Important Project Structure Discussion

My thoughts are that it should have a faithfulness in spirit, but not necessarily limited to what the Genesis could do. There's no reason for a cool game design idea to get the axe because the Genesis couldn't do it. There's also no reason to set up a bunch of technical roadblocks to achieve something that could be done much more easily. The game should be a reasonable projection of what Sonic 4 would be, and each Sonic iteration contained major visual, game design, and cinematic improvements over the last. I'd like to see are visual story telling—no dialog scenes or anything, just simple, concise visual sequences to move the story along. I think seamless act transistions are key as well, as well as differences between acts, for instance during the Carnival Zone, Act 1 can consist of moving through the Circus with a big tent and roller coaster in the background, and act 2 can be running on the roller coaster.

As for time and development structure, assign leaders based on leadership abilities and qualifications for department, and they can chose people to work underneath them, have an over all leader/director set up deadlines and move along. The main problem with all fan projects are that they aren't paid positions so the main problem with be dedication and motivation, so it's important that if even a dozen people flake out, they can either be replaced or done without.

That's my two cents.

 

Sonic Crackers never came out, Sonic Adventure is Sonic Adventure and Sonic Advance is Sonic Advance. Sonic 4 never came out and, as it stands, never will come out. If we want to make a game in the style of what a fourth Sonic game should be we should take it from the mindset that the future Sonic projects don't "really exist" and make it in the spirit of the original titles, of course we can never nullify the fact that other Sonic games were made, we can do our best to ignore them.

I wanted to get the ball rolling with discussion, to be honest I have no idea how the development of the game would be best suited, but it seems like it's in dire need of some direction.

 

A fourth iteration of the main, numbered Sonic franchises for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was never released. Stop trying to undermine my point with unreleased games and discussion of the evolution of Sonic Team. This community isn't Sonic Team and it's not 1995. Now instead of arguing technicalities maybe you can argue the points I made about the game's direction.

 

I don't think the game being reproduceable on the Genesis should be that much of an issue. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing some processor heavy tasks going on ranging from visual distortion to particle systems... so long as the look is consistent with the rest of the art style chosen. That is to say, if you are working with a limited pallet, stick with the limited pallet regardless of effects, don't do any really bizarre stuff that wouldn't look at home on a Genesis with a better processor. I don't believe sticking to sprite limits is particularly important in any aspect... not to say that Sonic had an unforgiving sprite limit or anything.

As far as I'm concerned, what I'd like to see most out of this project is something that takes the foundation left by the three Genesis Sonic titles and then builds a sequel that is basically the same level of change as Sonic 2 is to Sonic 3.

Things that do irk me would be failure to adhere to a Sonic-styled level design, a regression to the style of Sonic 1, recycling almost any content between stages be them gimmicks, enemies, or art, and progression styles through levels.

One thing however I find a little odd is the rigidity of the Sonic, Tails, Knuckles lockdown. Going from Sonic 1 to Sonic 2 you got a new character, and the same happened from Sonic 2 to Sonic 3. Taking that logically, a fourth playable character would essentially have been the norm rather than simply using the S3K roster. Now, the obvious problem with that is that a fan character would be fucking stupid and every one of those games also set a precedent of making the character for that game be the debut. That is pretty much a paradox that has to be dealt with by ignoring one of those precedents... Either introducing a character that had been introduced in another game or not introducing a new character at all.

Or you could always do one of the following: Hunt for scrapped character designs by Oshima, Yuda, whoever or perhaps follow the rule that nothing after Sonic and Knuckles exists to open up future character designs such as one of the Chaotix characters... characters who really aren't at all offensive to the style of the Genesis games in their own right.

