Sonic Galactic

This fangame was quite a nice surprise among this year's entries. It's probably my favorite 2D one, the spritework is incredible and the level design is solid.
I'm equally surprised to see you posting about it - I didn't know you liked Sonic

 

I'm actually doing some of the art for this! (I'm listed as 'Death Egg' in the credits) Nothing of significance I've made made it into the demo unfortunately, unless you count the floating platforms, but I've helped out with a decent amount of level art in a couple other levels.

 

This has definitely been the standout Sonic fangame entry for me this year. It just looks so bloody good, it plays great and everything is on point for me.

 

I literally created a profile there just to comment on it, by far the project that impressed me the most at SAGE as a whole.

As I said there, this project was in a direction I liked a lot - it really looks like a "progression" of classic games and not a revision of them. As they said themselves, they are taking a more "Saturn" approach with its art direction, and I totally feel that. It's the kind of direction I've always wanted to see the series taking, making sprites more detailed and closer to the characters' design. I became particularly a fan of Knuckles' sprite, I really love it sooooo much! In the rest, the game has a very solid design and visual as a whole (although the second act is significantly shorter than the first).

If anything, the only really "bad/sad" thing I have to say on the project is that it has such a high quality, and sounds so ambitious that it ends up looking to me like another one of those incredible projects that will never be finished - which obviously, I hope to be wrong. Other than that, it's really amazing!

 

Maybe it's because it's early, but sprites are very inconsistent. Sonic and Tunnel have a very detailed shading, on Tunnel looking basically a prerendered sprite set, while Fang and mostly Knuckles have a really simple shading, especially Knux which looks really cartoony. Also, his head looks BIG on fast running stance and some others. Also happens in a minor scale to Tails.

Other than that, the project looks awesome.

 

We don’t need Sega to release Classic Sonic games. Clearly the fans have it taken care of lol!!!

 

I played the demo and it's awesome. This is exactly the kind of thing I want to see out of 2D Sonic.

 

The demo was a treat to play. The gameplay is very solid Sonic fare, but the real star is the impeccable spritework, to the point of making me think I was looking at a sprite artist reel disguised as a fangame.

My only complains are that I'm really not a fan of the stage palettes. They look very desaturated making them feel flat
And bosses, oh the bosses. I thought we collectively agreed after playing Superstars that "make you wait for tens of seconds until the boss exposes its weak spot to let you hit itself once, repeat" is not the way to do Sonic bosses.
They also are extremely poor at communicating when the player can hit them.

Anyway, a great fangame, I enjoyed playing the demo a lot

 

Yeah I won't lie, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what was in the background and what was in the foreground in that level.

Still, overall a really well made project. The spindash wall jump is so brilliant I kind of want to see it in a 3D Sonic game lol

 

Knuckles’ levels feel different enough. I suggest playing through him as well.

 

Riddle me this: Why does every single city level's background have to look busy?

 

So many things that we've been through
Can you feel it
So many things for us to do
But can you feel it
So many faces all around
So many places to be found
Living in a city where nothing gets you down

 

Here are the screenshots where the saturation changed to 170+.

Spoiler

Easy fix, almost...

 

I agree... I appreciate the amount of detail and unique artwork in the city zone... but it's so busy with so many moving things and bright colors that it's kinda hard to parse...

 

This is a fantastic fan game.

• The level design is marvelous, there's a good mix of speed and platforming and there aren't bullshit surprise sources of damage.
• The levels are honestly maybe too large but at least this is compounded by there not being a time limit unlike other fan games with large levels, looking at you 3D in 2D
• The bonus stages were grating at the start but they grew up on me.
• The single special stage in the demo is fun but feels too easy? Perhaps future ones will be harder.
• Bosses could telegraph better when and where they are vulnerable, if they are gonna have long invulnerable phases then perhaps lower the amount of hits required like in Sonic CD
• The drop dash being usable to climb vertical walls and jump off of them is honestly such an inspired piece of character movement that I now want it in every single 2D Sonic game. I wasn't able to pull off anything like this but if it isn't possible then I'd love to be able to chain vertical drop dashes in parallel walls.
• The level visuals are beautiful and character animations are fantastic.
• If there's one thing I could dock points for is not supporting 16:10 aspect ratios natively and using dithering techniques meant for NTSC color blending when the game doesn't provide a shader that takes advantage of it.

9/10 overall fantastic demo, I haven't finished playing it and I already want the full game.

 

Dude, what do you mean the first demo was 5 years ago already...

