Is there a 'Sonic Maker' or equivalent?

Someone else might be able to confirm if this is true or not, but I remember reading they somehow still had and were able to use code from the Genesis games for it, and at some point later, lost it all due to a really stupid accident.

What isn't a matter of opinion is how good those mechanics are compared to the Genesis games. That much is very measurable, and those games are very watered down in comparison. Generations uses a lot of little cheats, control locks, and scripted bits that force Sonic's speed and angle. The biggest thing that separates the classics from these modern games is natural vs artificial. The modern games use a lot of overrides and automation to create the illusion of a complete Sonic game, and the devs are counting on the fact that players generally won't notice because novice players are only going to hold right or hold forward without attempting to gain finer control of the game. The classics were completely natural and the player was always in control no matter what the terrain, ramp slope or loop, allowing much finer control of the game and a lot more possibilities.
Take a look at this gif.



No automation, no static motions.
Sonic responds to curves naturally, and has natural physical rules of momentum and gravity.
Clearing the loop is organic and the player is always in control.
Sonic landing on that high ledge at the end is not because of a script fixing his speed and direction, but a graceful culmination of natural physical laws.

That's a question I've been asking for a long time.
How do you explain Sonic 4 then? If any game should have gotten it right, it should have been that, but it was a horrid mess.

I'll get my crochet hook lol.

One thing I can agree with is that it doesn't have to be 1:1. Sonic Advance is a good example because it's not 1:1, just pretty close, but given it still has very natural gameplay and good control makes it alright. Sonic Advance 2 does some of my favorite things in the series. In particular, it has what I consider the best implementation of the homing attack in the series, and does so while keeping the instashield. The double tap air dash is a nice addition that can give Sonic a smidge of speed needed in certain situations, and a skilled player capable of abusing it can rack up a lot of extra speed.

Sonic Team really has no excuse. It was an impressive feat to accomplish this engine on the Genesis, but nowadays it should be easy as punch for them. Using 3d geometry gives them real surface angles to work with, and collision detection can be far more robust. I've been working with two people who on their own have accomplished working engines in Unity, and I know it's been accomplished at least twice more by two other individuals. And that's just Unity. We know Sonic Team is using Unity too, as Sonic Runners was made in it.
And given this, is another reason it doesn't have to be 1:1. With much more capable methods, there's a lot of room to clean up and improve the classic model. The reduction of mechanics, more awkward controls, use of cheap gimmicks and arbitrary filler gameplay segments is not an improvement; it's a regression.

 

Alright, lets assume that the Advance series are good. The same engine and mechanics and the same team later made Sonic Rush and, hint hint wink wink, Sonic 4 Episode 1.
Now the general consensus is Ep 1 is a major step back. Would you pretty please elaborate why did that happen? If they have 'proven' they can make a good game, what happened there? Were the 10 programmers with experience making 5 games of the same type with an available engine not enough? They had around at least 1 year in the making of the game to produce 4 Zones, while the original Sonic was done from scratch in about the same type by a handful of people and had 6 Zones.

Yes people in *THIS* community, not in Sonic Team or DIMPS or Big Red Button or Hardlight Studio or whoever is developing.
In fact the good engines in the community were all done by people with a lot of experience that know what they are doing and indeed working as programmers in real life. Those are all definitions of a 'pro', literal and non literal.

I did like the daytime levels in Unleashed, only as a single playthrough. The night levels were atrocious Prince of Persia/God of War wannabe. And I wont even start on the need to collect red stars in the levels in order to progress.
The daytime/modern levels in Unleased and Generations are full of endless pits, monorail grinding, the 3 lanes game from the '80s, cutscenes all the time. For the most part I cant go back 2 screens in the level. And they are actively trying to prevent you from trying. Whats up with that?

If I wanted to play a game that holds my hand 90% of the time instead of letting me play, I would play a Gamebook

And guys, answer this - would you buy Unleashed as a gift to a person that hasn't played Sonic or knows what it is?
In the 90's would you gift him Sonic 2, 3 or S&K ? Perhaps S&K Collection?

