Sonic 2: Return of Shadow/demo and website.

Halp!



Can't you just put the screenshots and download in here?

 

I gave this game a go. Very nice start! It's been forever since I've seen a new Sonic 2 hack around here, so it's a nice throwback to the olden days if you will. This hack also has some great features and ideas. It's a bit rough around the edges, such as with sprite priorities, VRAM issues, and some of the custom sprites (particularly Shadow), but in time it should be really good stuff.

 

Well, I have a few things to say.

I really like the direction of this hack, especially the moveset (many of them were in my super-hack plans, thus probably I will never actually do it). However, the button scheme is sort of confusing. I mean, some characters jump with C, others with B, I don't know. I personally would, for example, let all characters jump with C button, that would improve the gameplay. I love to have many characters to play with, even in the same level layouts (thus Knuckles have its own).
Now the bad part: I would suggest you to finish one thing before starting the next one. There are many good stuff, but they all carry a lot of bugs (its natural when adding new stuff). Some ones are more serious than other ones, for example in Star Light Zone, I took fly with Tails so he could lift Sonic and keep advancing, but Tails made it through the bridge and Sonic got stuck, so I coundl't finish the level. The special stages have problems with the X rings to go: with Shadow and Knuckles, it tells you that you still have to get the amount of rings to get through (example, I have 32 rings and it says 30 rings to go), and in the last step it says 226 rings to go (226!!). Now with the layouts, there are a lot of parts in which you are running at top speed and you get stop in there. I also got stuck when digging with Knuckles. Besides that, well, the usual wieh you're adding tons of new sprites, garbage everywhere, and there are some performance issues sometimes.

But in overall, you have awesome ideas, so bugs don't really matter since they will get fixed at some point. Keep going with your work, I know that it will worth it.

 

Aside from a few issues which the others have pointed out, this is pretty neat so far! Very interested in how you have the bullets killing enemies, because I'm been trying similar for a while with the fireball object in Sonic 1 (in a first-step toward a Mega Man in Sonic 1 hack) but it only half works. That's unrelated though, good job so far!

 

Had a playthrough and I'm really liking what I see.

...

As a spriter though, I have to say I hate how you've used 5 different Shadow sprite sheets. It can be very distracting going from the standing base, to a larger version when going over a ramp, then a very old badly made sheet when hovering/using his gun. Surely a Shadow sheet exists with all the poses you need?

 

Giving my professional spriter opinion in here, from all the Shadow sprite sheets I remember seeing, Damien's Shadow is probably my favorite one out of the entire bunch of Sonic 3 styled Shadow sprites I recall seeing-- it's not the perfect Shadow in the style, but it's the best one available, in my opinion. Not only because it has a good handful of animations that would be convenient for hacks, but it also just seems to be closer to being accurate to how the Sonic 3 style works, in terms of shading. That and he manages to be very accurate to his own design, while still being translated into Sonic 3 proportions decently, and the best part is that he's clearly no minor edit of Sonic either. The only thing that stands out too much for me in the sprite sheet is how the spinning doesn't has his spikes accurate, and other little inconsistencies, but nothing really major.

If there is any extra poses you need, simply editing from parts of this sprite sheet would help the inconsistency in the current version's sprites, or anything you can do to keep the design consistent throughout the animations.

 

You asked me to give this a go on SSRG a while back, and I feel bad that I didn't get around to it. That said, I tried it recently, and I'm a bit disappointed.

The biggest concern is the amount of bugs. My first run through the game was cut short about one minute in when I inadvertently triggered Tails' flight and had him grab Sonic. A swinging platform moved between Tails and Sonic, separating the two and leaving Sonic stuck in midair until Time Over. On my second run, I spent a moment observing the odd collision with the jump ramps early in the act before playing onward. The Zone 1 Act 1 boss went well until the pinch phase, at which point the second rotating ball started moving in circles around the boss faster and faster until there was no way past it without getting hit. The second act went more smoothly, although I was disappointed that the boss arena was taken right from my hack. I have no problem with basing ideas on somebody else's stuff, but improve upon them if you do! My game froze upon entering a special ring in the Ice Cap expy, which has all but the lowest points in its layout copied directly from Ice Cap Act 2, and I quit playing at that point until the next day.

