Announcing Sonic GX - a new episode of Sonic the Hedgehog for Amstrad GX-4000

[TotO]

What a beautiful and interesting project! Congratulations to everyone involved, for the little that is shown at the moment, there is a superb job in every aspect.

Exactly. Great to have the team at the event!

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

This looks amazing! Good work guys, even getting to this stage :-)

[kawickboy]

Great project.
I know it's ripped from the gamegear it reminds me the neogeo pocket port.
Targhan did an amazing work too.

[andycadley]

Looks fantastic. I've always said the Plus hardware could be pushed much further when unshackled from trying to produce something that will also run on original models. This, along with GnG, is really starting to show how true that is.


Looking forward to actually playing it.

[JayBlood]

Awesome! Tested in real. Impressive work.

[BSC]

Wow, this looks really impressive. Incredibly fast (I wonder how you manage to draw such huge parts of the screen when scrolling really fast) and colorful and oh the music and everything. This is the surprise of the year to me. Way to go!


PS: and this was coming from a Nintendo fanboy

[SyX]

AMAZING PROJECT!!! 

This is the KILLER APP for the GX4000!!! 

CONDENSE, YOU MADE IT AGAIN!!!   

In this moment I can not think in other thing except all the times that I have read in the EAB Amiga forum about how it is impossible to convert this game to that machine (my second computer after the CPC and a machine that I loved too) because a lot of shitty reasons. And I am sure that if somebody would open a thread there for announcing this game, those lazy trolls will complain about this wonderful game by using the most stupid reasons that you can imagine... instead of moving their lazy asses and working in making a game at least half of great like this in a much more powerful platform 

[Carnivius]

except all the times that I have read in the EAB Amiga forum about how it is impossible to convert this game to that machine (my second computer after the CPC and a machine that I loved too) because a lot of shitty reasons.

why would it be impossible?  I have Kid Chaos for Amiga and it does a lot of Sonic-style stuff.  More than the Master System/Game Gear ports of Sonic manage anyways.

[BSC]

why would it be impossible?  I have Kid Chaos for Amiga and it does a lot of Sonic-style stuff.  More than the Master System/Game Gear ports of Sonic manage anyways.

Mind you, the Amiga is not as powerful as the GX-4000. Or a plain CPC 6128.

[TotO]

Kid Chaos, Body Blows, Great Giana Systers... All those "canada dry" games...   

Sure the Amiga can, but nobody does (except Hudson for BC Kid?).
All those "clone games" looks homebrews and not first parly.
Sonic GX is really promissing, because the demo looks pro.

[SyX]

why would it be impossible?  I have Kid Chaos for Amiga and it does a lot of Sonic-style stuff.  More than the Master System/Game Gear ports of Sonic manage anyways.

Read that forum filled with trolls and you will see... but oh my God! I should not open my mouth anymore, everytime that I speak we get another off-topic 

[VincentGR]

Mind you, the Amiga is not as powerful as the GX-4000. Or a plain CPC 6128.

Dunno about that but it is more powerful than the SNES for sure


 

[villain]

Mind you, the Amiga is not as powerful as the GX-4000. Or a plain CPC 6128.

This means OAS/Hypnom(ega) was right all the years?  Time to come back to CPC right now. 

[dthrone]

Dunno about that but it is more powerful than the SNES for sure


 

Well 'at least as good as' according to Cliff Lawson 

[BSC]

I was obviously kidding about the Amiga. It should be crystal clear that the Plus/GX4000 tech is not in the same league as any Amiga.
But yes, HypnOAS must have been right all the time when a GX4000 can achieve things which the Amiga never did.

I am really looking forward to the final game and hope that NoRecess will also provide some kind of insight into the tricks he used.

[norecess464]

Ahah, thank you all for the amazing reception of this project. This motivates us to bring our very best to complete this through next year !
@BSC: honestly, no super-advanced tricks as you could find in demos, just regular usage of hardware!

