by the level. You might get Fang, with bits of the puzzle solved by his set of moves, or you might get Scorch, who has a different set. If Chaotix set itself up so that you were forced to use Mighty in say, Botanic Base 2, and then had parts of the level make use of his specific skillset, I think that's a way forward. Although obviously that reduces the the random nature of play.


And I feel the randomness was probably integral to the design at some point. As I explored in that other topic, there are switches in Amazing Arena to change the time of day, but the effects are so minimal you'd be forgiven for not noticing how time makes a difference. But the developers were clearly expecting each run-through of Chaotix to be different, and it would be a shame to take that away... even if ironically it makes most of the game feel the same.

 

(Got a bit carried away writing this and it still doesn't really touch upon the ring band gimmick. Apologies.)

See, that's why I think the roulette partner idea might have made more sense if the plan initially was 'you have to save the other characters'. It goes from being a safe bet to something considerably more risky after the player begins saving more players. I get the feeling they might have potentially had concerns about the structure/were rushing along and just gave the player access to everything at the start as a quick band-aid solution. Maybe they even figured that would be more fun?

The issue this introduces is that there's no real form of progression outside of crossing an Attraction off your to-do list after you do every Level/Act that Attraction/Zone has to offer (and maybe a Chaos Ring or two along the way if you're aiming for that sweet sweet good ending). Sure, the same thing can be said about most Sonic titles ('Yay I finished this Zone a couple more to go!'), but the randomization the level select forces on the player can make it feel like the player isn't really progressing that much (especially if the level roulette doesn't play to their favor). I think having the characters being unlocked would've broken up the monotony even if it was still deeply flawed since it would at least spice up the character roulette in the middle of a playthrough. It also compounds the issues Bomb and Heavy face with the current game's structure.

My idea would be to just either have them at the start of each Attraction or have the Level they show up in be different for each partner. Charmy's broken nature becomes a bit easier to hide if he was say hidden at the end of Amazing Arena Level 4.

Key phrase 'a bit'.

There's still the issue of potentially getting him so late-game that he kinda wraps back around into being useless. Perhaps a New Game + mode of some kind would've alleviated this issue some?

I actually like your idea of characters being a 'per level' thing and the player is simply stuck with Knuckles as the lead. It's considerably less exciting, but now you don't have to worry about one character breaking a gimmick you have for a level. It might have also allowed for more interesting team abilities, which is something Chaotix sorely lacks. Knuckles slamming Mighty around like a basketball aggressively to break ceiling tiles or something would've been neato! The game tries to have an emphasis on duos, but then doesn't really do anything with these duos except ring flinging and switch pressing.

All while having mechanics that kinda seems to discourage experimentation ('I don't care who I get, just please don't let it be Heavy or Bomb...').

Sonic Advance 3 I think had the right idea with the cute unique team names and abilities depending on who you mixed and matched. I still think there is some merit in the 'snap' ability the Rings offer, but Advance 3 does nearly everything Chaotix was trying to do with it's teamwork a fair bit better. I'd basically copy that before I really began worrying about the band gimmick again.

Even Advance 3's HUB structure for the Zones seems like it might have benefited Chaotix? A player couldn't access Level 5 until they did the previous 4 levels in a Attraction. This means players can come and go as they please and would have the option of knocking out an entire Attraction in one go, or they can head back to the Central HUB and try another Attraction. On repeat playthroughs, once the player knows what level hides what character, they can even just quickly go and rescue their personal favorites, then continue on with the game. Or do a run where they save them for last. Or save Heavy and Bomb first and intentionally restrict yourself to the worst of the bunch!

It's so frustrating to revisit Chaotix because there's a lot of really cute ideas here that would have made each playthrough substantially different, but it just never fully clicks.

 

That's what they did? I always assumed that you had to press them to turn the power back on and thus be able to access new areas, akin to CNZ Act 2.

 

Those are the other switches. Amazing Arena won't let you finish unless you turn the lights on.

Christ knows why it matters.

 

Shearing to rotate is the old, old school method of rotation. It's accomplished by 3 shears: X shear by -tan(θ/2), Y shear by sin(θ), X shear by -tan(θ/2). This is how you rotated on very old hardware, preferably with a LUT for -tan/2 and sin. Precalculate out as much of the rotational data in the LUT as possible.

You can rotate like this on the Genesis, but you can only do 2 of the shears (X and Y, and Y is in tile-width steps), so you are limited to roughly 30 degrees rotation.

