Socket the Hedgeduck (hack progress)

Spoiler: Lock-on tech

(Not a tutorial but a PoC S2 Lockon disasm from a few years ago. Unfortunately, it's meant for Sonic 2.)

I could look into adding Socket as a playable character feature (and IIRC, the Socket tiles are stored in the GF64's Socket disasm uncompressed, so extracting them should be cake). Modifying the Socket palette so that objects relying upon pal #0 don't look tuity-fruity might be a little bit hard though. Pressing the "A" button on the Title Screen could toggle characters.

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I worked on Future Zone a few weeks ago. Only FZ3 is not done, and I need to eventually port over the S3K reserve gravity gimmick (which is being a big pain) to get FZ2 functional and then begin working on FZ3's layout.

 

Also, how come most of your ports actually prevent every other sound from playing? That's a very serious error and needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

 

I should double check if I properly applied the extended music guide (for music slots $E5-$FF)...

 

That looks great. I really like all the custom and edited objects which I feel more hacks should add. One thing that bugs that crap out of my is that the second palette line is so underutilized in hacks and it leads to Sonic's skin colors and dark reds very commonly being used as shades of yellow. It doesn't help that in Sonic 1, the second palette line features a bright green, dark skin tone, and red that are barely ever used because they lack different shades. The red is used for the HUD which isn't necessary since there is already a yellow and red in the same place on the first and second palette lines respectively and green is used as a brighter shade of yellow for some reason. You should just take Sonic 2 or 3's second palette line, rearrange the colors, and make a lot of the objects use that.

 

Dem gimmicks. I just love this, feels so fresh.

But please, for the love of God, can we get custom enemies? This would make the hack just perfect.

 

Seconded. I mean, we already have a few Socket enemies already implemented, so why not implement the rest as well?

 

I noticed that the art looks a bit odd and, when comparing the art to the oiginal, I noticed that the art in this lacks a stripe pattern. Could you fix that?

 

You should improve the non-Socket music ports. Most of them sounds very bad, they doesn't resemble their original songs and they doesn't fit to the levels you had put them to be played.

 

You know, considering how people have been saying how your non Socket ports were terrible, you'd think to try and improve you music skills. But nope, besides the one Socket port shown (which honestly the Socket music isn't that good anyways) your music is still pretty terrible. It would have just been better to just have only the Socket ports and not have act 2/3 music.

Anyways, besides that, this is just yet another broken Socket level. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with these level ports. I don't know if it's the collision or the art but something about this feels wrong to me.

This hack is just... Ugh.

 

I love how Future doesn't have any of those level warps or anything, maybe this means GenesisDoes has learned how to expand level sizes. The working fence level blew me away, and likes how it has a noise for when flipping planes, and how the gravity flip platform has a "CLIPCLIPCLIP" noise when being used. Some new graphics for springs, switches, signposts, HUD, and other things may help for a better feel. As for the palette line... Let's just keep it mostly the same for Sonic himself, but make change the green to a brighter shade of yellow, and have the repeated colours and second palette line for sprites be dynamic, depending on the act, so we can have more accurately coloured enemies and objects.

This Zone, like Antiquity, seems to be the most complete accurate of them all, and I know this hack is gonna be amazing when it gets done.

 

Maybe after the main meat of the hack (the levels and bosses) are finished for custom enemies and other objects. I can try and add the stripes back (darn RetroGraphicsToolkit ate that yellow stripe during dithering of the level chunks I ripped).

 

Treasure Castle Zone boss. Quite fun but challenging to program in the block array, will need some polishing on collision.

 

The boss looks nice, but Sonic rarely has any safe spots to avoid getting hit. It looks a bit crowded.

 

And please, for the love of god, please get a better recording device. I was barely to make anything out of this video. I would suggest Bandicam, since it's a good high quality alternative that is free.

 

Why do I get the feeling if you are standing where the capsule is going to spawn after the boss Sonic will get crushed? (You might want to test that out)

 

Collision is disabled on the capsule for now. I plan on making it rise from the ground (or perhaps putting Socket's spaceship or something) before the final/next release.
I'll bump up the quality on Camstudio for next recordings (was too lazy/tired to do it on that one, which was made at like midnight a few weeks ago).

 

My only complaint to the boss itself is that it plays very rigid on the screen; I haven't played enough Socket to compare, but from what I seen, summing/substracting X/Y speeds may give a much better impression to the player, as the animation itself generally plays smoother and richier on screen

And my only complaint to the videos is the save-state abusing. It's not too bad, but when you're exposing your work, it's a little hard to "understand" it at first glance with the sudden reloads

Spoiler

Players and SSRG members have big expectatives and are whimsical perfectionists. Anything, albeit little, still is very noticeable, and may make some difference in the general reception, consciently and not. Little good details may also make some difference. Everything has to be done as best as possible. The player doesn't think on the nature of the visible bug, issue or imperfection, it will only call them for what they are.
If issues are too constant, and in extreme cases, the player feel disappointed of who was in charge.
Would you forgive a visible camera in an expensive movie? Or a bad effect with broken layer synch and no color correction? This is a similar case