 

Played through what's available of adventure mode with Sonic and Tails and I've tried the other three lads in the tutorial zone and here are my thoughts:

• Sonic being able to Drop Dash up walls feels almost as natural an addition of the Drop Dash itself, and I think is emblematic of my optimism that this game could be a an advancement of Mania in a way that Superstars utterly failed to deliver.
• Production values are absolutely gorgeous. The best of the Sonic community's efforts are known for looking nice, but I think this reaches that coveted status of "so damn good it could be mistaken for official", once again with the pixel art feeling like it develops what Mania put forward in terms of silky smooth subpixel animation, despite the fact it's entirely from the ground up (for the most part). Knuckles' head often looks too big for his body however.
• Levels are engaging but far too long, which is a pitfall I feel fan efforts often blunder into. I'm a Sonic veteran - if my first playthrough of a level why following the path of least resistance is upwards of four minutes, then frankly there's too much there. Not helping is how levels can at times poorly communicate what the route forward is. Luminou City is a particularly egregious example. It can already be hard for me to tell what's solid ground and what's set dressing due to its high saturation colour palette, but there are arrow signs leading to dead ends and the path switching gimmick has a sign next to it indicating that staying on top is fast and going down is slow, despite the fact that speed doesn't seem to have an influence on which path you take, and sometimes taking the bottom path is mandatory anyway.
• There are also some isolated instances of level design dickery here and there (about as much as Sonic 3 & Knuckles where sometimes enemies are put in your path for you to just run into, something Mania is really good at avoiding), largely concerning spikey enemies, but the biggest sin here is the bosses, which, while conceptually very interesting with engaging designs and gimmicks, indulge Superstars' worst excesses, taking far too long with phases of waiting, and getting hits on them often leading to unfair damage. I think having the bosses be based around weak points is a good idea to get people to engage with the boss, but once I've found that week point I should be able to go to town on it, rather than it getting untelegraphed mercy invincibility or the weak point just straight up going away. All the bosses are awful for this but I think Luminou City 1's is perhaps the worst.
• Transition cutscenes should be skippable, and/or a Zone should be considered cleared as soon as Act 2's boss is beaten. In my Tails run, I closed the game after Verdant Isle 2's boss because the Zone transition was taking too long, and when I came back to it later I had to play the entirety of that Act again.

I realise most of what I've said here is criticism, but it stands out like a sore thumb against a game that gets so much right and is perhaps the most original and innovative fan effort since Robo Blast 2. I've been hyped for this project for a while now and dearly hope it reaches completion, but unfortunately the blemishes in this demo have dampened that hype somewhat.

 

I respect and admire what the game is going for. The spritework is gorgeous, as others have mentioned, and it does inspire the sense of wonder I think they're going for. Levels do compliment that, because they often tease you with stuff you might want -- and, unlike Mania, you're not just blazing past it. I like it when the game gets really technical and asks you to engage with its mechanics on your own terms to figure out what you really want, which happened most often in Coral Garden. In other words, Sonic Galactic looks its best when it's like this:



The bubble wheels, the vines in Verdant Isle -- I like these times when you have only one chance to keep running in the path you were on, otherwise you'll be thrown to a lower path. I like that Coral Garden Act 1 is entirely underwater.

However, I think the game is way too whimsical -- as in, things work the way the game seems to want them to work at any given time, and entirely in a way to keep you from getting too frustrated. Some seemingly background objects are interactable, but which ones, and what they're supposed to do, is not always clear. Those coral flowers give me a bubble that pops for some reason (after some time? When I touch some other object?), and the sigil-thing gives me rings. Going too slow? The game will give you a random burst of speed for some reason. Maybe it's an object I touched? I wouldn't know! So when I reach Luminoucity, it feels a bit strange that it's the busiest level, visually, but none of it seems to interact with me.

So the game is at its worst when it's like this:



Okay? Do I actually get a Chaos Cola at come point? I do have 10 rings. There's another sign that tells me, "Pop!" but I can't pop it. In the previous two stages, I kinda could even when I didn't know what I was popping. So it feels like the game is trying to make me feel something specific at every turn, but I'm not sure what it could possibly be. It doesn't help that, so far, all levels fall into the same pit fangames usually do: every level is Green Hill, Chemical Plant and Hydrocity. Every level has loops; every level will give you that sweet momentum because, don't you know? It's a Sonic game! Here's all this wavy geometry everywhere so you can run on it, and we can make a trailer video out of it. If they stop you, it's through some sort of trickery that demands reflex. So while I like those times when the game tests your reflexes, the game seems to only ever want to test that. Coral Garden Act 1 was, for a time, my favorite level for not being like that. Until it was, then I let it do whatever it wanted to Sonic and it still took me nine minutes to reach the boss. But what do I care? I didn't take nine minutes. At least two of them were Sonic running all by himself while the stage lunged him forward.

So there's a lot going on here. A lot of good! I thought I wouldn't like wall dashing, but I actually did, and the best part is that the game never made a puzzle out of it. I used it when I thought "hey, I wonder if there's something up there". I wanted to, I made it my business to use it. Sometimes, there was! I think I found a big ring because of that. Although I couldn't access the special stage for reasons I'm not sure I understand. But that's cool -- not that there was something there, but that it wasn't always the case.