Nemox

I think a 3D combat system, particularly a Hack 'n' Slash system, could be done. If you think about Sonic's abilities from all the cartoon, comic, and several game renditions, he's able to spin and throw himself at an enemy, ala homing attack. The homing attack is essentially Sonic's way of fighting since he's more skilled with his body as a whole than he is with his arms. As we see in Colours, he has a couple more methods; the kick (either sliding or downwardly-thrusting), or the dash (horizontal). These are also ways of thrusting his body toward an enemy, albeit with less control than the homing attack. He also has these methods in Brawl, though they are drastically reduced to fit the map. It does feel a great deal different, even accounting for the smaller scale. In Brawl, he is doing definite attacks with parts of his body as opposed to throwing his body into the strike I remember a fighting style in Kingdom Hearts that really felt nice for Sonic. It involved the character's entire body whooshing across the enemy, striking along the way. It felt very unusual, but very fun. Other characters aren't based around speed and total-body control, so they would use different attacks that simply involve colliding against the enemy rather than across it. Knuckles is very fast and very strong, for instance, so he could run and plow into the enemy with strong strikes, losing very little speed. Vector, however, might not be as fast, but just as strong. His style might be to trample enemies. Hack 'n' Slash may not sound like the deepest of combat systems, but it really can have a lot of emergent qualities that enhance a character's strengths. Sorry if that seemed like undirected rambling at all.

I just did some fooling around in Sonic Colours, and it seems that in those more free-controlled areas, Sonic adheres to a slope only if he's traveling fast enough. Otherwise, he stays upright. Also, he can only generate enough force to move forward if he's on a low enough slope. Seems very simple and clean. I suppose I should set my running force to Force*CombinedFriction/(1-(slope/90)) At the point of 90, the character is touching a wall, so they apply 0 force if that's the only footing they have. It's a built-in maximum. Alternatively, the character can apply force relative to how steep the slope is relative to himself. So if he's traveling fast enough, he will adhere to the slope, and apply full power. If he's too slow, he will be walking against an angled surface, and apply less running power. Perhaps I should also account for how easy it is to adhere to downward slopes as opposed to upward ones... Oh well, no need to over-complicate it yet. EDIT: I've now got friction and deceleration working flawlessly. Now if something is slick, the character will accelerate and decelerate more slowly, but will still reach top speed eventually. And deceleration will not work against gravity. Next up, I'm going to add the traction, and allow deceleration to work against gravity if you have a high enough traction.

@DW: Weird, maybe it's 'cause I edited it really fast. I tend to do that at times. @Oddwarg: That sounds about the same as what I'm doing, except that I am trying to account for characters who can stand still on walls and ceilings like Espio. And for characters like Mighty who have a good ability to at least resist gravity. Sonic for instance, would be easily pulled back by gravity if he tries to run up long enough. But Mighty is able to resist the pull more. The way my system works, it applies the force of Acceleration up to top speed, and applies gravity as well. When running against gravity, the character will slow to a stop. But if Acceleration is higher than Gravity, the character can speed against gravity at will. Which means if I reduce the force of gravity for certain characters, acceleration will be too powerful by comparison. However, a square or cube root for the Lerp rate could work out... I suppose this could call for some tests with scale to determine how much I want gravity to affect the character, and how fast acceleration and top speed will work. Scale could be an important factor in this... @DW again: Luckily my system is pretty lightweight for being so physics-based.

When I first read your post, it only had what I quoted in my previous post. I figured you edited it or somethin'. xP Looking at your description of movement in Sonic games, it seems quite similar to my idea of Lerping the gravity vector in some cases (Don't know what I was thinking with Slerp...). While upside-down, gravity would be Lerped toward the character's down direction. At low speeds, the amount would be less, so gravity pulls the character out faster. At higher speeds, gravity would take somewhat longer to pull the character out. And at super-high speeds, gravity would have no effect, allowing the character to continue indefinitely until thwacked by a robot. This would effectively do the same thing, but perhaps slightly more emergent with the physics system I'm using. Although, that would pose the problem of indefinite vertical motion... I'll play around a bit. Maybe I should mess with gravity a bit too. It's a bit too floaty for a platformer now.

My system has a really emergent sort of PhysX-based controls, so I'd want to create such a force instead of simply reducing gravity. Thinking about the way it works so far though, perhaps I could Slerp the Gravity vector to the character's "down" vector based on velocity and this Traction stat. Maybe the velocity redirection could be based on this as well, but I would have to test that out to be sure... This could generate more force than needed though. Perhaps I could make the force directly proportional to the distance between the ground and the character. Sometimes the collision doesn't pick up on some things, so I use raycasts to keep the character grounded when it's less than 0.4 units away. I suppose that's really why I need such a downforce. EDIT: I read through your edit, and I'm thinking up some more thoughts. Room immediately around my head is beginning to smell like smoke.

So I'm working on friction and traction for my game. Right now what I have is a character whose orientation changes according to the surface he's walking on. I figure I'll base acceleration on how much friction the surface has, so slick surfaces like ice will cause the character to accelerate and decelerate more slowly. But I also want to incorporate a level of Traction that a character can have. In my mind, "traction" is the ability for a character to hug the ground, and generate the "downforce" that keeps him stuck to ceilings. This would also be the force to resist gravity. So, a character with 0 Traction would not be able to do any of this. But a character like Espio with 10 Traction would be able to completely resist gravity, and have a lot of downforce to work with. But it seems a little redundant; a force that sticks a character to the wall, and a force that resists gravity. But without that redundant force, a character's acceleration and friction might not be enough to keep him in place. So I kinda want to hear what you guys do for traction, or downforce, or other such silliness. There must be quite a few methods to do it, and that could give all of us some new perspective on how to make it work. What do you guys do?