Level designs leave a bit to be desired. Some sections of the first zone are pretty clearly left over layout parts from Emerald Hill, so I was able to gauge how close I was to the end of each act by looking for familiar things. The layout to the first act of Starry Night—a name that I'm pretty sure MegaMix has used and done better—is simply Star Light Act 3 but with an odd introduction. Starry Night Act 2 has some problems with getting stuck in loops when Sonic moves at high speed. The boss of Starry Night gets a bit hard to manage when every seesaw is constantly firing its spiked ball into the air; my first death was actually off screen when a spiked ball and Sonic were off the top of the screen simultaneously and I couldn't tell where either was. I eventually beat the boss by ignoring the seesaw catapulting completely and carefully jumping from the fulcrum of the middle seesaw. The Wacky Workbench expy (I forget what word you used in place of "Workbench") doesn't have thick enough collision set on many surfaces, so when you get fired into the air, it's very possible that you fall through the floor and die when you try to land. This happened to me at the boss arena twice.

Utopia City is where I ran out of patience on my latest run. The blur effect applied to the water creates a serious amount of slowdown and makes gauging your remaining amount of time underwater difficult. The gimmick with switches that change the water level and platforms that float on the surface was also taken from my hack, so as with the first boss, I expected to see it done in a better way. However, I instead found several parts of the layout were copied straight from my hack, including the area in which you navigate through a passage in a wall to get atop a floating platform and the area in which you need to quickly jump across five floating platforms in a row to exit a room (both of which are from Chemical Plant Act 3 in my hack). I lost a life to a section in which a loop sends you underwater (if the water level is high enough) and a spring then pushes you left. The intent is that you go to the left, but since the curve used at the bottom of the loop is the one that has solidity on either collision path, I believed I needed to jump to a small alcove high in the right wall. I jumped there only to find it was the end of a different passage, not the start of one, and drowned shortly afterward. The boss battle finally did me in. I quickly jumped atop Eggman's head and bounced on him seven times. As the eighth hit almost connected, Sonic mysteriously died, as the collision box on the chemical vat Eggman holds seems to be way too big. At this point I closed Kega and gave up.

My advice to you would be to not release a hack to the public until the bugs are unobtrusive and to truly play your layouts in every possible way to make sure they work for all types of players. For example, my instinct when playing is to jump off of any uphill slope when I'm moving at speed to gain lots of height and to jump off of steep downhill slopes and loop ceilings to gain speed upon landing, and these habits led to encountering many collision errors or having no sense of direction upon landing from big jumps. I'm sure other players' styles could lead to different issues. I applaud the effort you put into this but disapprove of the half-polished state of the release (and, of course, the stuff copied from me without improvement), so please give this hack much more time in the oven before its next release.

 

Sorry for the bump, but seeming as it's contest week, and this hack is in the contest, here is my "Let's Try" video!

[video]http://youtu.be/v2GBBqLr4PE[/video]

 

So wait. You can port Sonic 3 code to Sonic 2 now? That Ice Cap level looks like it's an actual port rather than a Sonic 2 stage with Ice Cap graphics.

 

Well, technically, we've been able to do that for ages, see every elemental shield port ever. This... looks more like a reskin. The Orbinaut seems to just be S2's, the background is static, no scrolling, the Penguinator, I have no idea what it's based on, smashable ice block, HTZ rock, the glowing bridge, HPZ's bridge.

EDIT: Jesus Christ, this is one of the buggiest and laggy hacks I've ever played. CPZ act 1 was brutal, and that awkward rising water switch gimmick had me stuck for five minutes, and by the time I did the first one right, I got stuck behind the second switch, and couldn't play until I time over'd. Also, the SLZ boss warped me to death multiple times.