EDIT: Also, order of operations matters, and you can't condense the algorithm into a single operation like you can with matricies math. It's a cumulative algorithm, where the second shear is done on the result of the first shear, and the third shear is done on the result of the second shear, so you need a buffer to hold the intermediate results of the shear. This is why the Genesis can't do full rotation this way, as it'd have to store the result of the first X and Y shears before doing another X shear, and the plane hardware of the Genesis just can't do that.

That's what gets me about the time mechanic in Knuckles chaotix. It's so detailed, there's honestly a lot to it, but it's completely auxiliary. It doesn't DO anything. I mean, I guess it does have some time sensitive doors in some (but definitely not all or most) acts, and one of the bosses kinda changes sorta? But I mean, that's a ton of work done into what ultimately amounts to some meaningless palette changes. But then there are also some time related things that just aren't connected to the other time of day mechanic, like how techno tower builds up over 5 acts, or how botanic base gets overrun by vegetation over time. These details are super easy to miss too, because of the randomized nature of the acts, it's actually super hard to notice the growing vines in botanic base unless you play each act directly after one another. Then I couple that with the largely redundant zone layouts. I dunno, I get the feeling Chaotix was supposed to build off the workflow and concept of Sonic CD, but it got abandoned or never came together or something. There's something super weird about the workflow and how they made content for Knuckles Chaotix, like the concentrated on the wrong things or were working towards something really grand that got cut down 1/3 of the way through or something. It just feels so.... weird, and halfbaked. It's the most obviously incomplete sonic game around, even more so than Sonic 2006.

It concentrates so, so much on time in Knuckles Chaotix, but it's all meaningless and they don't even point out the complex mechanisms behind everything. It's like they just gave up mid way through.

 

Three things come to mind which i think were mistakes:

1. Very low acceleration (I think they were trying to encourage using the core mechanic by reducing acceleration, but I think that was a mistake). The acceleration needs increasing.
2. High learning curve for the mechanic, even now after mastering it, it doesn't always go my way.
3. Level design is lacking, not enough badniks, a weird structure of level pieces, it's quite strange, I think (once again) they were catering to the mechanic and it drop the quality for everything else.

I'd make the mechanic something more on the side, something activatable but not manditory, be it performing an action close to the side kick or a monitor if need be. But I'd offer a much larger reward for utlising it rather than skipping it. As for making it easier to use? I'm not really sure, can it be improved without removing it? I think in order to find out, trial and error is needed, lots of fine tuning, i doubt there's a silver bullet.

I've got not more to say, the music and art is absolutely top notch.

 

I think fine tuning the throwing mechanic would help a bit in taming the rubber band mechanic of chaotix. The throw is too blunt, being able to fine tune the throw, maybe like how you throw eggs in Yoshi's Island, would open up a lot of possibilities. If you could throw your partner in multiple directions, and make the snap of the rubber band useful in bringing you along with the throw, then you could maybe have something worth having fun with. Knuckles Chaotix as-is doesn't really let you abuse pipes like you could in the old games, you don't gain acceleration from rolling down a pipe and there's no speed cap anyways. If both of those came back, then suddenly the utility of pipes becomes bigger, and couple that with the throwing mechanic I described earlier, you could have some neat level tricks. Like a quarter pipe on the ceiling that you could aim your throw to so your partner hits the pipe and sticks and starts rolling. Turn the throw mechanic almost into an angled spring sort of deal.

 

This was my previous take, and I still stand by it. I think it could make for a very interesting moveset for Tangle.

 

IMO the ring tether should be only for coop. The problem with Chaotix it's forcing it for single player. I seriously think that Sonic Clackers/Crackers came from somebody trying to fix Sonic 2 coop, but they implemented single player controls for debugging. When the idea was presented, somehow that became part of the main game, because you know: You can't have a coop only game and you can't just have your main gimmick on coop when the game has single player. And that was the beginning of the end of the game that Chaotix could have been.

If the ring tether is in single player, you end up making a platforming/puzzle game. I love them too, but it wouldn't be a classic Sonic game anymore, just a spinoff.

 

Something about Chaotix is especially magical to me.

Watching this game in motion is dazzling. Seeing all that brightly-colored parallax swing through the background of Botanic Base is absolutely mesmerizing; it's another world. Maybe it was the mystery of it being released on the 32X, a system that no one I knew growing up had owned. Even emulating it wasn't always as straightforward as it was for Genesis games at the time. It had that same appeal that Sonic CD did; some element of the unknown that seemed to last far longer than other entries in the franchise usually did.

