Hello and welcome to retro. Just so you know, we have youtube tags here so people can view youtube videos without leaving the site. Feel free to use them! Theres a button in the full reply mode and if you want to use it quickly its [youtube*][/youtube*] take out the *. Here I'll show you:
That's really impressive art! It looks like the game would benefit from running on a better engine, though. Or even being made as a hack. I'll be watching this one.
Did you realign Sonic's walk animation from Sonic 2? It lost all the weight in the animation. Now it looks like he's just gliding in the air just like he did in Sonic CD. It's not a very pleasant sight. Game looks fine overall.
Specifically looking for feedback about: - Should I replace what version of Sonic I use for the title? I kind of feel like I should, but I am not confident in my own art abilities (to the point where I could animate something like that) - Is the menu near the end dumb? What needs work?
The title screen is fine. Custom art would be better, but what you have is good enough. The menu is nice also. You should perhaps think about re-ordering it though, so that 'delete' is at the bottom.
Yeah, I've made it so it defaults to the first save slot now: If you hit up once, it reveals the "delete" slot: Putting it at the bottom wouldn't work. This is, after all, a PC game, no matter how much I try and replicate the Genesis "experience". Thus, the number of save slots you have available could literally be infinite - but I've capped it at 100, just to have a nice, round, "large but not too large" number.
Really liking it, Blaze, bar a few qualms. (:P As usual.) The Sonic on the title screen DOES work, but what about recolouring it to match the sprite colours of the Sonic you use in-game? That'd make more sense, and might make it look better. Also, the way the hand looks when rotating slightly looks very odd. Is there no way to anti-alias the rotate? The menu looks good, it's just the font that's making me go "meh". It might just need a remaking, or it might be a spacing issue, but I think something a little cleaner would look better. EDIT: This is a personal preference more than anything, but I think the Score part of your savegame profile section would look better at 8 digits than 7.
Your ability to notice little details like that is constantly impressive. I didn't even think about palettes, because they both look like extremely similar shades of blue, at least on my monitor. I actually had to go in to an image editor program and compare R/G/B values to make sure. The wagging finger is using the "high quality" real-time rotation function MMF2 provides, which is supposed to apply a certain amount of filtering, but I guess it doesn't apply to transparent edges. I guess I could forgo real-time rotation and just have it be an alpha-blended animation. Well, that's MMF's Text Blitter extension, for you. Getting the spacing to look right is kind of a bitch. Believe it or not, that's the most "natural" I've ever had a Text Blitter font look. It's either that or I go with Windows fonts - not terrible by any stretch, but it loses some character. Done, but I guess that means I should do this in the rest of the game HUD, too.
@vexer: Your fangame is looking really nice and I'm looking forward to playing it. @Blaze: Really nice menu but maybe you could do something different with the Sega intro to make it a little unique from Sonic 2? Not sure about the name though. Sonic Forever sounds extremely generic and it's been used in past fangame projects.
I think the name suites pretty well. Plus I can't remember any fan games that has had the name "Sonic Forever" recently.
What I'd probably do is have a second "menu" open up when you select the save - your typical "start/copy/delete/cancel" menu, really. Yeah, it's one more button press when it comes to just getting the game going, but eh.
Blaze, would it be possible to have a moving preview of the zone, may be nice to see a moving look instead of something static.
That's more work than its worth. The easy road there would be to embed a video file, and then you get in to the question of what video codecs a person has installed on their PC and that starts becoming a hassle, plus even a well-compressed file is still going to be fairly large when you have 6 or 8 of them. Look at Sonic Classic; that game was over 100mb. Heck, my Sonic 2k6 2D was like 30mb for 5 levels (2 1/2 zones). Not to mention, the way Windows renders them means I can't overlay sprites on top of the video. A still image is fine.
I'm not even sure it's possible, unless MMF2 has some kind of stencil buffer object I'm not aware of, in which case you can have the game render the scrolling background layers ONLY in that window... but even then, it would be a lot of work for little gain.
Blaze, mind posting the sprite sheet for the text? It might just be some of the letters that look odd.
How it appears to the Text Blitter object. Lots of blank spaces, because I'm ignoring a lot of non-essential characters like colons and whatever. Letter spaces are 16x16. A lot of the more funky letters are probably because I wasn't very approximate with how letters fit in to spaces. It's difficult figuring out the appropriate grid when you're being lazy :P Edit: Trying to find the dimensions for these font characters, I really don't think it's 16x16, but those are the settings I used when I made this. So I have no idea! Edit 2: Aha, it tells me if I go in to spacing settings. It's actually 17x17. Edit 3:
