Sonic Nexus '08 Demo

I am very impressed guys! I was a bit iffy about the intro, but once I began playing the game, it really put a smile on my face. It felt like a genuine Sonic game. It's too bad there's only one level though. But overall, very promising. Good job to you Slingerland and Taxman and the rest of the crew =)

 

Oh. My. God

 

This is very awesome. I had no lag and the engine is spot on. I Loved every second of this demo and the music fits. I can't wait to see the final product.

 

Glad to finally have this one out there. I hope you all enjoy what we have going here.

 

Hot shit. Much better than previous versions of both Retro Sonic and Nexus! Loving the gimmicks and overall environment, though I had some concerns in that the end of Act 1 felt a tad bit too much like Palmtree Panic in design. Outside of that, the level design flows extremely well, and keeps up a great pace, and has amazing balance between platforming and speed. This is a Sonic level, people!

I think the hang gliders are a bit tacky, personally—they don't feel as dynamic as they should, and they're only useful in a limited situation (with the fans). It might benefit from a system that better helps it propel the player at high altitudes. In addition, I was at one section where I was riding the hang glider, and a buzzbomber slammed into me! How rude. :v:

Hunter did an awesome job with the music. It's very colorful and fits the environment perfectly! While it doesn't have a "traditional" Sonic feel, it still manages to be entirely appropriate and retains a memorable melody. Great stuff!

The new enemies were very colorful and felt natural. Their behaviors are extremely similar to traditional Sonic badniks, but at the same time have a nice refreshed graphical and behavioral revamp. It's the little touches that count. :D

(I also wanted to try out the zipper gimmick, but I kept missing the handle. Looked pretty sweet, though.)

Overall, the design in this game is of superb quality. Huge props to all involved in its creation, and I'm looking forward to future progress. Keep up the great work!

 

My original concept with the hang gliders was to have them get significantly faster than their maximum horizontal speed is now. The speed you'll be able to attain later on mostly will depend on how long you can stay up. We'll keep working on this stuff. Also, there will be a little hook/wooden construct for them to hang off later on for aesthetics. Yeah, right now they seem a bit rough. As for the buzz bombers, well, sometimes you just have to let go of the glider. Yeah, I know no one would ever want to do that, but no worries. The game won't thrust you into a bottomless pit.

 

Haha... yeah, I know what you mean—I should have jumped off, it just took me by surprise. It sort of reminds me of Robjoe's old Megamix layouts where you'd smash into badniks without prior warning. I eventually memorized where they popped up, but that didn't make it any less of a dick move in terms of design practice.

Don't get me wrong, though, that's just one nitpick out of the bundle. I'm sort of thinking that for the gliders, you can try a sort of "Mario 64" approach—you can gain more velocity by diving down and trying to keep a steady angle of flight, but if you try and hold up the entire time you're not going much of anywhere. Just a suggestion, though.

 

So a bit like Sonic 2 GG then?

 

This felt exactly like SonicCD....With the exception of the flower out of enemies =P. Excellent work.

 

I think we've found a new definition of 'Sheer Greatness'. I remember playing the 2006 demo a couple of times and I was blown away with that. Somehow, I missed the 2007 SAGE demo; how I don't know! Two years later, it has blossomed into a beautiful game. For a demo, it's still bloody fantastic!
Oh, and one bug I found is that I got an extra life with 99 rings, not 100; maybe 0 rings counts as 1 in the code for an extra life somewhere? Just guessing.

Overall, an absolutely superb piece of techinal engineering that is definately a huge success. Keep it up!

 

Heh, yeah, we've heard about the 99 rings bug a few times now. The lack of an enemy remnant too. My personal preferences are for us to do something completely new for enemy remnants, but it hasn't been much of an issue so far.

I like the idea of that Tweaker. I'll try to work with that soon. Might try to run you by a few different prototypes of it.

 

DLing now, but I just want to make a small suggestion. Get rid of that music that automatically loads when you go onto the site. It's not your fault I happened to have been listening to a song that was so low in volume beforehand, that my speakers went BLASTING when I entered your site, but it is generally annoying when music starts playing out of nowhere. Plus it makes it slower for 56k users.

Dunno if this looks like a bitchy rant but..there you go :p

 

Just played through.. This is looking great, all that hard work converting to the Retro engine is sure to be rewarding.

 

OK, so I just tested it out. I must say it really did feel like a Sonic CD experience. I was expecting to come across time posts any minute as I kept running =P I wanted to try the zippers but kept running past them, usually falling down the pit below them, I guess I'll just have to play through again. Overall I like what you did, and it's a huge improvement from the last demo, mainly for the fact that it's not MMF but a Sonic specific engine :D

This is a great sign of things to come once Retro Sonic goes public. My only hope is that the game doesn't rely too heavily on Sonic cd graphics. Mixing different background from various games plus palette editing can really go a far way if done right. I want to see the rest of the levels now!

 

This isn't likely going to be the default Retro Sonic graphical set. No worries there.

Anyway, we are going to be having a small mini-event on SFGHQ around Christmas. We'll probably have some more Nexus stuff on display there.

 

The game refuses to let me map the down command to any other key other than the down arrow key.

 

Ahh shit yeah I had the key mappings muddled up... so the up and down go to left and right and vice versa (or something like that). I'll fix it ASAP, I guess I hadn't found it yet because I never change my key preferences :P

 

Having played a previous version of Nexus before, I find this much better with the Retro Sonic engine. The music is great, and the acts were well-designed I thought. There's some great gimmicks I enjoyed as well, particularly the hang glider. Also, I'm surprised you went with the Sonic 2 beta walking sprites, which is something I haven't seen before in a fangame. Overall, no complaints here. Looking forward to seeing more zones in the future, too.