Something new, I think is basically mandatory. Both sequels did bring in new mechanics afterall. Sonic 2 brought the spindash which was probably the single most important mechanic introduced in the series... at least until more recent games made it obsolete. Sonic 3 gave the characters all double jump abilities. I believe that if a Sonic 4 had been made, something new would have come. The question is simply what it would have been. Now, thats a hard thing to figure out... but you can't really have a spiritual sequel without it. Otherwise it's just Sonic 3 with new levels and a new way of getting chaos emeralds. And don't get me wrong, thats not a bad thing... but I don't believe it's the stated goal of the project.

Anyway, that's my take on it all. Feel free to defer.

 

I agree with everything that DimensionWarped said, and agree that adhering to Genesis graphical limits is unnecessary and probably not something that a general direct sequel to Sonic 3 the way it was to Sonic 2 as it was to Sonic 1 blah blah would even do if Sega was in charge of it because the development platform of choice would be the Saturn. I accept the Saturn graphical limitations as the minimum for this project, though I don't think it should be developed for Saturn because nobody really ever was any good at that.

As such any wild gimmick that takes over the entire gameplay the way that the ring energy band did for Chaotix is probably not a good idea because a direct sequel to Sonic 3 probably wouldn't have added one, any more than it added overarching gameplay gimmicks from Sonic 2.

I'm okay I guess with adding new things but at the same time most of the new ideas for gameplay modes (like the bonus stages) that I've seen so far don't really mesh in with the standard Sonic style in my mind, and are both too slow and don't really involve the player as Sonic which are two issues that I have with the wheel of fortune bonus for example.

 

I don't think we should look at it through the lens of what platform would this be developed for. The project is "Sonic Retro", and I think most of us will agree, well maybe not Stealth because he seems to create delusions that Sonic 4 really exists, much like how Sonic Heroes is really Sonic Adventure 3 and Super Mario World is really Super Mario Bros. 4. that Sonic stopped being Retro after Sonic and Knuckles completed Sonic 3. So if the project is going to be a representation of a Sonic 4(not the Sonic 4 because there was never released a real Sonic 4) in the minds of us fans, than it should meet a visual style set up by the Genesis, but not bogged down by the platforms limitations.

An overriding gimmick is, necessary, as is a new character and also opens up a lot of developmental issues. Sonic, Tails and Knuckles both have defined gameplay attributes, why complicate things by adding a fourth?

 

In terms of how this project should go, I think we should strive to, most importantly, do new things rather than buil upon old concepts too much. We should only use some of the foundation from the old Sonic games, rather than all of it.

Besides, there's a lot of fun stuff we can do with this game, but we're not accepting it because we think that this MUST be a Sonic 4 or RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEGG.

I can name three things off the top of my head that would be a fun new twist to a Sonic game, and all three can come from concepts already laid out in this forum.

1. Unlockable mode where you play as Fang/Nack in some sort of Gunstar Heroes mode, where you play through all the levels as if they were GH. We could change around the badniks so that Fang can run around and have a shoot 'em up fest and we can make it work so it clearly is not part of the continuity.

2. Zone specific graphical effects. Maybe a light rain in the tropical zone, a soft mist in the ruins zone, a murky background in the underground zone. Something to provide depth.

3. Fun, challenging and epic bosses. We could do so much if we talked more about having epic bosses. If we let our ideas flow around, we can push out some crazy fun bosses. We could have, say, a two screen tall boss at the end of the first zone that you have to use the trees to get up to his weak point. In the Underground zone, we could have a boss that's a giant, aquatic tentacle monster robot that you have to destroy all or most of the tentacles before being able to reach the weak point. Something challenging but not unfair. If we let the bosses be as epic as they can be, we can make the game more epic as a whole, and maybe even better for it in the long run, too.

Another thing to think about would be accessibility. I would mind not playing something I was a part of, since I'm on a PPC Mac and I can't really do shit, unless this game can work in DOSbox.

Spirit to the original games should've mostly been abandoned a long time ago.

As for development time . . .

How about "When it's done."?