 

I know three people who aren't even adults, let alone with a career in programming, that have accomplished three separate 2d Sonic engines each on their own with a great deal of accuracy, two of which are near perfect and have more advanced features, and have done so in a matter of months. One of these people has created multiple working 2d engines in multiple languages and programs, using 2d and 3d graphics, all of which with stunning accuracy and each attempt was achieved faster than the previous.

 

I'm guessing cause Sonic 4 wasn't intended to be Sonic 4. Iirc the filenames of promotional materials and some slip-ups have indicated that it had the working title of Sonic DL. Also it was made by Dimps who used the Sonic Rush engine, so it was pretty clear that they didn't intend on the game having good physics. :v:

 

All the Advance games and Rush and 4 were all pretty different from each other. You can hardly lump them together like that. The first Advance game had fairly faithful physics, great levels, great music... it was no Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but it was an all-around good game. Advance 2 had some cheap level design, and Advance 3 had an annoying gimmick, but they were both still decent. Rush is the only one among those you mentioned that actually felt at all like Sonic 4 Episode 1, but even it was not nearly as bad. Sure, it had the same crappy physics, but the aesthetics and level design were still mostly on point. It also had boost, which it was clearly designed around.

Sonic 4 Episode 1 had hideous graphics, cloying music, level layouts that not only weren't good, but were a poor fit for the momentumless physics, which were themselves meant for boost gameplay but here put into a game without boost...

If you honestly think Sonic Advance 1 is similar to, or nearly as bad as, Sonic 4 Episode 1, you really need to replay Sonic Advance. Dimps' suck was a gradual devolution, a fall from grace by a company that legitimately had made a great game and a few okay ones before they moved to flat-out terrible.

 

Oh not at all. My point was that Advance is much much better than the latter Sonic 4 game which was assumed to be by the same team and an iteration of the same engine. People in this thread(not necessarily you) stated that the current Sonic Team/DIMPS have proven they can make a good Sonic game (namely Advance 1) and are simply choosing NOT to with recent games.

This is basically what I meant but didnt say explicitly.

 

Sonic Advance 2 is certainly unorthodox relative to the "traditional" model idea of a Sonic game. From all of my time playing it recently, the levels are very well designed around doing tricks with the R button. (It bothers me that they stripped this feature down in Sonic Rush, because here, you can leap in nearly five different directions depending on the character.)

If you try to play it without R tricks, like you would with the classics or even Sonic Advance 1, you're in for a bad time with missed landings, missed additional paths accessible by rails or hoops, spending more time on momentum based blue springs than necessary, not being able to skip vertical spring sections entirely, stopping yourself from being launched higher than you want by a spring, or having a good sense of air control during tighter platforming sections in general. You can't even dodge some of the game's cheaply placed death pits anywhere near as easily.

So thanks to R tricks, I'm enjoying Sonic Advance 2's take on the normal way to play a 2D Sonic. It's no wonder I always died infrequently or got bad Time Attack Mode records in that game as a kid. I didn't understand or care how differently it was designed from Sonic Advance 1, and for that I'd always play SA1 more often. I imagine that's the case with a lot of you guys here on Retro too.

^{(I still hate that you have to collect 24 Chaos Emeralds to get to Amy, though. To save myself some sanity, I used a cheat in an emulator to unlock her, and copied the battery file to my real cart with homebrew DS software.)}

 

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but as far as I'm aware this is just a myth based on the fact that Naka was still in charge of Sonic Team, the game plays 'a bit' like the Mega Drive games, and that it has some Nakamura music in it. I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything vaguely resembling evidence that this was the case. We do know that they at the very least have the source code for Sonic Jam, since M2 looked into it to see how they added the spin-dash to Sonic 1 3D (in the end they gave up and just asked Naka who basically said 'lol n00bz'.)

