6/2/2018 General overview and goals

For the last 6 months or so, I've been working on this side project that for now I'm calling "Radical Adventure" and I'd just like to give a general overview on what I hope to accomplish with this project. Once my main project Desiderium is done I plan to make this my main project.

I really like the idea of spiritual successors. They let us play games that might as well be considered the sequels to some of our favorite games from our childhood that have little to no chance of being made today. We've seen spiritual successors to games like Banjo-Kazooie with Yooka-Laylee, Castlevania with Bloodstained, and Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis era) with Freedom Planet. But what I haven't seen yet is someone attempt to make a spiritual successor to the Dreamcast era Sonic games. Bringing a platformer like Sonic into 3D seemed to be a tough task and it shows in Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 with how difficult the camera can be in some segments. But I still think those games have a lot redeeming qualities and I still have fun playing them today. I think there's a really great sense of speed with the way Sonic controls in those games.

Another thing I liked about the Sonic Adventure games was how you could experience the story from different perspectives. Regardless of what I think of the quality of writing in those games, I think it's a great idea that's pulled off moderately well. Seeing other playable characters for a brief period of time and getting a glimpse into what's going on with their story and how it relates to the overarching plot is a good motivator to make me wanna go back to the characters select screen and play as them to find out more.

And I might be in the minority for this, but I really liked the hub worlds in Sonic Adventure, and I always wanted them to make another Sonic game that had them. They tried with Sonic 06, and I think they did a really great job designing the hub world of Soleanna Castle Town, but it's still smaller than I had hoped and the other hubs felt lacking. In Sonic Adventure, I liked having the option of going to an open area in which I was free to do whatever and play around with all the character's abilities.

So these are the three key things I want to achieve with Radical Adventure:

• Fun, fast paced 3D platforming with minimal camera issues.
• A story mode that the player can play through from different perspectives as multiple characters who have different abilities and level layouts.
• An open world that feels expansive and fun to explore. But I'm not trying to make them as expansive as like Grand Theft Auto's open world, but I'd like them to at least be more expansive than the hub worlds in Sonic Adventure and give the player some more breathing room so they feel they have a good amount of space to run around in.

So the game's world structure will be divided up into hub worlds and action stages which are attached to those hub worlds. The list of hub worlds and action stages I have planned are as follows. (Any of these are viable to be cut as I'm still VERY early on in development.):

• Small town by the water
  • Beach stage
  • Harbor stage
  • Countryside roads stage
  • Tutorial stage which takes place in a forest
• National park
  • Stage with very tall evergreen trees
  • Snowy stage
  • Villain's secret base stage
  • Secret snowboarding stage
  • Ancient ruins
  • Flying fortress
• City
  • Skyscraper stage
  • Highway stage
  • Casino or arcade stage
  • Villain's headquarters stage
  • Factory stage
  • Secret arcade mini-game stage

I have more details on these stages in my game design document which I'll probably share in the future.

As for who the playable characters and villains are, as well what the plot is, I haven't figured out all the details yet. Most of my time spent working on this project so far has been spent working on the mechanics and overall game structure. (Making sure character locomotion is fun and intuitive, minimizing camera issues, figuring out the best way to save and load player progress, figuring out the best way to transition from hub world to action stage, etc.) For this project I needed a very specific kind of player controller that would easily allow the player to run on walls and through loops. In order to achieve that I had to make it from scratch and handle physics and collision detection on my own without the help of Unity's rigidbody component. I went through five iterations of a player controller before I settled on one. Essentially my reason for not using a rigidbody is because whenever I did make a player controller that used one, the Unity physics would conflict with what I wanted to do. So the solution was to not use Unity's physics and calculate all that stuff myself, which means I've had to spend a lot more time coding on this project than I have on other projects.

Now I currently have a demo available for anyone to play which contains a tutorial level. After getting some feedback on that, I've decided to start over with the tutorial level and design on that's less frustrating. The new tutorial level takes place in a forest and there are less places for the player to accidentally fall off and die.

I've also done away with any segments in which the player will have to run upside in a tunnel because most people seemed to have trouble with that segment in the first tutorial level. I still want to have set pieces like that, but first I'll have to do something about how the player controller and camera both work in those segments.

Also when I'm ready to upload a new build to Itch, I'll have the main menu partially implemented. Here the player will have access to three different save slots. Though the only thing that'll be saved at this point is their best time in the tutorial level. I also want to have more information next to each save slot so the player knows what their progress is in each save slot before choosing one.

As the screenshot of the main menu above suggests, I plan to have a 2 player mode in this game. Although the only mode available in the next demo I put out there will be story mode and only the main character will be playable. I've started implementing the abilities of the other characters but they're not close to done yet.

Story mode will be the mode in which you can enter a hub world and are free to explore and enter action stages as you please. Time trial mode will allow the player to simply pick an action stage from a menu and play it from there if they don't wanna go through the trouble of navigating the hub worlds to find the stage entrance.

Also since I've put the first demo out there, I've done a lot of work on improving the way character movement feels. I think I've made it so turning the character feels a lot more smooth and natural, and not as slippery and easy to lose control of as before. So improved player movement will be part of the next demo I release.