Ironrind

That could be interesting. I remember in Super Mario Bros, there were bonus stages that were accessible by breaking a box, and then climbing the vine up into the clouds. Maybe raining rings could be used in a bonus stage of some sort. If used in a rainy level, it would make some sort of sense, I suppose. Maybe you could throw in a rainbow to go with the gold rings and other 'treasures'.

Those are a looking sweet, Strife. The lighting in the first few shots(first post), even with so few colors, look really alive. It seems that every color was choosen with care. =D ---- This gimmick was added before I added Tails as a companion in CB. Now, I'm rethinking how to use this. Basically, The player rolls down a series of hills at top speed and then over the edge of a cliff. The player is launched into a free fall and Tails comes to the rescue in his plane. Likely, I'll use it in a different zone to prep for a boss battle. I'm going to have to retouch all of the tiles due to the gaps and then re-lay each one...so gaps for now.

Man, that really looks great! Nice work.

In the genesis game "kid chameleon", some stages start of with light rain/snow and progress into heavy storms. Once the storm is at max, spikes of hail fall to the ground and hurt the player. It makes being outside or above ground a real hassle. I think something similar could be done. I posted an artificial time based weather system here working towards that idea, although wrapping needs work. While in the rain, a persistent Zeus like bot could throw lightning bolts(or something rain related). He could follow you around until you reach shelter. Think of the cloud riding enemy from Supermario Bros. While inside, rain could drip inside sometimes creating pools of water for interesting effects. Puddles would splash while being ran through like the snow piles from Icecap Zone. Knuckles underground route in Angle Island Act 1 comes to mind. If given a choice, the rain path could be faster paced to satisfy the want for speed, while underground would be more treacherous, murky, and possibly slower paced.

Alright, I will give that a try.

I've been playing with a weather system. So far I've gotten rain, snow, wind, lightning, clouds, day, night and a few other things. The system could possibly use more natural disasters, wildfires, ect. More in video: http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=-SbUkOvykXo

Awesome. Thanks for the help. rep+ Edit: Seems that I can't rep you at the moment. I need to spread it around a bit, but will do.

I prefer to use ambient sounds along side when using weather. What ever it may be, wind, thunder, drips.. I think sounds is important.

How about a flower like the one from S3: Angel Island? It could collect water and then blossom out, spilling or spraying drips. Or it could be placed in clever spots near cliffs as it pours the water of the side. Sonic would be hit running below. If needing to move, it could walk by its roots using them as legs, I suppose..

I'm working on a weather system as we speak. I haven't gotten to rain, but I'm thinking of doing it like this: Using a weather control object, I create various alarms. Depending on how hard the rainfall is, the alarm will trigger a rain drop nearby and above the player. To give the effect of actual rain, I would use at least three different rain drop sprites. The closer to the foreground, the larger the sprite and the faster it falls. The biggest being half the size of Sonic or so. The further rain sprites could be possibly be done in clusters. While all overlapped, it could create the illusion. Just an idea; If exaggerated, the water could be super-sized(Think "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids") making one rare drop quake when hitting the ground, stun the player, ect. The alarm times, could be tweaked to go from light rain to down pour based on time or progression through the level. For e.g: Little or no rain at first, but based on the Player's x coordinate, the rain will increase. That way, a drizzle stage could provide a stormy boss fight or a flood. As for drips hitting the ground, you could fake it by animating flowers to 'cry' out drips. Water to look unstable and spray a bit. Have Sonic throw water behind his feet while running.

I'm eager to see how that slope engine plays out, FGR. I think the presence of slopes would be a great addition to your 3d games and the size of that slope looks to be exciting...haha

While working on Sonic CB's engine, I found a better solution for Pure Chaotix's BG. I said that I'd pause on this, but the BG really needed fixing. The background was causing a lot of problems. I wasn't able to piece together a 'wallpaper' background that would span the sky in terms of content in the further distances. The usual parallax didn't work too well with the layers. I think a skybox would work better than how I had it before. In this vid, the d3d_fog would want to erase my skybox. I think there is a way to either set the tiles and skybox on different fog systems or to let the skybox bypass fogging entirely. So as for now, the layers blend quite a bit due to lack of fog. That'll be fixed as well. Maybe I'll build a lower section to the stage underwater. Nothing major. Just a few item boxes or something to rid the death pits. I was thinking to add gimmicks which may occasionally require two or three to operate. Like a see-saw, a weighing scale, or three button system. I made some concepts on the previous pages, but I'll get them into the game.

Very cool. The presentation of this game looks beyond great with the menus, transitions, cuts scenes and the gameplay itself. The key config made this game very hard to play for me, although. I never could get used to the up being jump, especially when having to do a wall hop. I think it wouldn't be so tricky with a gamepad perhaps. The combat also seemed a bit slow when recovering from a jab. This made me stick to just using dash attacks for the majority of the time.

Thanks for the replies. The next zone should be more exiting. I've been saving some stuff for later, so hopefully I'll have some more to post for this weekend.

Thanks much =) Gameplay for Knuckles: The camera has been pulled in a little bit closer since posting the test demo. I also use an alternate path which lets you blow through most of the 'puzzle' sections.

Odd Nosdam - Kill Tone

Made it up when I was about 8. Me and a friend used to sketch out our own comic books in class and I used "Ironrind" as the name of my fictitious comic book company. Hadn't used the name for anything for some 15 years, but couldn't think of anything else.

The gaps began to show while using"interpolation between pixels" which softened most of the hard edges on the sprites, especially while close to the cam, but now it also fades the tile edges into the alpha spacing on the tilesheet. If I adjust the tilesheet, I might be able to fix it. Hmm..I don't think I can scale the tiles in GM, but I can readjust the tile spacing settings to shave the tile edges a bit more.

Adding Knuckles to Sonic CB. He'll be able to be played along side Sonic, Tails, or just solo.

For some reason, I thought it'd be sort of tricky. Thanks for the help and this works pretty good too for acceleration: hsp+=acc*abs(joystick_xpos(1))

Yeah, that's pretty sweet. Now I want experiment with acceleration based on the degree that you move the joystick. May have to change things up a bit.

Thanks guys! I got it working just fine. Joystick/Gamepads are so much more comfortable. Rep++

Beautiful looking zone. Great looking screenshots. Everything seems to blend seemless and perfectly.

I've been having trouble with programming a joystick for some time. What I want to do is create a code that will recognize if the the joystick button has been pressed since the last frame or not. Reason is, the insta-shield is executing as soon as the the player jumps. If the player is still holding jump after jumping, I want the jump button to have to be presses again to execute the instashield. Also, I have the same problem for joystick 'key released' rather than 'not being pressed'. I'm using Damizean and McDizzy's Sonic 360 Engine Any ideas/techniques?

The few seconds of gameplay looked a bit interesting, although not that exciting. IMO what made the genesis series so great was that it was platforming at it's absolute best and I think it still is today. Everything was so polished, visual, music and most of all gameplay. I don't care if it's 2d, 3d, or HD. If they can just recreate that charm and creativity that the genesis games had, I might give this a try.