I grew up with Chaotix in a different way, and one I'd imagine is somewhat relatable: through the music alone. Late into my time at college out in California I went through a heavy VGM phase, downloading and getting to know intimately many of the classic soundtracks. Chaotix was in heavy rotation during that time. Those sparkling bells and splashy percussion permanently carved out their own space in my brain, and will be forever special to me.

But, I've never actually played the game itself. I've tried, but the rubber band mechanics are always just too much of a turn off. This is coming from a perspective of someone who doesn't particularly like original 2D Sonic gameplay to begin with, so its harder for me to want to adapt to a control style that feels unintuitive and wobbly. And, for me personally, that's a bar to entry I'm not willing to jump. But, I know how to play the other 2D Sonic games mostly fine, and I've imagined that if you ported the level architecture and artwork to a modern Sonic platform and make the needed tweaks/additions, you'd greatly expand the game's audience with at least the option for a truly single-player experience.

Maybe that'd work out, maybe not. I'm not very well versed in what makes a Sonic game fun, but I did want to share my personal experience with it

 

On this note, You don't need the 1/cos^2(a) scaling operations at all -- That's just a MS Paint workaround. Rotation by shearing only needs -tan(angle/2) and sin(angle/2) to shift the pixels around, which is way simpler.

 

I'm almost positive there is another 2D platformer out there that has the exact same mechanics as Chaotix and is critically acclaimed. I forget the name of it, but I remember seeing friends of mine watching YouTube videos of this game when I was in college, around 2 or 3 years ago. It's not chained together, it's a 2D game. Might be a flash game? I'll ask them and come back to this thread

 

Are you thinking of this? It might not be, considering how it came out last year.

 

I was one of the people flooding the "Adventures in Chaotix" thread with theories on how to make it work, lol. So let's give it a shot. Using the 6-button layout instead of the 3-button, since the game probably needed more than the three it was given.

-A: Swap, B: Hold, C: Jump, XYZ: Grab

- The tether mechanic stays, but it only affects the partner character. The player character is unaffected by the tether physics UNTIL you hold the B Button, where the partner stops and the tether now pulls you instead. (Call it "reversing the polarity" or whatever for lore and logic.) This would allow you to pull the slingshot move both on the ground as well as in the air, while letting go gives you full control again. So you get all the perks of the slingshot gameplay with none of the negatives. If you want to keep the chaotic "clackers" feeling intact then just keep holding the B Button when you use a spring, release a slingshot, or when you or your partner is pulled by an enemy/boss.

- When the player character and partner get far enough away (goes off-screen or caught behind a wall/loop/etc) the ring pull breaks to prevent them from bugging out, and they respawn on-screen similar to Tails in the classic games. The only exceptions to the respawning are if they're set to stand in place (ie: on a switch), or if they are trapped (where you must free them to progress). These new rules delete the need for a "Call" button on A.

- New A Button function: Swap. Use the button to swap between your two characters. It'd be much more fun for the player to swap between their picks, plus it'd be easier to make areas built for specific movesets, as people mentioned earlier in the thread.

- Lastly, grab on X/Y/Z. This would allow you to grab onto your partner character (and release to throw) like it does in the original, but now you can do it without the function overlapping inputs with the "hold" function on B, and making it not as hand-crunchingly hard to jump while using it. I think while I was at it I'd probably design a few stage gimmicks to make better use of grabbing like physics objects, keys to use on locks, levers to pull, etc.

- In co-op mode, you are both separate from each other until you choose to be with the B Button, which will make you tether to your partner's position. So like I described above, but with both players deciding when it's on/off it has more cooperative synergy to it. You could probably get some killer speedruns out of it, too..

This is about the best I can think of for making these mechanics fun to use. I've often thought the best answer was to rid the game of it entirely, but I think it'd lose too much of Chaotix's identity if you did. From there I'd just suggest better level design, and a non-randomized stage or character selection.

 

This might be it. It seems like the move to make a Chaotix game would be to borrow the puzzle-platforming elements from this and try to come up with new challenges that also include Sonic's pinball physics.

At the same time you also probably want to scale the game so that the camera is "zoomed out" and it's easier to follow the fast-paced physics as they're happening.
In summary, add more puzzle elements like Bread and Fred but with a pinball twist.