Violet CLM
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Posts posted by Violet CLM
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It's the original engine. You can't change the screen size of a DOS game any more than you can change the screen size of a Genesis game, unless you rewrite the entire game from scratch based on observation and guesswork.
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New batch of screenshots posted!
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New batch of screenshots posted!
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New batch of screenshots posted!
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Sonic With A Gun alters Epic Megagames' 1994 DOS game Jazz Jackrabbit (in graphics, enemies, and level design), primarily in the style of SEGA's 1991 Genesis/Megadrive game Sonic the Hedgehog. Certain details are also lifted from various other games, such as Sonic 2 (G/MD), Sonic 1 (SMS/GG), Sonic 4 Episode 1, Sonic CD, Sonic Advance 3, Sonic Mars, and so on. SWAG encompasses six main planets/zones, each with graphics, level layouts, enemies, and other obstacles unlike anything before seen in Jazz 1 modding, in an elaborate celebration of the Jazz engine and the Sonic series.
All elements of this mod are to be seen as a remake: next to none of the original graphics or level design from Sonic 1 are present, and instead 99% of the graphics are edited from Jazz art and the level design is a hybrid between the styles of the two games. Enemies and other level objects are included as accurately as possible within the constraints of the Jazz 1 engine, with occasional new additions or modifications in the spirit of either the original or the mod.
Two prominent differences between the gameplays of Sonic and Jazz are that the former can run up walls, ceilings, etc., and the latter has a gun and disposes of enemies with it rather than by jumping on them. These differences remain in SWAG, which features the standard ammunition types from Jazz 1. Perhaps the best way to think about this mod is as Jazz visiting the equivalents of the Sonic zones but in the Jazz Jackrabbit universe.
Unless you're running a sufficiently old version of Windows, you will need the DOXBox emulator, which can be downloaded for numerous different operating systems. Playing under the open-source "OpenJazz" remake of Jazz 1 is not recommended; OpenJazz is far from perfect at emulating the native Jazz 1 levels, and SWAG takes the engine nearly as far as it will go in various directions, including various parts of the game that were never used in the native levels and are therefore not implemented in OpenJazz.
SWAG has been in development--very, very intermittently--since mid 2008. I'm excited to share it with the world at last, as part of SAGE 2014 and in honor of Jazz Jackrabbit's 20th anniversary.
Initial bunch of screenshots; click over to the ModDB page for commentary:
Coming this SAGE, or I'll know the reason why...
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To be completely fair, there really isnt any other platformer other than Sonic that uses a movement setup like this.
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I had a weird thing happen. Playing as Carol, I had the yellow crystal-attracting shield in reserve. I then got enough orby things to get the regular green/pink/leaf/whatever shield. When I did, my reserved yellow shield turned into what I'm guessing was a bubble shield.
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It's 06:07:36. I beat it a second time under 6:15 and got the You Unlocked Carol! screen again and still no available Carol in the char select. Tried again, beat it under 6:00 and that time it worked. Looks like you're checking against two different times at two different places.
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I got the "Unlocked Carol!" screen, but the character select only lists her as a lock icon with some question marks for her name. What am I doing wrong?
No thoughts?
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It took me forever to find the first hidden card -- the rest were more or less intuitive secret areas over a few playthroughs, whereas that first one was purely a matter of Lilac-boosting into the air whenever I wasn't sure what might be above me, until I finally found the right spot -- but I did it. Now to shave a minute or so off my time and try to get Carol. EDIT: I got the "Unlocked Carol!" screen, but the character select only lists her as a lock icon with some question marks for her name. What am I doing wrong?
Loving the game so far. No complaints about difficulty -- the first time through I wasn't sure it was even possible to die, I got hurt so infrequently. My main concern is the shield, which seems, well, pretty useless. It takes a long time to save up for it, the orb colors used don't seem to change it, and all it seems to do is add the equivalent of a single petal to your health. What am I missing here?
(The solitaire game is also incredibly simple, but, well, minigames. Better than Keen's "Paddle War.")
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Eh, you have to consider other levels as well: if you were to include a darker level, she'd likely blend into that if the colours matched, where as she'd stand out if left with that pallette. Kinda like a tightrope if you ask me, no hard work and you're gonna fall.
I'd recommend making her fur darker as well, though, if you're gonna go with that.
So make her palette dependent on the level. She can be darker when she needs to be darker, and lighter when she needs to be lighter, and nobody's going to notice and think it's a mistake or anything.
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Darkleo has released several complete games that people don't take much note of, probably because they're complete.
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Also, I'm surprised no one has complained about the Sparkling Seaside screenshot yet. The foreground is much too vibrant for the background, they don't quite fit. Blyde (or I if he'd rather) will eventually tone it down and make the palettes match better.
My concern with the Sparkling Seaside shot is not the palette, but rather that it looks zoomed out when compared to Polar Peak. In PP, the walls have depth, the floor (that is to say, the snow) is large, and Sonic actually ends up looking kind of small. In SS, Sonic looks closer to a natural size, but the walls and floor look pretty flat in comparison. Making the grass thicker and the edge pillars wider (and perhaps even shading the parts of the wall texture immediately adjacent to those edge pillars) would go a long way to making the two tilesets look like they're from the same game.
(It also has issues with repetition; the trees in the background tile pretty obviously, and there aren't any decorations in the wall texture at all, but the flatness is more glaring.)
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Polar Peak Zone
[qimg]http://etcf.thisisourcorner.net/images/screens/ppz_1.png[/qimg]
That loop on the left could use some retouching with the bottom-right-most block, the one that's cut off diagonally. The ice blocks in most of the tileset have a lot of depth, but the diagonal edge there is way too small and makes it look like nothing more than a victim of the eraser tool.