It's cheaper to make Sonic play like in Generations. If you're constantly automating movement down a linear path, you avoid the level of bugs that are introduced from letting the player do what they want. Plus, you can spend significantly less time and money on level design, as you only need to create say, one linear path which occasionally splits into two linear paths, rather than one big playground with 3 kind-of distinct paths which all intersect, and can be swapped between by the player at most points. You can instead spend your time and money on making a game that looks nice, which is something that looks good in marketing and draws interest.

I guess there's not much to talk about that is actually 'on topic' since the answer is "there was", but did anyone archive the PlaySEGA site while it was up?

 

...then you won't advance (no pun intended) past Sky Canyon as Sonic, and possibly Knuckles.

I liked Sonic Advance 2. It seemed that if the levels were designed for more than just speed (and looking like a '\' :specialed: ), it'd have closer physics to the originals than even the first Sonic Advance (which was fair, but the deceleration upon jumping made it feel 'heavier', notwithstanding whether or not one could abuse the air dash to mitigate that). Don't know that for sure though, I don't know either intimately enough to break it down like that.

 

Thats one of the main problems right there. The supervisors and the marketing department don't even play the game and want something that looks flashy. Constantly running at super sonic speeds, the screen blurring, leaving a huge blue trail after the character, a big shockwave on each boost, exploding objects and walls every second. Works well for a Michael Bay trailer.

A real Turing test would be if they make a romhack of Sonic 3K and replace 3 of the Zones. Then give it to people who haven't played or are familiar with the game and see if they would notice there is something off about those 3 zones. Surely they are not going to mimmick Sonic 2 DIMPS edition, right?

 

Alternatively: it was also probably going to be called Sonic the Portable.



I don't remember the source, but I think there was rumblings that it started as a mobile exclusive project before it got escalated to being "Sonic the Hedgehog 4." More than anything else I think that would help explain why the physics were so shitty; it probably wasn't originally intended to be this big tentpole retro revival thing

 

Didn't Jun Senoue say that it wasn't called Sonic 4 until later down the line? I'm on my phone at the moment so it's not easy to go searching for stuff.

I'd argue that a large amount of Sonic 4's automation comes from it being a mobile title where nuanced control is more difficult, but Episode 4 is guilty of a lot if the same issues.

 

Cash or check?

 

That'll be cool if Sega makes a Sonic version of Mario Maker, though I don't know if the idea is trademarked.

 

Nintendo did not invent level editors, and they didn't even invent level editors on a console.

 

With Sonic most of the level pieces are not solid rectangles and they don't tile. Every tileset belongs to a certain Zone which is usually associated and available only with a specific game in the series.
With Mario however we have (very simplified) lets say 5 tilesets that make zones that reoccur throughout many games. Outside green, underwater, cave, castle and few others. People don't associate a tileset with Funky Castle Zone from Super Mario Splash 3. With Sonic making a generic zone that is not associated with a specific game and yet feeling like it could have been from an official game would likely require making entirely original tilesets. Same with badniks and gimmicks. If Sega is doing those, they might as well just make a new game.

There is also the problem of collision plane switchers and the flags for tile solidity (none, from all directions, downwards, etc) which can be necessary for an elaborate design yet easy to abuse in unexperienced / malicious hands.

tl.dr. people might try to compare your level with the original from where the tileset came from, and its much easier to screw up the design than with Mario Maker.

 

So you just create an expanded tileset that supports a much more general range of slopes. It's what I've had to do for fangames for ages. It won't look quite as nice and smooth as the Sega Genesis games, but that's just the nuts and bolts of a project like this.

Though with a bit of fancy coding you could probably do some kind of polygon/masking thing, sort of like how making arenas in Smash Bros. Wii U works (or any Worms game in the last ten years, for that matter)

 

Technically making your own gimmicks is also possible. Again, see the LittleBigPlanet games. Problem is that it'd take a shitton of effort and would probably make making levels harder.