Hello Newgrounds

Today I wanted to introduce you to something that I have been working on for some time. I've been making a Sonic the Hedgehog engine on Construct 2 for a while. It eventually spiraled into it's own thing and development was in pause because of life getting in the way and me not having a big brain.

I decided to revisit the project two days ago and for some reason, I don't know how or why but everything clicked and I was finally able to fix everything wrong that prevented me from moving forward. Let me introduce you to the Sonic Alien prototype (beta name).

What is Sonic Alien?

Sonic Alien is my take on the speed action platform genre, the main goal of this project is to give the player an extra layer of freedom when navigating stages. Besides the previous mentioned, the game will focus more on dodging obstacles, movement options and navigation optimization. Of course those are the plans but the possibility of making this a more traditional Sonic game are still present.

Previous version comparison

Here I'm gonna compare the previous and current version playing the same segment.

(Left is old right is new)

Here we can see how the version on the left is struggling just to walk from point A to point B and there is a reason for that! and that's because the old prototype was built around a different kind of stage. Let me introduce you to what I call "Slope world"

(Left is old right is new) - (Also Sonic Advance 2 placeholders)

So this is slope world, and for the longest time I wanted to make a game around stages like this, but the code was to unstable, allot of things wouldn't work consistently and for somebody as unexperienced as myself this was gonna be a huge challenge design wise.

With the changes made in this new version, now it's possible to make normal Sonic stages without having the game trying to break every five seconds and we can also have giant slope sections. The only thing that was lost was the ability to jump vertically off of steep hills because that just broke the game.

What were the issues and what was fixed?

The previous version was some sort of Frankenstein monster that simulated everything artificially using some everytick tile detection, variable adding and subtracting mechanism, it was a mess! Because of that, the engine failed to do some basic Sonic stuff with consistency:

-On key release walk down slopes normally (old engine would build up speed unnaturally)

-Building momentum if key releases mid run on a steep slope

-Consistent deceleration on different kinds of slopes

-Regain momentum if a moving player without pressing a key re enters a steep slope

-Consistent acceleration and deceleration properties for different angled slopes

And those are the ones I could think off the top of my head but be sure there were a ton of other problems!

The new engine can now do all of the above and is ready for level making! YAS!

Old in the left and new in the right - Random gameplay GIFS

So what's next?

A web version is planed, hopefully I can have something ready some time soon. A Patreon is planned for supporting development, a mobile version and if we are able to reach the goals I will be able to work on a Steam version!

The best case scenario would be having a successful Kickstarter, but maybe it's to early to be thinking about that.

Anyway I'm really looking forward to making something we can all enjoy and hopefully it will turn out just fine.

If you are interested in following development I post gameplay videos on my Twitter, so give me a follow if you are interested.

Thank you once again Tom Fulp for all of the support and all of the constructive criticism the Newgrounds community has given me.

See ya soon!