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[qimg]http://i.imgur.com/16G2d.png[/qimg]
Those scaffolding tiles are much too dark compared to the rest of the level. They don't plausibly go in front of the background. Also I can't for the life of me visualize what the red pipe is supposed to be doing there... based on what it's in front or behind of, it seems to be following the z-axis curve of the corkscrew path, but based on actually looking at its tiles, it's all totally flat and at the same level as the wall it connects to.
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...what does any given Sonic physics engine have to do with your parallax layers? If you want your backgrounds to scroll on both axes, just write the code for that, be it in GM8 or MMF2 or whatever else.
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Well, the resolution I used was intentional(PC game resolution like Jazz Jackrabbit 2 resolution I guess) and to change it now would require me to update a fair bit of designs especially the level design as many paths would get hidden by the view.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the 640x480 resolution. It's great for showing paths, as you say. But you have to be prepared to make some changes if you want to make a Sonic game in 640x480, since the two don't hang out much.
Gameplay needs to take into account that you can see a lot of stuff, and Sonic needs to encounter larger obstacles, larger areas, and so forth. Rather than every moment being full of discovery as the tiny screen stretches into a new place, there have to be more moments of decision as the player looks at what they can see in front of them, judges the best course of action, and takes that. Stuff like the pulley systems in Labyrinth Zone, the spinning platforms in Scrap Brain Zone, or the gears in Metropolis Zone could be used for much more intricate purposes in a higher resolution. However, that has to be a conscious decision. Spinning around endless loops and quarter pipes -- which suddenly look a lot smaller in the higher resolution, of course -- can't be all that the player does.
More immediately, you have to be prepared to make the screen look interesting. In this, 640x480 arguably takes more work than 320x240. Here are some screenshots that I think make decent use of such a large screen, in that they provide a lot of interesting (and, ideally, varied) things to look at without leaving great swaths of blank space.
http://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6616/screenshots/2/
http://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6862/screenshots/1/
http://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6792/screenshots/3/
Compare those to, say, this one of yours. The background's not bad -- or at least it wouldn't be if it weren't so pixelated -- but it could certainly use a bit more complexity. The wall, however, is really boring to look at. The complex floor piping looks great in 320x240, but in 640x480 it only occupies a small portion of the screen and you have to bring the rest of the level up to that standard. If you want to work in 640x480, you need to make your levels a lot prettier, and a lot more complicated in graphics and level design both.
(It also helps tremendously to have a bigger sprite. Advance Sonic is designed for a tiny screen, and it shows.)
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I agree with what others have said that it doesn't really make sense for Sky Sanctuary to be overgrown in the past. The vines and such are a sign that it's ruined and abandoned -- if they're there in both the past and the present, then there's really not much distinction at all.
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Well, that was... playable. Enjoyable, even, in the latter half, but the first three or four zones should be two zones at most. There's very little to distinguish them from one another, the acts are long and extremely empty, and it's just not a good setup to encourage people to want to continue playing. The first couple acts of the blue-green zone in particular often don't even require the "hold right" part of "hold right to win." Enemy recolors and such are fine, but you shouldn't have three or four separate zones all including motobugs, and you use the curved floor-to-wall corner (not the half-pipe, the other one) way too much. It appears very rarely in Sonic games, but it shows up in this game every few minutes. The Tails acts often feel as if you didn't remember that Tails can fly, featuring large open areas that can be flown over or long vertical chimneys with springs and other such objects at the bottoms. Most of the level palettes are attractive, but the Tails water zone looks extremely chaotic. Again, everything gets much better in the latter half when the levels start to develop their own personalities and there's more level design than curve, flat, curve, flat, curve, flat -- although having two separate zones with the same blue and gray color scheme doesn't help -- but the first half of the game is in need of some serious polish. About half the cutscenes could easily be dropped, as well, and constantly reusing the same Sonic poses (half of which have severe anti-aliasing problems) doesn't look very good. Probably the best cutscenes were Tails and the black ball boss monster glaring at each other and Sonic reaching out a hand to save Tails; most of the others would work better as ingame cutscenes or just not included at all. All that said, I noticed very few actual bugs; the special stages are quite engaging; and most of the bosses were pretty fun, in particular the black ball guy with the twin lasers.
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I was going to make an isometric engine once, and while I never got around to it, making everything an active object is definitely the wrong way to go. Your layout is (rotated 45 degrees) a grid, and as far as I can tell, you don't have any floating platforms, so each position in this grid stretches up a certain height and no further, much like in Mode7. This is a perfect candidate for a 2D array. Just store the height value of each rotated tile in the array, and then handle the actual graphics through backdrops or (preferred) an overlay or whatever you like.
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All right, so let's be clear here.
Your tilesets are, as follows:
Carrotus Fix Diamondus 1 by zapS and Olsen.
Blizzard by Dodges.
Sonic Adventure Mega Tileset by Gus.
Egypt by Agama.
Moreover, you are using PurpleJazz's Sonic JJ2 sprite replacement pack. You really ought to credit some (perhaps all?) of these people, because judging by your level design, they've done a lot more of the work for your level pack than you have. Either way, that last video is among the least qualified as "unique," since you're just showing weapons directly from the normal game without any sprite modifications at all.
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Y'know, I'd love to see some Jazz Jackrabbit levels remixed in Sonic's style, especially Tubelectric. If I actually had the time and patience to get accustomed to Sonic Worlds, that's probably the first thing I'd try to do. xD
There's this stuff, though it's not particularly pretty.
Sonic With A Gun
in Game Project Showcase
Posted
New batch of screenshots posted!