If your wondering why I haven't made any updates or what's happening development-wise, to put it simply, my progress slowed down. I imagine it was probably burnout; I started to do other things fangame-related while my passion for this one wasn't as strong. It probably didn't help that Sonic Moon is at that point in development where most of the fun stuff is done and it's mostly the off-putting, boring stuff (namely testing, bug fixing, polishing, making sure everything works correctly and is presentable). There's still a lot of important stuff to do though.
Since the last demo released, I have done some work on the project. I do hope to release a Demo 4.5 at some point and if that happens (hopefully), there'll be some tweaks and additions:
Sailor Neptune will be available (now that means all 7 Sailor Senshi are in the game now).
All 3 acts of Soundwave Star Zone is playable via the secret code.
Sprite and Background tweaks to help maintain Master System-authenticity. These mostly include optimising the tilesets, allowing for more instances of common 8x8 tiles as well as making the tilemaps more 32x32-metatile-friendly. Trust me, it probably makes more sense once you look at tile rips of the SMS Sonic games.
Largely redone ring layouts to help with SMS authenticity (apparently the 8-bit Sonic games use 32x32 metatiles for ring patterns, probably to save on the memory required if each ring was a separate object).
The Sailor Senshi no longer have hurt sprites (at least the originals, at the moment). I decided that, aside from saving on hypothetical VRAM and sprite flicker, it felt a bit better. It looks less dramatic, especially since the transition between the largely vertical main sprites and horizontal hurt sprites felt a bit awkward to me.
Parasol Golf now has some more stages and a level-clear screen. Also I had to redo the status bar. After looking into it, it appears that the SMS couldn't vertically scroll the screen after a scanline (unlike the NES. This also means smooth-vertical-scrolling status bars, like in SMB3, can't be done on the SMS without tricks I'm not too aware of).
Hidden below the option for Parasol Golf is an unfinished Air Hockey minigame I hope to finish.
Some additional credits. I'd like to credit Giraugh from StackOverflow for the color-replacement tutorial whom I hadn't added to any credit-lists yet. I'll also be adding WreckingPrograms too since their Mega Engine was a big help back when I was making Mega Man fan-games and has helped a lot with certain coding techniques (namely pausing, keyboard input). Nothing is actually taken from the Mega Engine but I often think the influence might be overt in areas. I could just be a bit paranoid but sill. There some more related to recent development too, such as University-mates Kate-Lyn and Jem who helped test the game.
Also, these were helpful in understanding the Sega Master System and I'd like to shout them out:
Oh yeah, I should probably mention this. I did indeed get Creative Araya to port Demo 4.0 to Android but I decided to wait until I had made some changes I wanted to make before porting and releasing. Of course, I ended up making more changes and more changes so it never got released. In hindsight, I think it would have been better for me to have released it. I am an idiot.
Overall, I'm sorry for not doing any updates. Unfortunately, I kept putting it off until I felt I could show off something satisfactory but that just got longer and longer. I think I probably didn't need to, I could've just made small updates here and there. Hopefully though, I might get an inspiration boost soon.
I almost forgot, Sonic Superstars came out recently and that also features Chaos Emeralds being used for additional powers. Funny, I guess SEGA happened to be on the same track as me when it came to using them for more than just Super forms. Pretty cool! I'd love to see what they do with it for future instalments.
Anyways, I hope you've all had a good 2023 and I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
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