 

That was completely unnecessary. You have totally misinterpreted Stealth's point, which is that you don't want to create a "Sonic 4"; Sonic 4 as a concept was what Sonic had eventually evolved into, which is Sonic Adventure and its following sequels. That is Sonic 4, in terms of being the latest evolution of the Sonic franchise with new concepts, characters, and level environments being introduced. "Sonic 4" was never guarenteed to be in the exact spirit of the Genesis games, which is why using such a term is very shaky and open to more interpretation than it's worth. "Sonic 4" is a wrong term to use in general, and we should avoid it at all costs.

In this sense, yes, Super Mario World is a "Super Mario Bros. 4" as much as the series could have possibly evolved in that particular direction. It's not exactly like the old games, but that's where the series evolved, and that's what happened to it. It just happens to also have the advantage of being a spiritual successor to SMB3 in a very appropriate sense.

What we want to do, and what Stealth is proposing, is to create a game in the style and spirit of the classic games, without attaching arbitrarily interpreted titles such as "Sonic 4." That's why this project was named Sonic Retro—we want to take the aspects of the classic Genesis Sonic games and create a spiritual sequel, not a literal one. I know this is what people mean when they say "Sonic 4," but I think that term is too broad to accurately represent our goal. This is going to represent what Sonic was really about—lush, surreal environments, creative level gimmicks, upbeat, environmental music in the style of early 90s pop/elevator music... the works! Come on, we all know what made classic Sonic great, don't we? That's what we're after.

This is why I think we need to use this topic to sort out our priorities, our ultimate direction, our platform, everything; it obviously hasn't been clarified well enough to this point, so let's sort it out now so we can make some real progress.

 

Well I understand your point but I respectfully disagree with the reasoning. If the idea is to create another Sonic title in the style of the Genesis titles, then I don't think it's that much of a stretch to call it Sonic 4, as it would be the fourth Sonic in that line...well at least that's what I'd like to see.

 

Well, in terms of graphical capabilities, I'd like to see fairly light color restrictions in the game -- I'm not sure how many colors the Saturn could produce at a time, but I think that artistic thematic unity and direction should end up being a limiting factor in terms of how much is on screen at any one time rather than trying to impose artificial hardware restrictions; I don't want my eyes bleeding, but I don't want excess dithering where there doesn't have to be.

Similarly I'd love to have more than one background layer. I guess if I had to make any sort of statement on what I'm looking at in terms of quality I'd have to say that it would be something like the Saturn/PSX version of EWJ2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxNRyXrvi8s
I think that the game could afford to be more colorful than that, though.

 

Except it would, for the reasoning I already put forth. You can't throw away the point based on your personal preferences—that's not how a debate works. There are specific reasons for it not to be called Sonic for, either in concept or in execution, and both of us have raised those to you. I think it would be wise to simply drop that particular subject and maybe try and argue something more related to the actual design.

For example, muteKi raises some interesting points—are we doing pure Genesis limitations, or are we going to try "extended" Genesis standards? For example, multiple layers of background scrolling, sprite scaling and rotation, full-color fade-ins/fade-outs... etc.

 

I don't think the reasoning is that fantastic though, and I've made several counterpoints to the contrary. There never was a game called 'Sonic 4' that ever made it to market. Many of the key developers left after the competition of Sonic and Knuckles so to say that Sonic Adventure is somehow "Sonic 4" just doesn't make very much sense to me. So to say I'd like this to be a reasonable projection of what Sonic 4 might be isn't an invalid argument.

I'm not saying "Call it Sonic 4", I'm just saying the game should be a reasonable projection of what a fourth Sonic game would be on the Sega Genesis. That's what I'd like to see, and that is an actual point about the design.

Anyway, I'm through belaboring the point, and just for the sake of not stirring the pot, I will refrain from using the word "Sonc" and the number "4" side by side.

 

Oh, sorry, I forgot that's exactly what happened, boy am I an ass.

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I have a question, though. Who is in charge of what with this project?