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The cool side of Sonic Fandom (Aka No Weird Ass fanart allowed)

Deleted member 671

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
1,268
I'll say it again: No weird ass fanart allowed.


Yes, there's a lot of shit associated with the brand, we all know this. That's not what this thread is about. This thread is about highlighting some talented creators who are a part of the Sonic fanbase.



To start off with, check out Sonic Before the Sequel



Era's own Falk contributed to the music which is brilliant in this and all the sequels. The same people made Sonic After the Sequel, Sonic Before the Sequel Aftermath, and Sonic Chrono Adventure (for those who prefer Metroidvania's). They also came out with a commercial release named Spark The Electric Jester:

store.steampowered.com

Spark the Electric Jester on Steam

Spark the electric jester is an action/platformer video game heavily based on best classics from the 16-bit era from both sides of the aisle.
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com

And have come out with a sequel

store.steampowered.com

Spark the Electric Jester 2 on Steam

Fast paced 3D action platformer.
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com

Which looks to be their take on the 3D Sonic Adventure formula

Check out some of the music as well:






Another fan game, named Time Twisted






The excellent Freedom Planet started as a Sonic fangame and borrows elements:



(I know how much y'all love Super Best Friends)

store.steampowered.com

Freedom Planet on Steam

Fight your way across the celestial world of Avalice where cats are green, motorcycles drive up walls and monster girls do most of the buttkicking! Freedom Planet is a cartoony, combat-based platform adventure that pits a spunky dragonoid and her friends against an alien attack force.
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com

And has a demo for a sequel as well:





The Sonic Hacking Contest which happens each year showcases hacks from numerous creators:


(Shout out to SomeCallMeJohnny for being a chill youtuber in general. Check him out)



Please have fun sharing and for the love of god, keep everything safe for work.
 
Zubz

Zubz

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,565
no
I love joking about the horrible parts about Sonic to my friends that revulse the second I mention the comics, but that's because that cheap laugh is a much easier sell than a full on fangame. The Sonic fangame community is arguably the best one for any series, though. I still need to try Time Twisted, & can't wait for Freedom Planet 2!
 
spam musubi

spam musubi

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,381
that you need this disclaimer says enough about the fandom

on topic: Sonic Utopia, a fan game that shows that a 3D sonic game does not have to be dogshit and can actually work:

 
Kcannon

Kcannon

Member
Oct 30, 2017
5,663
nynt9 said:
that you need this disclaimer says enough about the fandom

on topic: Sonic Utopia, a fan game that shows that a 3D sonic game does not have to be dogshit and can actually work:

Click to expand...
Click to shrink...


Man, Classic Sonic really doesn't work in 3D. The model's running animation looks weird.
 
Rackham

Rackham

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
8,532
Sonic Utopia's design looks pretty cool and it could be as a Mario 64 type game with open levels and collectibles. I'd like to see a well designed level though because that looked too much like a prototype with just random pathways to demonstrate the idea.
 
Megatron

Megatron

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,445
lrgscalesonicXL.jpg
 
PeakPointMatrix

PeakPointMatrix

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,104
The fan community has gone through great lengths to fix up and polish Sonic 06. It's a really fascinating project to me since I think with the right amount of love, the game could have been something special. We'll see how far these projects manage to go in terms of covering the wealth of issues 06 suffered from.

 
sibarraz

sibarraz

Prophet of Regret - One Winged Slayer
Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
18,108
I actually like how positive is the community, like for the most part the sonic fandom are very nice people. The weirdos are SUPER weirdnbut overall I prefer to keep the image of some friends who are very into Sonic and are some of the nicest people that I have met within my game circles

That being said is still funny to mock the sonic fandom thanks to how over the top are some of them (Deviantart guys, etc)
 
Lant_War

Lant_War

Classic Anus Game
The Fallen
Jul 14, 2018
23,580
nynt9 said:
that you need this disclaimer says enough about the fandom

on topic: Sonic Utopia, a fan game that shows that a 3D sonic game does not have to be dogshit and can actually work:

Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Of course it can work. There's been plenty well received 3D Sonic games.