I base all my scripts on simplicity and emergent gameplay. Hence why I'm not done with much yet. Accomplishing this stuff with PhysX is difficult. xP I love the entire concept of emergent gameplay; using simple mechanics to generate new experiences.

From my experience, Unity is really good with performance. From what I've heard about SFR, it's probably just extremely un-optimized.

EDIT: This thread started out kinda badly; without much real purpose. But if anyone is still interested, here it is redone. A totally revamped thread! Yes, I am working on a Sonic-inspired motion system for the Unity Game Engine, along with some other parts for action-adventure games. Essentially, an action-adventure RPG kit which can easily be applied to Sonic games. I started work on this over a year ago, and as any eager young game developer who had just learned a great deal, I became excited and wanted to create a full-fledged game. I originally created this topic with the intention of getting a development group together; mostly art and animation assets. However, as my understanding of game development has grown, my goals and plan for the game have drastically changed. As this development kit is being designed as a game development toolset rather than a game, the Sonic aspect will be secondary, and act as a sandbox for my ultimate projects. This means that I'll primarily be working on the systems and some general Sonic aspects that go into it, while I might ask for help creating levels for it. The control system itself is designed to be truly universal. It will have settings that apply all sorts of different action gameplay styles, from platforming to first-person-shooter to third-person shooter to racing game- Mario Galaxy style gravity, free-roaming, roller-coaster gameplay; anything. Yes, it's a complicated undertaking, but it's coming along well. Everything is entirely physics-based, and very much centered around momentum. While slower characters (Link or Bowser for example) would not notice this immediately, it still plays a big role in what they're able to do. It is not yet as refined or developed as Sonic GDK, but I hope that it will at least be as impressive in its sheer flexibility. Another sub-system I've got planned is a universal clothing/inventory/equipment,etc. system. Primarily for RPGs, but it could enhance the Sonic experience in several ways as well. Here's a comical experiment: Hedgehog in Hero's Clothing Clothing options in a Sonic game? Primarily for NPCs. But hey, Amy's got to have a hobby, yeah? Anyone who wants to help, I'm primarily looking for environment pieces, textures and any other art donations. The system is not yet ready for any extra scripting, ala abilities 'n' such. One thing in particular, I could use someone who has some shader experience. My current character models are the playable ones from Sonic Heroes; an updated library would be nice as well. I can animate them and all; I'm just not good at the actual modeling. ... (Don't worry, my animation skill has gotten better.) Here's a few videos demonstrating how it's come along. They're very old, but they'll suffice until I get my next one up: Sonic in Unity 1 Sonic in Unity 2 "Super Sonic Galaxy" Took only about 3 days to get that working, and I've learned a ton since then. I'm currently rewriting the entire system to be better in every aspect. Current Team: (tl;dr) Tuah - Scripting, modeling, animation.

I'm doing scripting for a game called Love Runner, which I believe will be for Android as well as iPhone. Honestly, I can't keep up with all the new gadgets out. But that's where the benefit of a multi-platform engine comes in. I can program for one, and it'll still work on others. xP It's a little spare-time project for most of those working on it, but I think it'll turn out nicely because of it.

Woah, I thought it was just under a month ago. Didn't look at the year. ^^; I suppose it is a bit tangential rather than direct...

One major thing I think about in level design is context and frame-of-reference. Yes, Sonic can run really fast across any arbitrary surface, and Mario can jump over random blocks and stuff. But it doesn't mean a thing to a player if there's no context. This is where I think Mario Sunshine succeeded so well. The game was a true platformer to the very end, but now rather than random blocks and oddly-shaped ground, you're actually making use of Mario's abilities in a real place. He stands out among all the people for his skills. All the other people are stuck selling fruit and can't put out fire to save their lives. It makes you feel like a super-hero. Likewise, that's one place that Shadow the Hedgehog succeeded. In that game, you actually have monsters and people fighting each other, and you see their strengths and weaknesses. By comparison, Shadow seems that much more amazing. Given, it's still a silly game. But it has a lot of great gameplay aspects to it. This is also partly where Sonic 4 was iffy, though it wasn't level design. It was the same concept though. People thought Sonic felt slower in 4 because of his odd animation speed, when in reality he's actually moving faster than in the ones compared. It's all about making a character seem like it's more in a real world that makes the gameplay stand out. Even if you can't think of many creative puzzles or whatnot, create some nice scenery in the least.

Hm... I'm curious, what do you think about Level-based stats, and Point-buy stats? That is to say, Level systems follow distinct structure, often surrounding the character's class or race, whereas Point-buy systems measure power directly, as to make the system more flexible and balanced. I personally prefer point-buy, but it seems so hard to develop something like that.

I'm rather fond of the homing attack to a point. I do agree that it can be broken at times, and this dive kick could be a great new take. However, I think it could be taken a step farther in being a replacement. Have not only a dive kick, but also several other context-sensitive moves, like Smash Bros has. Might be a bit difficult to pull off in 3D, but 2D would work for sure. Then other directions' 'kicks' of sorts could be used as hang-time boosters and nudgers, sort of like when you shake a pinball machine to affect the ball. It'd have a similar effect to Sonic's old 'shield attack' thing from 3.

Throw in Majora's Mask and I'm in. Otherwise, I'm waiting for the price drop or 3DS++.

EDIT: Got the armature. Gonna start making a version of it for Blender, so I can start rigging some characters. Maybe I can get this whole character customization system up and running...

There's a free Locomotion System project on the Unity site. On one of the scenes there's a Planetoid Gravity demo with a character motor for that sort of thing. While that system is pretty bad itself, you can still make some pretty sweet stuff around its framework. Either that, or team up with me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GH2fR4UFo0