Bark the Polar Bear would make an excellent third member if he's shrunk down. He'd fill in the Power role of the trio.
I've been waiting so long for this. Nothing matters more. Finally, another game where I can play as Mighty.
Well, Sonic is the fastest thing alive... so he could either be running back and forth or traveling back in time. There are other teams planned that will share characters with other teams; I will leave them as surprises, though. I am also thinking about a Generations team with 3 Sonics (S3&K Sonic, ModGen Sonic and some other Sonic), but I am having trouble finding a third sprite sheet with all poses. So yeah, several teams with Sonic.
That could work, especially if Team SegaSonic's version of Sonic used Sonic 1/CD sprites instead of the Sonic 3 sprites used in Team Sonic. It could give players more of an incentive to pick one over the other depending on their preferences.
The real challenge is to have mix and match teams - I.e. be able to pair Sonic up with anyone :specialed: (it would be interesting to see if it could be feasibly done with such a limited palette. Whether you'd be forced to cheat and point out that Espio can change colour)
That is not a challenge: (top rows are original sprites) The challenge is doing that while still allowing for super/hyper transformation; it is this restriction that prevents being able to use any 3 characters you want in SCH... were I to get rid of super/hyper states, you could make any team you wanted. Would need some engine changes, and I would have to disable Espio's rainbow idle animation too. Edit: also, some characters don't look too good on those palettes; Cream, Big, Cheese and Tikal look awful, for example.
I don't know how feasible it would be, but maybe you could have pre-set "official" teams that can go super, and a mix-and-match superless team option that lets you pick any arrangement of the characters that play nice with the reduced palette. Maybe you could still go "half-super" with special invincibility stars for those characters or something. Just spitballing ideas.
Hmm... but why do you put that effort in make them all fin in one palette line, if max characters on screen are 3? Can't you make some sort of dynamic palettes that get the colours it needs for the three selected characters?
I don't want to be mean, but... I'm really not fond of that sprite design that the ModGen Sonic offers, given that it has an awkward art direction. The way I see it, it feels more like a head swap of the original Sonic sprites with plastic-like shading all over it that makes him contrast himself in comparison to the normal Genesis sprites way too much, and the animations themselves feel like slightly more inexpressive and stiff versions of their source sprites half of the time. It just feels like a very odd mix of elements that would've been better off if it was scratch made (like the other sprites from the Mod Gen project), rather than oddly edited from Sonic 3 sprites. While I cannot recall of any other good Modern Sonic sprites that actually has a complete sprite sheet, I can only recommend to go for something that goes along the sprite style used in the game. Something similar to this, perhaps: I made this some months ago, in an attempt to keep Sonic's modern design (Advance/Adventure era) as accurate to the S3 sprite style as possible, while keeping him slightly more fresh in comparison to the Sonic 3 sprite itself. As much as I wish I could make a whole sheet of it, I'm sadly pretty busy with many other things at the moment, but hopefully this is good enough of a base to show what I mean.
I thought about that; having a super form more similar to more modern games with some sort of aura or stars. I would need to either free $C00 bytes of RAM (NOT an easy task; probably impossible at the current juncture) and add laggy dynamic art recoloring (using these $C00 bytes as an intermediate buffer between ROM and VRAM), or include an ungodly amount of art for each character for each possible manner in which it could combine with other characters (which would end up forcing me to use the SSF2 mapper even without adding more characters, and would soon make the ROM too large for emulators or Everdrives). On a quick estimate, the dynamic art recoloring for 3 characters using various 64kB lookup tables and large amounts of generated code to save every possible cycle would use about one third of frame time. It would choke the game out worse than losing lots of rings when underwater after triggering collapsing platforms. Moreover, since each character has 40-100kB of art, it is actually better to have all potential recolors included in ROM. So cramming everyone into one palette line is the lesser of three evils. And who knows, having them all in one palette line might open up more possibilities. Keep in mind that I am not a good spriter; far from it (mostly because I prefer programming to spriting). Out of curiosity, what is your opinion on this sheet. It is missing a few poses I need, but no more than the "main" ModGen one (S2 ending far-away poses, ending large sprites, S2 special stage) which are beyond my skills. One sheet I would love to use even more than the ModGen ones is a version of this one (with matching super). It is missing a few more poses (the S1 ending "releasing emeralds" poses, corkscrew, S2 ending far-away poses, ending large sprites, and the "turning around" braking sprite, S2 special stage) which are also beyond my skills.
I have an idea for this. In Sonic Heroes, Tails and Knuckles aren't Super during the final fight, but they are surrounded in a golden shield thing that reminds me of the Electric Shield in S3&K. Perhaps when you make a mix-and-match team, going Super should surround you with a Golden Electric Shield like in Sonic Heroes. I dunno though, I just thought this was worth mentioning.
I somehow forgot to reply, but it would make some sense to strip features from "custom" teams compared to "official" teams. If you think about King of Fighters 97, you could put any three characters you wanted in your team, but unofficial teams got a generic ending, and less benefits between two consecutive rounds (yes, I know, it's way more complex than this, but I don't feel like writing an essay about how KoF97 works).
Yeah, I'd be okay with no or limited super form for custom teams. It's a necessary limitation of playing with a custom team. As for Team Generations: How about S3K Sonic, Modern Sonic, and SMS Sonic? They're all different enough to be distinguishable. SMS Sonic could be based on Sonic & Tails, where he has the Spindash and Peelout (and is invincible while using either). He could also skim along the water a la S2 8-bit.
My idea for a Team Generations would be Classic Sonic, Dreamcast Sonic and Modern Sonic (Using MotorRoach's sprite for Dreamcast Sonic and a really old Modern Sonic we made around a year ago) Classic would have the peel-out and Spindash, Dreamcast would use a Sonic Adventure-like spindash and lightdash(a Sonic Advance moveset would work too) and Modern would have a double jump and boost ala colors (a Sonic Rush moveset could also be used). But just in case Modern Sonic is too tall: Spoiler It works as a power type too! :specialed:
What if then the custom teams can have not a completly custom scheme, but, for example (Select main character from a list; select sidekick from list 2; select second sidekick from list 3)? I mean, it limits the posibilities a lot, but it would allow you to not strip a lot of detail from the characters. For example, you can't match Sonic, Tails and Charmy, but Sonic, Tails and Vector. Now that I think of it, it would be 'Select speed character, select fly character,select power character'. Except in the generations team, of course, that would be a salad of blueness, speed and spikes. Good side is that there's no problem with palette.
