Sonic the Hedgehog Save The Moon

Link: https://shc.zone/entries/contest2024/1105

Right off the bat, this is one of the best entries this contest has to offer. It’s an overall great and extremely promising package, but at the same time it’s also not without significant flaws. Let’s break it down.

Art

This is most definitely the strongest aspect of this hack. It’s varied (if a bit skewed to the side of “everything being green”) and overall well done. Highlights include the backgrounds for Pinetree Hills and Moon Reactor as well as the upper background of Ancient Maze.

The title screen Sonic sprite is rendered absolutely brilliantly, though the proportions are a little off.

The parallax scrolling is very well planned. A highlight for sure is the Metalopolis background at the top, where it looks like the big pillars go on top of the far away buildings; but they don’t, it’s just extremely clever art design. Ancient Maze in particular also stands out with how it utilizes vertical background scrolling.

The texturing is really well done, especially rock, grass and wood.

I like how Sonic has these starting frames to the idle animation, makes a lot of animation flow better as a result.

It is not without bad parts, however. Because this hack has a lot of effort put into the art department, I am going to go in depth with art critique with examples and comparisons, so buckle in.

Note

Please read the following knowing the fact that I hold the art of this entry in high regard and what I’m about to say is to help Guyke improve their work because I get the impression that they genuinely care about it.

Exhibit 1. Line dither

In some places this hack overuses line dithering where much better choices could be made.

Now. I know about the CRT warning the game puts at the start of the game. And I’m going to say it’s a complete cop out. It’s possible to design dithering patterns that look better both on LCD and CRT screens.

I can highlight two parts where it was an issue. First is the skies that probably shouldn’t be dithered like this.

This is straight up a bad idea. Not only does it look bad on a LCD screen, it still registers as distinct stripes on CRTs, and that’s not what you expect from a gradient.

My camera didn’t do a great job at picking up the stripiness on a CRT, but I can assure you it’s very much visible in person and would be even more visible on a standard sized screen.

So what to do instead, then?

Don’t use “standard” dithering patterns, and try to imitate some kind of texture. This helps you avoid straight lines and makes things blend more organically. While not perfect, here are some ideas to make it look better.

For example, I’m quite fond of how the bottom section of the Sandopolis gradient works out, though the top begins to devolve into stripes:

Next Level is almost perfect in that regard:

Alternatively, you could alternate color 1, color 2 and the dithered brush and then polish it to get a bit of texture. Do not feel restricted by one or two dithering methods.

Exhibit 2. Sonic’s sprites

They overall feature a significant amount of banding and look quite blurry as a result.

For a little refresher on what I’m talking about: https://x.com/CZAzuaga/status/1377009103613083650

Now, the Sonic sprite is nowhere near as bad as here, but a significant amount is still taken up by banding still.

It’s up to you if you want to go through the sprites again to fix them or not. But the banding is indeed present.

The actual levels

The first thing that heavily, heavily spoils the gameplay experience is the camera. Whenever you land on the ground, it pans up. I don’t get why you’d do it except for aesthetics, but it makes it almost impossible to see what’s below you. I can’t count the amount of times where I jumped down and onto a set of spikes I couldn’t see when I pressed the jump button. Please remove this. If you want fancy camera angles, then you should probably script your camera to only do them when they’re advantageous or not actively harmful to the gameplay (see Game Gear Sonic 1 for an example of that).

See here: what awaits you if you jump down? You can’t see because the camera is panned up!

…And it does, in fact, contain spikes…

Pinetree Hills has level design that is generally unoffensive, which is a big improvement compared to the last version of the game, though it might be a little too inoffensive by way of generally being kind of flat all the way through.

Ancient Maze Act 1 has some very clever ideas with the hole in the ground and switch puzzles, but the act itself is slow, kind of boring, way too long and almost entirely submerged in water. There’s also a particularly egregious section where you can fall down a tiny platform and end up having to replay several minutes of an underwater maze. Act 2 still has the cool switch puzzle stuff, and plays a tiny bit better but only by the virtue of not having the water; the design problems are kind of the same.

I’ve found Pinball City Act 1 to be quite fun. Act 2 is still pretty good, and I enjoy the bumper-platform interactions, but it has a glaring flaw that is worse than the sum of its parts:

• Checkpoint starvation throughout the whole act, the only one checkpoint present is… right before the end of the level.
• A tiny bottomless pit at the end right before the checkpoint you can not see coming that the game feeds you into, making you die instantly and repeat the entire level.

Metalopolis has some clever gimmicks, but it really suffers from the camera issue and also some parts where the path forward isn’t really clear. And I can’t really judge Moon Reactor — it’s too WIP.

There’s only one new boss, and it’s kind of alright. A bit of a waiting game, but not to the point of it becoming a glaring problem.

I don’t have much to say about the music. The ports are pretty good, and the tracks fit the areas they represent. The title/invincibility theme is quite memorable, too.