The problem is that every time they have something that works, they find a way to fuck it up.
 
Setsune

Setsune

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,649
Just saw this on Twitter a bit ago, and it seems like a great fit for Shadow. It's almost a little John Wick in some ways:



There's a Dark Chao that appears with Shadow in some of the Sonic Channel artwork, so I think they're kind of getting there...
 

Deleted member 34949

Account closed at user request
Banned
Nov 30, 2017
19,101
sibarraz said:
I actually like how positive is the community, like for the most part the sonic fandom are very nice people. The weirdos are SUPER weirdnbut overall I prefer to keep the image of some friends who are very into Sonic and are some of the nicest people that I have met within my game circles

That being said is still funny to mock the sonic fandom thanks to how over the top are some of them (Deviantart guys, etc)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
For all the exposure that the extreme side of the fanbase gets, pretty much all of the personal friends I have that are into the series are generally nice, well adjusted (and often super fucking smart/talented) people.

A good friend of mine who happens to be a big fan and teaches high school trig/physics recently built a whole lesson around the physics of the 2D Sonic games (Specfically how they were programmed; slopes, sine waves and shit, math was never my strong suit). Really neat stuff.
 
Village

Village

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,809
Setsune said:
Just saw this on Twitter a bit ago, and it seems like a great fit for Shadow. It's almost a little John Wick in some ways:



There's a Dark Chao that appears with Shadow in some of the Sonic Channel artwork, so I think they're kind of getting there...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I would prefer it would be chao, not because kittens are to weak or something. I don't like there being anthro's and then normal versions of animals. It would be like vector having a pet hedgehog. Weird.

I do like shadow having like a pet though, chao do appear in the art work. Buts its never appered in any official capacity with him. At most it showed up in a special edition funko.

There's a bunch of weird character quirks that never show up really in the games. Amy has a tarot Card thing

Lant_War said:
Of course it can work. There's been plenty well received 3D Sonic games.

The problem is that every time they have something that works, they find a way to fuck it up.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That and being rushed and junk, it just doesn't seem like there is an envoriment to make good sonic games at sonic team
 
Rlan

Rlan

Member
Oct 27, 2017
825
Wellington, New Zealand
I run Sonic The Hedgeblog and I genuinely try to find all the cool, fun stuff from the series, and not jump into meme territory. Wholesome content :P


Sonic The Hedgeblog (@Sonic_Hedgeblog) | Twitter

The latest Tweets from Sonic The Hedgeblog (@Sonic_Hedgeblog). Discover the secrets, GIFs, photos & more of Sonic. https://t.co/GD5SNaHUWQ Maintained by @Rlan2. Support us on Patreon! https://t.co/31QETkyfbg. Green Hill Zone
twitter.com twitter.com

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Laxoon

Laxoon

One Winged Slayer
Member
Jan 24, 2018
1,834
I still fire up Utopia every now and then. I've learned that I just really, really, really like momentum based platforming in 3D a whole lot which is a curse because I can count the games that attempt it successfully on one hand and almost none of them are Sonic games.

Hero Project looks cool for sure but the dev openly admits he has no idea what he's going to do outside of making a cool sandbox Sonic physics demo like 99% of other fans are doing. Lange and Murasaki have actually said they're trying to get an actual game out and from the interviews I heard I like everything they have to say about the philosophy of 3D Sonic, it's precise and they have a vision for it.
 
BlazeHedgehog

BlazeHedgehog

Member
Oct 27, 2017
702
I feel a bit weird making this post because I tend to lurk a lot, but if Rlan's promoting his stuff I might as well

As it relates to this thread, my primary contribution was the Sonic Amateur Games Expo (SAGE), which is essentially E3 for Sonic fan games. I founded it on September 9th, 2000 and its original goal was to kind of demystify fan games in the mainstream. Obviously it's still a problem now, but especially back then, NOBODY would ever talk about fan games outside of the specific fangaming communities. They were seen as illegal bootlegs and tantamount to piracy. I wanted to change that, to show that they were no different from fan art or fan fiction, so I created SAGE.

