Strife

SonicWind - I thought about it one day and realized that I could have a little fun by making enemies swipe collectable items out of the hands of slow players. There's a few places in future stages where it's really noticeable, such as a miniboss in Relic Maze Act 2 that plows through a tunnel while scraping up all the gems, and if you want them you have to defeat it. I'm also planning to add enemies that will purposely suck up/vacuum gems and life petals or break open powerup boxes to receive their effects before the player does. TailsSena - Indeed. She's going to draw the main graphics, while R-No's sketches will be used for a 90's style instruction manual. Also, thanks for reminding me to post the drawing here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B_EJ-PbViU Well, here's the new Lilac. She still has similar proportions to a Sonic character, but I've taken the effort to better highlight how she's different from him. I've ditched the hedgehog spikes and went with a look that's a more original, attractive, and easier to draw. I'm also putting a greater emphasis on her hair tendrils, as you can see by her new rolling animation in which she wraps them around her body and uses them like a wheel (instead of transforming into a sphere like Sonic, as was the case previously). I'll update the demo as soon as I'm able to get some new artwork for her to replace the art that's currently on our website. After that, no further changes to her design will be made.

TailsSena - You mean Spade? Yeah, he's one of the antagonists. He uses ranged attacks as opposed to hitting things up close like Lilac and Carol. DNL - I ran into that bug in Relic Maze, but I wasn't able to duplicate it. I think I might know how to fix it though, so thanks for the catch.

I am. xD; It kinda helps though that she's wearing the same outfit as before; The biggest changes are in the head and the color palette. Also, I too would be interested in knowing how Goshi beat the stage so quickly. :3

o__o That's an insane time. Congrats! I've only got a few animations left to do for the new Lilac, and they're the longest ones, so I'll wait until tomorrow to plow through 'em. After that I should be able to record a new video of her in action.

Thank you Ayling! It means a lot to me when folks come back from a hiatus or register on the forums specifically to compliment the game. :'D gsoft - I totally agree. I think after the demo's been out for a couple of months and discussion about the game dies down, I'll have more room to quietly do my own thing without being showered by outside opinions (Not that I don't appreciate them, of course!). I'll post updates, but they'll be a little less frequent since I plan on keeping a lot of things hidden until the full version is ready... ...unless you're a tester, of course. Which reminds me - at some point I'll need my current test group to sign a formal Non-Disclosure Agreement.

I'd say I'm starting to feel a little more optimistic about it. Reaching out to them was the right thing to do, and it's going to give me a clean conscience no matter how things turn out. I don't want to begin my professional game development career with 1 out of every 5 journalists comparing me to Zynga in the plagiarism department (even though it's not plagiarism and they're probably only saying that because it annoys them so much xD; ). As for a new name for Sonic Worlds... How about The Ultimate 360 Degree Platform Engine? :3

I'm willing to cut them some slack on the Streets of Rage remake, though, because while it contained a lot of new content and gameplay features, the original game was also in there in its entirety, so they were essentially distributing a commercial game for free. That's not the case with Freedom Planet, of course; I don't have the original Sonic the Hedgehog encoded into the game or anything like that. xD; I'll try and look on the positive side of things while I wait for a response. At least this is being dealt with while I still have little to lose. Had I waited until the game was finished and released, it might have had more negative consequences.

So the Dev Relations Coordinator at SEGA got back to me and forwarded my e-mail to their legal department. Kinda wished that he could've asked me first... Ah well. Guess I'll have to continue with the original plan. ^^;; If they deem any aspects of the game as infringements, I'll see if I can refer them to some examples of games that have striking similarities to Sonic either in style or presentation (such as the Rayman game Damizean posted on Retro) and maybe try to haggle down their opinion. I really hope they give me the benefit of the doubt since I was considerate enough to approach them before the game was finished. I hope this wasn't a huge mistake.

I can see where he's coming from, though; I have to be careful not to compromise my artistic vision for the sake of appealing to the masses, because then the game loses its sense of direction with time. And that's especially important for someone like me who's had self-esteem issues their entire life and tends to quickly change sides whenever someone brings up a convincing argument. I hate myself for doing it because it leaves me vulnerable to the whims of vocal minorities. ._. That's pretty much the reason why I'm not going to show Lilac's redesign this time until I've put it into the game.

This. A million times this. I know that Vexer included a Tails partner system in the latest version of Sonic Axiom, and I'd love to get my hands on that if he'd be willing to share how he did it. I hope there's a way to pull if off without needing to clone all of Player 1's sensors and such.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. Seraph has a really strong point about building gameplay around personality. I think I had a lot more luck doing that with Carol, to be honest - All of her unique abilities compliment her feline nature, such as her wall clinging, panel jumping, and pouncing. And if I ever made Spade a playable character, I would build his gameplay around his deck of cards, granting him unique powers based on combining them in different ways, and for Milla, basing her gameplay around shielding and counterattacking/reflecting to compliment her pacifist nature. As far as Lilac goes, I think the best I could do at this point is to focus her abilities more heavily on her two long strands of hair. Her melee attacks already use them, and I'll bet that if I made them feel more prehensile or even had them change shape and length depending on what she's doing, then it might take the focus off the abilities she has in common with Sonic. Maybe I could change the rolling animation so that she stretches out her hair to cover her entire body like a ball of yarn, or into a wheel that she can grab onto and cartwheel with. In any case, I've spent all night with my voice actress for Lilac working on a new design for her. I think we've come up with something that we're really happy with, but I won't reveal it until I've changed her entire spriteset to match the change. The next you'll see of her is probably a gameplay video showcasing the adjustments. I'll give you a hint: No more spiky hair.

