The Good News: A lot of my time has been spent working on Sonic: TFH in some form or another.
The Bad News: Most of the work is largely conceptual at this point and as such there is not much to show you guys.
Basically, it breaks down like this: A couple years ago, a friend of mine went off to College to study classes in Game Design and a few weeks ago he basically started yelling at me over certain design decisions I was doing in TFH. According to him, I was getting ahead of myself regarding certain elements of TFH's design process and he was none to happy to see me making these mistakes.
Basically, he's demanding I take a step back and re-think some things out. I've roped him in to helping me a little bit more with this stuff, and together we're trimming the fat and getting rid of some things that might not really belong. There are certain elements of the game's design I think he wants me to change completely, but we'll see. He can be a bit condescending with his advice and there are definitely times where he'll tell me something, like I don't know what I'm doing, when he's actually telling me things I did on my last game, MarioWeen. So yeah. Either he'll ruin the game, I'll strangle him, or this'll turn out even more awesome! Anybody have a three-sided coin to flip?
In other news, I spent some time doing some coding work on the game, just implementing minor little polish elements. Primarily was work on Sonic's running animation. I don't know how many of you have noticed, but basically, after a certain speed, Sonic's running animation will always play at the same speed no matter how fast you are going. This is a limitation of Multimedia Fusion's animation system, where the maximum speed an object can animate at is "100", which is a rate of 1 frame of sprite animation for every 1 frame of game logic. The new animation system I have written to work around this moves beyond that limitation, allowing animation to move at a speed well over MMF's limitation of "100". It's a subtle change, but it really helps the sensation of speed.
I've also been looking in to optimizing TFH's framerate some more, but I don't know if that's possible. I tried to write in some experimental optimizations but they don't seem to do anything substantial. It's possible TFH is as optimized as it's ever going to get - which is a bummer, because I personally can run the SAGE demo level at about 20-30fps. That's certainly more than playable for me, but for a 2D side scrolling game like this, I consider it unacceptable that I cannot even run my own game at full speed.
That'll do it for TFH's December Update. I might have more to show soon in terms of videos and pictures, so stay tuned.