[roudoudou]

Not a trick, but a clue -> the amount of generated code (like every other modern scroll engine on other machines) for graphics

[norecess464]

@roudoudou Oh yes, of course. Z80 programming involves precalculated code and all the stuff, no news here  That would be sad to not use that when you can have half a Mb on a cartridge :-)

[GUNHED]

Actually, this seems to be the first game which does use the full(?) potential of the Plus architecture. Great work! Hope you guys can finish it. Thumbs up! 

[GUNHED]

Anybody who wants to sell a GX? 

Sure, I got a new one here, never used, with Burnin rubber cart. Since this great game is coming out: I'm asking for 300 Euros now (yes, they get expansive now) 

[DanyPPC]

This one will be another masterpiece of GX/CPC Plus series 

[MacDeath]

Seems the only way for France scèneurs to compete with those naughty Spani"hards is to use the PLUS... hahaha can't wait for Rhino to go the PLUS way as well...

[jockavelli]

WOW i can honestly say i would never have thought i'd see this, i am amazed.

[norecess464]

Hello all ! (this message was also cross-posted on my website http://norecess.cpcscene.net/)


I realize I did not give major updates regarding progress on development of Sonic GX since the Alchimie Treize (held in November 2019 in France). So today after months of silence (and some published articles), I would like to share with you an official update regarding the project.

What was done since PREVIEW 1 ?

   
• 4-6 months following the Alchimie party, I spent most of my time rewriting some parts of the game, with better technical approaches. The tile engine got a major refactor, providing better performance and a reduced memory footprint.
• This summer, I had lots of fun adding the support of sprite multiplexing into the game engine. The game engine can now manage up to 40 rings on screen !
• The game engine now supports multiple ground positions for the same horizontal position in the world ; in other words, the Level 2 is featuring tunnels.
• Gameplay improvements: new sprite animations bringing more life to the game (a small "smoke" animation is now displayed when Sonic jumps onto an enemy, and a set of tiny "stars" is displayed when Sonic takes a ring) ; the sky (made of horizontal lines) in background is now always slightly animated vertically ; enemies can now fire projectiles (that Sonic must avoid); when Sonic jumps too high and gets hidden from the game's viewport, a small arrow is now displayed to determine what will be the position of the landing ; added support of water (Sonic walks slower in it)...
• Levels 1 & 2 are now finalized. They both feature new visuals. Level 3 is a WIP. CeD did a great job by providing new visuals for the tiles, new enemies too!
• Audio improvements: @Targhan did an amazing job by translating new musics and sounds.
• Various bug-fixings / other internal optimizations / improvements..

Remaining work to provide / the future

   
• With the help of @TotO , we now have a better idea of the game content. We focus on providing a coherent game experience, featuring a progressive difficulty for the gameplay and finally -- a game fun to play.
• There are still some low-level stuff that bothers me in the game engine..
• More enemies, new levels.. it's actually bigger and more ambitious from what we initially envisioned during the Alchimie Treize. Right now the original direction did not change, the game still features a completely new level design, taking a large inspiration from the SMS/GameGear versions -- so it's not a remake, but clearly a new "episode".
• We are planning a Bonus zone!
• I estimate that we reached approx. 50%-60% of what should be the final game. So it means we still have a long way to go before releasing this game..
• Consequence of the above point ; as you could expect, the game won't be released this year. 2021 will be a very intense year for me on the professional side, I plan to be more exhausted than usual. So, the new target for release is 2022 (in other words: "it will be ready when it's ready"). I know this will be a disappointing news for some ; but really, there is no rush here.

The first preview of the game shown on . Based on that success, I initially planned to release this today's update as a video. But we finally decided to keep this private to avoid revealing too much the game. So instead, I'm releasing here some exclusive screenshots of the game. Please keep in mind this is WIP -- the final version of the game may be slightly different.

I want to thank a lot my friends (they know who they are) that are helping me to keep the motivation on this project !! And I also would like to send a special mention to @Novabug (youtube: Novabug) and @Xyphoe (youtube: Xyphoe), they made a great job on Youtube to advertise the game and bring general interest to the Amstrad GX-4000.

[GUNHED]

You guys did an incredible job. Hope you can finish it up till 2022. Thar would be awesome! 




... Then send it to Amstrad, to show them how game shall look like.