I've tried multiple ideas for rolling replacements, but none of them felt natural to me. Someone on Retro gave me the idea of redesigning the rolling animation a bit, so maybe it'll work if I just replace the solid sphere frames of the animation with a more general cartoony effect. Anyway, let me ask you guys something... If Lilac wasn't in the game at all and Carol was pushed as the main protagonist, do you think the game would be criticized as much about the Sonic similarities? Sometimes I feel like Lilac is the only reason anyone has a problem with the similarities. If I'm going to break out of the "Lilac Cycle" once and for all, then I should probably spend a few days in quiet isolation while I conceptualize a completely new design for her without outside interference. And then when I finally come up with something that I'm happy with, I need to take whatever criticisms I get in stride so I'm not pressured into restoring her original design, as has been the case the past 4-5 times I tried to change her.

-> The only thing I can come up with as a suitable replacement for the rolling is this spinning maneuver similar the one Espio or Blaze uses. Even then, she would still need to curl into a ball in the split second before using a Comet Boost, since it would look weird otherwise. Also, I'm not sure if I can do the same thing with Carol, since her pouncing move transitions nicely into a roll. One of my friends brought up the suggestion of replacing the roll with a baseball slide - which could work decently on normal surfaces, but it would look strange with gimmicks that force the player into ball mode, such as the S tunnel or a spinning cup gimmick that's present in Relic Maze Act 2: If I'm going to rid the game of "ball mode" completely, then I will unfortunately need to scrap several of the gimmicks I've made so far that specifically utilize it. No idea what to do with the S tunnel or its switch-based cousin in Relic Maze Act 1, but I could change the spinny cup gimmick from a cup into a handlebar the player grabs onto as it descends. On the other hand, I could just limit "ball mode" to very specific circumstances which include the use of these gimmicks. Maybe the elimination of the Spin Attack would be enough to differentiate it from Sonic?

My friend introduced me to this little gem a while back: http://armorgames.com/play/553/the-fancy-pants-adventure-world-2 It's a platform game with a stick-figure style, where you run around sloping stages at high speed, kick stuff, jump off walls, and progress through an assortment of small obstacle courses. Sound familiar? Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a Sonic game that controls as smoothly as this. What's also interesting is that I didn't connect the game to Sonic at first, and it was only after I had been playing it for a few minutes that it dawned on me. xD; It should only take a few minutes for a skilled player to plow through, so it's a nice little time waster if you're looking for one. And it's got a bunch of neat easter eggs as well.

I have an idea that might help me tweak the difficulty in my game, but I'm wondering what kinds of extensions I would need to use to make it work. I'm quite inexperienced in the field of client/server communication, especially when it comes to MMF2 games. Suppose I put a plain text file on my server. Whenever the player dies in the game or clears the stage, the game would attempt to connect to my website. If it connects successfully, the X and Y coordinates of their character, along with other bits of data such as the current frame, difficulty setting, etc, would be sent to the website and recorded in the text file. Eventually after many plays, I would have a really really long string of coordinate data on my server, which I could then plug into a statistics program in order to create a map of each stage and dots/clouds indicating where the highest concentration of player deaths occur. Which extensions would you recommend for making this possible? (i.e. connecting to a server and modifying a text file on the server)

That last one should work wonderfully! Thanks. Uhh... I'm not sure what type of landscape this should be? Volcanic I assume?

Ooh, that's something to consider. So I would essentially just spell it out in katakana how it sounds in English? I wish I had a friend in Japan who I could ask which sounds better. xD; But, in any case, it's not at the top of my to-do list at the moment, so I've got plenty of time to figure it out. Thanks for the input guys!

I was thinking that exact same thing. Now I keep imagining Sonic having all these clay-based special abilities. xD; Would be pretty cool actually.

Yeah, that's a valid point... but how am I any less vulnerable to that kind of stuff by staying away from Asia? I mean, if I do localize in Asia, at least the legitimate Freedom Planet will be floating around in there somewhere. I'm thinking that the risk of bootlegs would be reduced somewhat if the game is popular enough for people to express outcry at imitators, so I'll likely wait until after I've finished and released it in English for a while. And if some kind of "Republic Planet" or "Free Planet" knockoff crops up anyway, I'll try and figure out what I can do. xD;

Cleberson - Indeed! Same goes for the website. People actually keep telling me that, which is why I'm focusing on Japanese localization first. Plus Japanese culture embraces cuteness, so I think many of the characters in the game would be a hit there.

Thanks! Freedom Planet isn't a name given to anything in the game. "Freedom" simply describes the ideal state of the planet. The planet itself is referred to in-game as Avalice.

My attempt at translating the game's logo to Japanese and Chinese. My bilingual friend helped me with the Japanese one, but I'm not entirely confident that I translated to Chinese correctly. This was mainly an experiment, and I don't think I'll have the means to localize the game in Asia until I start earning money from sales (or until I begin a Kickstarter fund). It's definitely something I'm putting serious thought into, though.

Ah, yeah. Loading your saved game in 1.1 should work, I'd imagine. As for adding new characters... I'm not certain at this point. It depends on how much steam I pick up during development and if I have the time to spare.

Do you have the latest version of the game? If so, then the time to unlock Carol is 7 minutes. There's also a cheat code on our Facebook page, but you'll have to do some digging to find it: http://www.facebook.com/freedomplanetgame