JEV3

Dream Express - Touhou 5: Mystic Square

3d assets are different from 2d assets, but I'm not sure they are the main reason why 3d games are hard to get working right. It probably has more to do with the engine, because I've seen flourishing modding communities do some outstanding things with existing engines. It is however new from 2d, especially if we're talking about a community which probably got its start from trying to make the 2d games that they weren't being given. Now however, it seems Sonic fangames are an outlet for concepts that can be bold and can deviate from any reputation Sonic may be trying to recover. We have Chao games, Shadow the Hedgehog games, et cetera. I think making 3d Sonic games is just a branch off of that so long as the designer is more concerned with creating his vision than appealing to the masses. (a trap that Sonic Team needs to deal with, but which we don't have to) I won't say its easy, but if you have a good engine and have the know-how, I wouldn't try to discourage you from making a 3d fangame. Although I only really speak for myself, but I think a significant amount of the quality that we can get out of the fangames here are from innovation rather than polish, visuals, or nostalgia. (Tikal and Chaos wasn't the smoothest game in the year it was released, but it still tied with it for best in show) If one were to ask whether 3d fangames are better than 2d fangames or vice versa, I'd daresay he's missing the point. That said, we do have a fairly disheartening lineup of 3d fangames for Sonic... but I won't say that can't be changed.

Thought I'd quit lurking long enough to post this video. Bad Apple [stylized Shadow Art] The animation is more fluid than almost anything else I've seen, and the artistic handling of the sillhouettes is very ingenius. You do not need to be a Touhou fan to enjoy this, though if you do happen to be a Touhou fan, its probably going to be hard to tear yourself away from it. After you've seen that, check out the Subbed Version. Lyrics are also synchronized with each character, besides the fact that the context is at an impressive scale.

With all due respect, I believe that if you are asking someone to make the commitment of spriting what appears to be a rather vague and difficult boss, then they have a right to know a little bit more about it. If you want to keep things under wraps and this is just for PR, then see if a friend you trust is interested and have them take care of it for you. Personally, I think you may have wanted to wait until you were a bit further along to ask for a spriter. As for constructive criticism, I think it needs a little bit more detail. You might have a hard time getting away with such a simplistic design even in a sidescrolling final boss given Sonic's reputation for rather complex doomsday weapons (even the creatures are rather detailed). Again, I have no idea what could be the context of the beast, so I cannot really offer much advice as to how to portray it. One concept that is sure to work regardless of what it is, make the face it's head and give it some other parts of the body... it can still take up a lot of space, but it simply cannot be the only aspect of the monster. It would be more simplistic than your badniks and the player would wonder how it can be a more interesting threat. Perhaps you could make it into something like a giant squid with hands instead of the two long tentacles, and fire where the rest of the squid's body would be... or perhaps some kind of core with other objects surrounding it . If you're really going for the face thing and believe anything further would ruin the effect, how about making the (burning?) face into the background, and just have Super Sonic fight his hands. (Was Andross handled this way?) You could probably have several different ways to build on this attack, maybe have him blow fire, send other things out (tentacles?) to attack the player, et cetera. When Sonic kills each hand, it proceeds into One-Winged Angel phase and will have a design more suitable a final boss. So, basically if you want it to work, it needs to appear less uninspired. Show why this final boss is going to be really interesting to fight against. Pay attention to detail, even if you don't think there will be any. Hope this helps. Good luck with your game!

Here's another attempt. Dunes for background and something different for the texture. CLICK

Sorry for not checking back, I had to deal with computer issues. Its all good now, so I can try when I've got a good grip of everything going on IRL.

So here are some experiments. What I did was made the sand more 3-dimensional, and then took the sand in the foreground and expanded it to cover over the blocks using appropriate shading. Then I used the burn tool in Gimp to darken the tiles closest to it to keep it looking like its bulging out. It's not perfect, but maybe it will point you in the right direction.

