Jon Burton, of Traveller’s Tales, apparently recently found his old consoles in his attic, because he opened a Youtube channel to give us loads of info about the games he made on the Mega Drive and Saturn.
He decided to have a go with Sonic 3D, for reasons unknown, and started releasing a bunch of videos explaining all the changes he’s making:
Things being changed or tweaked:
movement: speed, inertia, collisions
better camera
less frustrating flickies
Super Sonic
Level editor
crabs! (level editor and regular levels)
password save game
on/off toggle for directors cut
lots of bugs and small gameplay tweaks
The plan is to release a patch file to allow people who own the game to play the Directors cut.
MAN!!! I can’t wait for this to release! The videos are such a fascinating window into genny/md development. I cant belive they didn’t have a score counter becuase there wasn’t enough video memory!
Here he also explains how the animated logo and game over screens were made possible. At first I thought it was just a pretty straightforward case of 1-bit frames, but since the Genesis will treat them as 16 colors regardless of how many are used, the solution is actually quite a bit more complex and clever than that using palette shifting tricks.