I don't really think SAGE had a hand in changing perception of that stuff, but it's served as an anchor for the fan gaming community ever since, and still goes to this day. I haven't been involved with actually organizing SAGE in many years, but I still keep tabs on it.

Over the years, I've been interviewed by a couple of publications about my involvement in SAGE and the fan gaming community. First, by Cultured Vultures:


And most recently, by one of the biggest and oldest French newspapers, Le Monde:


In both cases I gave them tremendously long winded responses where they only really used a few sentences, but they let me post the uncut interview responses I gave on my personal blog.

Uncut Interview for Cultured Vultures: https://blazehedgehog.tumblr.com/post/167385966496/the-weird-and-wonderful-history-of-sonic-fangames
Uncut Interview for Le Monde: https://blazehedgehog.tumblr.com/post/177766562813/faute-de-bons-jeux-sonic-les-fans-développent

(I think the Le Monde interview ended up the more in depth of the two)

I was also a texture artist on Sonic Robo-Blast 2 once many years ago and I've been around various other parts of the community for a long time annoying various people. I've also written literally hundreds of fan game reviews for TSSZNews.com, as we tend to cover SAGE every year, but I won't flood the thread with links to those (you can check my author page on TSSZ, or the reviews section)
 
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JetSetSoul

JetSetSoul

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,185
I love the dedication to the fan games & always enjoy following these projects. Unironic fan since the first game!
 
Ashlette

Ashlette

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,254
Oh wow, where to start on this..

In 2002, I discovered Sonic Fan Games HQ (abbreviated SFGHQ), the most popular site for developing Sonic fan games at the time (I don't know if that applies today), through ChaoMega.

That site introduced me to Sonic Robo Blast 2 and Sonic: Project Mettrix (made by the Sonic Mania developers)




Project Mettrix was the GOAT back then. It was the first fan game to run on a 2D physics engine that could simulate the genesis games. And stealth (its programmer) wrote it in C++, a much more difficult alternative to using the code-less Multimedia Fusion (MMF), a popular game dev IDE at the time. Retro Sonic came second. They were the only games with physics movement at the time. Every other game couldn't come close due to MMF's limitations and the dev scene's lack of centralization.

Multimedia Fusion was the bottleneck. It had a pre-built platform engine that was easy to setup but failed to simulate Sonic physics at all. It had two major failures:
  • Stop-Dead: Landing stopped the player. Every time. So much for smooth movement.
  • Pseudo-Wall Jump: Hitting walls stopped the player. If the player jumped to a wall and held the movement key, they would stay in midair. If they spammed the jump button enough, they might even jump from the stuck position.
The engine was the antithesis of Sonic platforming. No one wanted to use it. (I even tried to optimize it but I failed terribly)

Developers tried to work around these limitations. The first ones to do so faked the physics. Namely, to simulate loop traversal, they hid the player near the entry curve, activated an on-rails mock that traveled along a circle-shaped path then reactivated that player at the end of the walk, which was placed at the exit curve. Later games avoided the buggy mess altogether and ran on a custom built platform engine called a static engine. They didn't have Sonic's 2D physics movement so they played like fast moving Marios.

To compound this, development was not centralized. Each dev had to make their own custom movement engine if they wanted to create a sonic fan game that didn't play like crap. If a one wasn't experienced enough to do this, too bad. This issue opened a rift between experienced devs who spent hundreds of hours on their proprietary static engines and newbies who had no idea how to start.

This all changed when Damizean, a SFGHQ forum member, released his own physics-based toolkit for MMF to the public. Like Mettrix and Retro Sonic, it simulated the genesis games. And it did so out of the box, with minimal setup (just drag and drop Sonic and some ground, boom). Thanks to him, newbie developers finally had a chance to create and publish games with little to no engine experience.

So yeah.. I wish I could praise the fan gaming community more, but it's late for me and i'm out of stamina. x.x
 
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Don Fluffles

Don Fluffles

Member
Oct 28, 2017
7,061
I totally loved the Sonic X The Sequel games and am sad that I can no longer play them on Windows 10.
 
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