SAGE 2014 Act 2 - SPECIAL STAGE DESIGN WINNER ANNOUNCED

[ila]

Post your entries for "Special Stage Design" here. Remember all entries must be submitted by THURSDAY AUGUST 7 AT 12 NOON CENTRAL TIME.

Good luck to everyone!

[JomasterII]

I'll be sure to try!

[MrLevRocks]

Here's my entree!

 

Just to keep size of the thread small...

 

Unlike the special stages of ANY other official Sonic game, this one is trying to make sense (in a way). It is similar to Sonic 2's and 3&K's Special stages, but is on a flat road-like area rather than a pipe or a sphere and has an story/level relation stroner thans Sonic 3's "color-coding". The sketch should explain all by itself, but to make things a little more clear, I'll try to explain one special stage by using Sonic 1's stages. If a special stage is triggered between Green Hill and Marble, then the first part will be in a Green Hill-esque enviroment with loops, rivers and hills in the background, green and brown checker floor, and height-change, bridges and tunnels appearing. Enemys and obstacles would include: Motobugs, totems and Buzzer's bullets to avoid, falling of the bridges and so on. The "boss" would throw spiky balls at the player. After that a Outrun/Super Hang-On-esque change of level-art would ocurr. The trird part would now be purple with sometimes grass on the floor, would have lava and ruins in the background. Tunnels would now appear more often and jumps with lava replace the bridges. Now the player would have to avoid catercillers, Buzzer's bullets and the crushers, not to forget fireballs, coming out of the lava. The "boss" would now try to throw fireballs instead of spikeballs at the player. 

The ring-idea could be scrapped with the only goal of parts 1 and 3 being "Get to the (choppa!!)  next part alive to face Robotnik!" and rings getting a similar function to those in the stages.

Any questions left? Then PM me and I'll edit this post.

 

tl;dr: My idea is more awesome then yours, explained with an example

[JomasterII]

Ok, this idea is terrible, but...

It's a kaiju.

You have to fight a giant monster which has an emerald embedded in it. You can block, which uses some of your shield, do a special move, which drains your regenerating special meter, punch, kick, and you only need to win one round to get the emerald.

As the stages progress, you need to fight bigger and bigger monsters, and you can even choose different abilities before you fight. In one fight, you can use a dummy ring bomb, or in another you can do an epic spindash into the monster.

 

The design of the stages will change when you go to different stages, like in one stage there's a checkerboard pattern ala Sonic 1, or a ruined city like Angel Island's.

 

tl;dr: It's not good. It's never good. It's just kaiju.

[r543]

Ok, here is my special stage idea:

I'm using sonic 1 as a example here, you can enter the special stages the same way as in sonic 1, but this happens:

Sonic gets warped to the "chaos zone", a zone that is created by the chaos emeralds. Each Zone from Sonic 1 would have a chaos zone version of it, this is the one for green hill, which would be the easiest.

As you can see a lot of strange things are going on here, parts of the stage are floating in the air and rotating and the background looks like a sphere. The Chaos Emeralds aren't called Chaos Emeralds for no reason, they have the power to create this.

Sometimes you need to wait for the objects to rotate right, like this slope for example, so that you can continue the stage....

But there are also objects that move from the background to the foreground, you can only stay on them when they are in the middle, this platform is still in the background so you would need to wait a little bit for it to come more to the foreground.

The stages have a time limit so you shouldn't wait too long or else you get warped back without the chaos emerald. If you fall of the stage you get warped(with that unused sonic 1 animation) back to the normal levels.

Later levels have traps and enemies, green hill would have spikes, marble lava, spring yard had the spinning spike balls and scrap brain had a lot of traps. You don't get warped back if you hit a trap but you can't control sonic for 2 seconds after you get hit, so you need to be careful to not get hit.

If you made it to the end you can find the chaos emerald here, jump up to it collect it.

 

Please ask if you have any questions and tell me what you think about this idea.

 

Credits:

Zenor for ripping the special stage graphics and sonic's sprites

Sonic Retro for the unused Sonic Sprites

Divine Insect for ripping the original Green Hill tileset, most tiles here are custom made but use parts from green hill.

Edited August 6, 2014 by r543

[ZigZaX]

Well here is my submission:

Well basically, the player would push around an emerald encased inside of a force field/crystal balloon, and the goal of the player is to make it so big that it pops and the emerald inside is freed.

The "baloon" grows by collecting rings, you have to throw it, push it, walk on it, kick it to get any rings that might be out of reach, sort of like a mixture of billy hatcher and the giant egg ,and Katamari.

 Once you have collected enough rings(varying on special stage)  the shield pops, and the emerald is free for you to collect. Fail to free the emerald before time runs out, and youre kicked out of the special stage.

If the Balloon is big enough, certain parts of the special stage can be broken open/outright destroyed/crushed/made part of the shield.

This could actually work in either 3D or 2D.

 

[Proto Dan]

@ZigZaX Spoiler-ception. Neat idea, by the way.

[thevaleev]

Here's my variant:

Edited August 7, 2014 by thevaleev

[ChaosLord]

Look, guys, I don't wanna trash on all your ideas but the moment you chose not to include barrels, you were screwed.

 

Master piece. Genius. I don't really know what you do in it. Collect rings, I guess. The point is: It has barrels so it's automatically an incredible idea.

 

I'll have my Freedom Planet copy now, thanks.

Edited August 7, 2014 by ChaosLord

[AstroPiranha]

Lmao ChaosLord, I love it.

Anyway, here's my design:

https://db.tt/Dn7u9LsN

And here are some notes to go along with it.

[ila]

I appreciate everyone's entries, but today I'm going to announce that I'm extending the deadline until tomorrow, Friday August 8 at NOON Central time. I'll be going ot TMNT tonight and thus won't be able to kick of judging anyway.

[ila]

As I stated in the "SAGE THAT TUNE" thread, I am incredibly pleased and overjoyed with the response to these "open format." Kiddo and I discussed this live during the SAGECast today, and this is most certainly an impressive effort. That said, there can only be one winner.

 

The winner is r543's Chaos Zone. Kiddo and I agreed that it's unlike anything seen in a Sonic game before, and truly lives up to the name of Chaos. That being said, it is with hope and enthusiasm that I see all of these entries in a playable form some day.

 

Once again, thank you for entering these contests, and I promise there will be many more on the way.