All of the 2d Sonic games had a special kind of tile that went right beneath the surface, like from the checkerboard wall to a darker version with the grass over it. The problem here is that it looks like you're trying to do the same thing, but instead of the sand appearing to go over the blocks, it appears to be behind it. First divide the surface from the tiles under it, it doesn't matter if you are going to end up getting rid of this line, but it should help you judge where you need to work. Then see if you can shade the sand so it appears to come out of the bricks instead of being a flat surface behind it. Then I'd suggest having the brown tiles closest to the sand have a dusty yellow texture that slowly gives way to your normal texture. For the sake of simplicity, I wouldn't take up more than 1-2 tiles for this, but its your call. See if that works... I would tinker with it myself to experiment with the shading, but there appear to be some rather nasty jpg artifacts there. One unrelated note, the lighting on the sides of those bricks are pretty much the same color as your sand... you may want to change the hue to something more orange to prevent any confusion. Its subtle but should help avoid any visual confusion by keeping yellow-tan to the sand and brown-orange to the bricks. Good luck!

The graphics are quite impressive, however, the colors in the background need to be much less saturated and preferably use yellow (the core of the stage graphics in the foreground) much less. You probably should also tone down the normal stage graphics, so that they feel less sharp and more like part of the level. Furthermore, the yellow you have is way too bright to be used so prominently, either darken them or go for a less glaring color. The concept is there, the textures look VERY promising, but the colors and their placement needs quite a bit of work. Keep it up and you'll have a very nice looking level come out of this. Remember, its all about contrast. It should be easy to tell the character from the stage, and the stage from the decorations... without any one of them feeling out of place. Barring the occasional decoration, Sonic should be the brightest one on the screen. Backdrops for underground areas need to be very dark, and skies/backgrounds should never detract from the foreground... Looking forward to seeing more!

My chief issue with the PS3 is still the games library. While it does have plenty of standout exclusives, I don't much care for the style of most of them. It's a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact, that the PS3 doesn't have enough games to justify my purchase of it. I can't buy the console only for Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4, but the other exclusives (like God of War) don't interest me, and Ratchet and Clank is cool but hardly a selling point. Backwards compatibility would make it much easier to take, as the PS2 has a huge library and my PS2 broken while my PS2 games are still gathering dust. The PSX had some excellent titles too, though I assume THOSE can probably be emulated in a virtual console sort of thing. If I could get PS2 games to play on my system, I'd probably get the chance to check out Sly Cooper, Jak'n'Daxter, and if PSX is an option, I'd get the old Spyro and the old Crash games. Besides which, I'm not going to want to play MGS4 without playing the three before it... it would have been nice if I could have played them all on the same machine, instead I'd probably have to look to see if MGS1-3 had ports for the PC. Yes, I do like cinematic games, which is what PS3 has going for it... but I also like to have plenty of unique games in my library. Until PS3 has a more robust lineup of games NOT catering to the blood-n-guts hardcore audience, I'll be fine with my PC-Wii setup. For those that do like the kind of games PS3 has to offer, this is good news... I'm just afraid it doesn't help me much. (yet) EDIT: Of course this has nothing at all to do with my paranoid and likely unfair complete that Sony's just removing backwards compatibility to keep the PS2 on the shelf longer so they can continue to boast selling three consoles at once while only really supporting one. (though if I could afford the PS3 and liked the library, I could forgo the sour grapes attitude.. sooo )

Much better, I'd like to see how that works on top of the foreground. Are you going to make more shapes if that fits into the level?

I didn't bother dredging through all six pages, partly because its an awful lot of reading for a topic I don't care much about, and partly because I don't want to get into any drama that may have come about because of the "lol sega" nature of the topic. So forgive me if this seems out of line with the discussion. The statement in the topic's title seems to be fairly obvious. When a franchise has gone downhill the way Sonic has, it will take a while to bring it back. They need to know where they are going with each installment and gauging how well it works takes time. With fangames, we have the advantage of getting input and feedback every step of the way, but with commercial games they have to try to take what works and make it into a new game with each subsequent release... some will be hit-or-miss, some will be decent, others will be failed experiments. As much as some people hated Sonic Unleashed, I'm sure most everyone can agree that it has the most polish of any Sonic game yet (Genesis games don't count because polish doesn't quite mean the same thing it did then)... the flaws were gameplay quirks such as NPC or QTE complaints, loose steering or different gameplay styles being slapped alongside each other... but they weren't bugs resulted from a rushed product. If they continue to work on the polish, then they have a chance of bringing the series back near the top, though I don't believe it is possible for some of the more disillusioned fans to ever be brought back (nothing against those that are, I've just heard complaints so many times that I can't even stand hearing my own!) I do believe its possible for them to be quality games regardless of who likes it.

