posted April 04, 2006 04:52 PM            

Creating an editor this robust with so many features takes A LOT of time - and this unfortunately played against management's traditional and corporate understanding of re-inventing the wheel every game - but seeing results faster. Ironically, we ended up with an amazing tool just in time for management to can the game!

To give you an idea of the power of the editor, I spent a week designing and creating this level, from scratch, to get what you see here using this editor (Ross Harris did the Sonic sprite and Ring sprites). By "scratch," I mean textures, level layout, design, enemies, titles and score pop-ups, etc... everything except Sonic and the Ring graphic. Granted, the level needed a lot of work to be done (should have been longer and many issues addressed), but still - it's impressive to have tools that would allow such fast creation.

This was one of four worlds I created near the very end of the project to help Ofer and I gain support to do the PC version of Sonic Xtreme.

Jade Gully Video - 8 Mb Zipped .AVI

Here are all of the worlds you can view/discuss:

* Jade Gully
* Crystal Frost
* Red Sands
* Death Egg

posted April 04, 2006 05:05 PM            

Instead of seeing happy faces and people going 'wow', all that happened was that there were lots and lots of pissed people - and in the words of Sonic, "that's NO good!"

posted April 05, 2006 02:10 AM            

2. From what I have learnt from Mike, there was little of this kind of thing running on the Saturn, as the Fisheye couldn't be implemented without a large framerate drop.

Otherwise, it is indeed an awesome video

posted April 05, 2006 02:27 AM              

quote:

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Originally posted by hxc:
there was little of this kind of thing running on the Saturn, as the Fisheye couldn't be implemented without a large framerate drop.

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That's unfortunate So the plan was to ditch the fish-eye for the Saturn version then?

posted April 05, 2006 03:11 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Gareth.de:
Hey, thanks for the reply.

That's unfortunate So the plan was to ditch the fish-eye for the Saturn version then?

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posted April 05, 2006 07:19 AM              

what more needs to be said...umm...nope, wow covers it

the spiraling bridge [and it's other spiralling friend, a land mass?] were very impressive.

Not to sure about the spike land fish things...but they're cute in thier own way

MeX

PS - crap I've posted all praise again...

PSS - yes 'm posting again, things got way technical [game building etc.] recently, me sucks at technical.

posted April 05, 2006 10:43 AM            

Color-correcting this old footage most-likely caused any darkness or change to Sonic that you see. This never ran on the Saturn.

I don't know why I didn't use the rendered enemy sprites - perhaps I didn't have access to them (I know at that time I was working completely off-site and may very well have not wanted to set foot in the office to even get them because of the politics - see below), or they looked too pixelated, or what - but instead of following my own designs, I made new ones! Maybe I did them as a break from working on the levels - something fun and small to be creative with and finish quickly... I just can't remember. Regardless, I agree that the fish guy is charming, but doesn't fit the Sonic universe!

Historical Note: Getting this ported to the Saturn could have happened, but due to various compelling reasons, including a break in the team where Ofer and I worked separate from the rest of STI (Yasuhara-san did some amazing paper designs for the other group, but the editor they were using was an old version of Ofer's - but since management had removed Ofer as a lead, they proceeded with the then technical director's plan of porting the output of the editor they did have to the Saturn... mixing that with the fact that nobody could reproduce Ofer's fish-eye lense for the Saturn... and Nakayama-san's rage at seeing what they'd accomplished vs. Chris Coffin's boss engine canned the Saturn efforts... meanwhile Ofer and I had been working on two video sequences nobody had seen - not the 4 worlds I've mentioned - but we were unable to present to Nakayama-san to gain support for us... so these 4 worlds were designed to help promote the PC version... our last hope.)

posted April 07, 2006 06:58 PM            

Quakester2000 - Thanks. There's no doubt in my mind that with more time, we could have made a game with lots of cool stuff in it... but "more time" is one of three usual things needed (the others are "better organization" or "more and/or more appropriate team members")

Grans - Good question. And I have no answer... lol I have no recollection of removing the rotation gameplay... so either it "slipped my mind" or it was just difficult enough for me to make *any* level, let alone one with the added complexity of designing for rotation. In retrospect, I'm sitting here dumbfounded, actually.