So, um, yeah... announcing my sonic game

I dunno if anyone remembers, but a few months ago, I came on this board saying that I was bored, and wanted to take a crack at making a sonic engine, much in the same vein as tax's awesome retro-sonic.

Since then, I've done some pretty extensive research as to how sonic's engine works, and even spoken to tax (or maybe sax? One or the other) about checking to make sure my theories work.

So about a week ago, I figured I had enough information gathered that I could begin coding my back engine.

So here's a little demo to show I have started progress on the game:

LINK!

that's a pretty unimpressive demo, I must admit, but what it's doing is pretty neat, to me at least. If you'll notice, I didn't include any images that get drawn to the screen. that's because I've been working on my own paletted image format that it uses. The image is actually made up of 4 layers, each with their own palette.

I actually made a program that automatically converts any image format (bmp, gif, etc) into a palette of colors used and a tsr file, which is my image format.

Press w to toggle pixel shift... see how I can shift on more than one layer at different intervals?

again, not very much, but now that I got all this grunt work down, I can begin actually coding the game.

some images:







And these images are from an older build:



I'm planning a GP32 and DC port of everything when it's done, too, since I'm using SDL. I'll update again in a few weeks or so.

 

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but that's actually a setting I can change. I can change the ammount of ripple.

It's worth noting that everything is scaled to fit the screen. My engine can handle real-time scaling and rotation pretty well. Each pixel you see on the screen is actually 4 pixels, which allows for me to do smoother pixel offsetting like you described.

 

I can actually do this, I've just been too lazy to have the translation always begin at the top.

Anywho, I feel so embarassed about how little is going on in the demo I posted that I threw in a small animated sprite of sonic running around to make it more interesting. I also included some more layers to be drawn, and each layer has a ripple effect drawn on them with different wave lengths and frequencies if you press the w key.

slightly updated demo

enjoy

EDIT: A couple of pictures in case people don't want to download it just to see things ripple and sonic run:

 

you know that visual trick they do at the end of Super metroid when you beat mother brain and her entire body becomes a glowing rainbow?

Yeah, my engine can now do that. Very trippy demo:

Trippy as hell