It needs to feel integrated into the level, not stick out. Perhaps you should put a few bands around it that shade in such a way that make it look clamped to the end of the level. It also doesn't exactly match with the colors or design of the level. Maybe you can make something that is about the same size as this but feels more consistent with your other pipes in color and shape. The plant thing would probably look best on the surface of gaps in the level design. Or maybe you could make the bottom half more square so it appears to be embedded into it. Like the other one before, it needs to look like its part of the level's geography, not slapped on in photoshop. (even though it technically was, due to the nature of mockups! ) Also, you may want to only use one row of blocks or shrink the ones you have. It looks strange when the floor surface is so large... levels like Emerald Hill don't even use half as much space for the floor. It appears you're going for orange and blue for core colors, and red and green for ornaments.. with mechanical parts pushing the blue and the natural parts pushing the orange. Maybe you can put some seaweed onto the edges of some of your blocks. Red would fit the color of coral, but outside of what I posted earlier, I've not got a lot of ideas to work it into the level. You could try "staining" some of the level blocks, but I'm afraid to try it because it sounds like a cheap photoshop effect. Another idea is just to draw a coral net (I know coral doesn't really look like that, but we're going for abstract applications here) to use in the foreground, which may look good overlaying some of he blocks, and maybe even in some areas where the player would go behind it. ...and because I need to visualize an idea when I think I've got a good one, I've attached a file to show an example of what I'm talking about.

I like where you are going with it, but I think the colors for the pattern may need to be refined a bit to keep the blocks from blending together. Perhaps you should make the wavy lines contrast a little less and make them a little thicker in alternating blocks. Also, the blocks seem to stand out a little too much against the actual wall texture, perhaps you could use some red coral to soften the transition. I tried my hand at tweaking some of the colors. It's not perfectly fit into your palette anymore, but it has an example of some things you can do with the textures. LINK I'm not sure what you are shooting for, but these are just some of the ideas I had. EDIT: whoops, it appears to be a tad big for posts... I'll post a link instead.

I'm sorry I wasn't able to spend more time enjoying the fangames, but I did enjoy this year's SAGE, and considering my limited time I'm quite glad that we didn't have all the big name fangames because I otherwise would have never taken the time to try out some of the smaller but more promising games. Scheduling the workshop could have been cleaner, but that was partially my fault and we got it worked out in the end and I had a pretty good turnout though the ratio of active participants to idlers fluctuated significantly throughout the night. I'll probably do this again next year, as I managed to get quite a bit out of it this year. I'd also like to recognize a few fangames and their creators which stood out to me this year. First of all, Overbound's Time Twisted fangame had some interesting gimmicks but was very rough around the edges last year. Like Slingerland said in his review, he had to deal with some very discouraging feedback last year, but he came back with a product that was hard to find fault with. Then there's Sonic Babies. Whether you like it or not, I admire the fact that cannengui released this even in a community which has a tendency not to take a game with such a premise seriously. It's definitely has quite a ways to go, but I believe that with a little work, it will get its chance to shine. Kudos to everybody else who was willing to give it a chance despite their first reaction, this is what SAGE is all about! Lastly, I've been behind the scenes with SRB2 for about a year now, so I know how crazy it has been. It's hard to imagine it has been around a decade before I came on board, and even after release I've witnessed developers pushing to fight through the many bugs that surfaced with the public beta... while it hasn't exactly been smooth, I would like to recognize Spazzo and Jazz Jackrabbit from the team who've been under the most pressure to fix these bugs. I don't even know if they visit these forums, but they deserve the thanks of SRB2's many players for their ongoing hard work. There are still some fangames I've yet to try, and I'll probably stick around until I've played them and can provide feedback. Later in the year, I'll also be looking forward to some of the games that did not make an appearance. So I'll still be frequenting these forums occasionally. Thanks alot Instant and KTZ, along with everyone else that made this happen, it's been a great SAGE!