#sonic 3d engine

[fantasiac]

designing the concept of a 3D Sonic Engine called the Sonic Stagger Engine

3 gameplay styles, with 8 characters, they fit into these 3 gameplay styles with slight variations

Gameplay styles:

Momentum

Combat

Sling (awaiting a better name)

all gameplay styles will be based around momentum and keeping it, but momentum characters gain speed easier and their movesets are based around keeping momentum and doing tricks and fun skips like a speedrunner, as opposed to Combat, which is like Sonic Frontiers but fast, focusing on tough combos and battling difficult enemies)

characters:

Sonic (momentum)

Shadow (combat)

Silver (sling)

Amy (a mix of momentum and combat)

Blaze (momentum)

Surge (momentum)

Whisper (combat)

Tangle (sling)

every character will have a special action after charging a chaos emerald (Sonic gets Boost and Homing attack, Shadow gets Chaos Control, ect...), all characters have one emerald each except Whisper, who uses wisps, the emeralds colors match the color of the holder

I will be posting stuff about this, but until I get a computer (or partner with someone willing to code this), it will definitely stay in concept territory

[blastgale]

somehow managed to make Sonic’s model work for a mocap project for college and some of the footage/scenes with him is so funny

he breaks a bit for simple movements but if you decide to do a ballerina jump he works flawlessly — 10/10

[techbestlaptops]

How Can I Charge My Laptop in the Car? [Pro fips] 2024

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Best Answer:

You may all the time purchase a transportable charger, however, these might be costly and cumbersome to hold around. Luckily, there’s a lot simpler option to cost your laptop when you’re on the go — by utilizing your automotive’s cigarette lighter socket.

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Read The Full Article: How Can I Charge My Laptop in the Car

[vertebreakher]

I've been working on a shader in Godot for a while now, and recently started getting results I'm really happy with. The classic spring model I made shows off its strengths effectively.

This has been a pretty big (and very needed) confidence booster, so I think I can start refocusing on getting assets in-game now that I know they can look this good.

[motherforthefamicom]

new 2d sonic games coming out this fall apperently ?

[jadsddd]

(WIP) for my first serious attempt at a chiptune cover i'm kinda popping off rn?? idk i like the direction this is going

(song is Panic Puppet Act 1 from the Genesis version of Sonic 3D Blast, specifically a PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 cover) (created with Furnace Tracker, which you can see in the video)

[890prodoctions]

Actually, I've done something really epic gamer right now. Turns out. The photos were available in high quality. Just not from that archive! Apparently These pictures are still on Tumblr, all you need is the link! So, copy and pasting the links from the archive post, allows us to view the files! But they're still kinda low quality... However, when you hover over the pictures in the archive you can see that they say: "tumblr_njuardbVUb1s6muneo(1-6,8)_1280.jpg"... and in these lower quality versions of the files they instead have 500 or 250 instead of 1280 So, If you change the numbers at the end to 1280...

YOU GET TO DOWNLOAD THEM IN THEIR ORIGINAL QUALITY. (Or at least... close to the originals. (The sonic is my boyfriend art is still slightly compressed... leading me to believe that there might still be a higher quality version than 1280... (Here's the link to the art if any of you wanna try and find it... (And here are the pictures on Tumblr: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8. (Also... Judging from the naming convention, I'm lead to believe that picture 7 is missing...))) Do with these and this information what you will, but I am incredibly delighted to have found these!!!

Whoever archived this post by GlicthCityLA on the Wayback Machine is an absolute legend!!!! Thank you so much!!! We have some official photos of the event now!

Unfortunately, the pictures are low quality but low quality is better than nothing! I'm gonna be downloading all of these just to keep them safe. Also bonus thing too:

[thelombax51]

***FAN RENDER***

Some of my best Boom Eggman renders that I made it for long time ago. Just for fun actually.

The 3D model is ripped from straight Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric game with some modifications.

Done in Autodesk Maya, V-Ray render engine

[specialagentartemis]

A very apropos HumbleBundle right now…

Instructional tools for making games in Godot 4 Engine—a free and open-source videogame-making engine.

Master Godot—the lightweight, fast, and free game engine behind hits like Sonic Colors: Ultimate. Whether you want to use the brand new version 4 or the battle-tested version 3, these courses will get you building platformers, RPGs, first-person shooters, city-builders, strategy games, and more—no prior experience required! Plus, you’ll learn how to customize your games by creating your own art and assets, all while supporting Girls Who Code with your purchase!

$1 gets you Intro To Godot 4 Game Development; $25 gets you a whole suite of instructional tools and courses that cover all sorts of videogame-making skills. The program and the engine itself is free.

If you want to start learning to make 2D and 3D RPGs, platformers, survival games, strategy games, or FPSs, this has introductions to how to do all of that using an open-source non-corporate-controlled cross-platform-compatible program.

[blazehedgehog]

Man, that's crazy and unfortunate what happened to that level designer on Sonic Heroes. Is there a source for those stories you could share?

Unfortunately it came from a Game Informer interview on their website back in 2016. Thanks to the efforts of Gamestop, everything about Game Informer was basically wiped from the internet about a little over a week ago.

Digging around a bit I found this Wayback Machine post for the article, titled "Where Sonic Went Wrong", written by Brian Shea.

Iizuka recalls the development cycle of Sonic Heroes, the first multiplatform mainline Sonic console game, as the most stressful of his career, in part thanks to deadlines. He was based in the United States while the rest of the development team was in Japan, and mismanagement took its toll on the team. "The level design for Sonic Heroes was made by two people: me and one other person," he says. "As we got to the later stages of development, this other person got pretty sick and didn't show up to work, so level design was made by one person! So for those very last stages of the game, I didn't sleep at all and I was constantly working. I lost about [22 pounds] because I was just cranking away and it was just work, work, work. I didn't sleep because I had to finish the game on my own. Almost dying!"

From what I've heard, this isn't the first time somebody has mentioned this about Sonic Heroes, just the first time in an English interview.

For the other information:

The information about Sonic 2 comes in the wake of Hirokazu Yasuhara's Digital Dragons talk in 2017, where he revealed a significantly different and more ambitious early design for Sonic 2 that was scrapped in favor of something they could do faster and easier.

The information about Sonic 3 comes from the Hidden Palace dump of a Sonic 3 prototype. The creation date on their prototype is maybe three months before its retail release and the state of the game at that point can charitably be described as a disaster, something their news post explains thanks to information provided by the person who offered the prototype.

Sonic Adventure 2 being made by half the people in half the time is original research by me. Sonic Team is on record that the 3D Sonic World in Sonic Jam was a prototype for Sonic Adventure on the Sega Saturn, putting development of SA1 starting around late 1996 or early 1997. If you count from there to when the finishing touches were put on the International (American) release of SA1, that gives it a development time of around 2-3 years. SA2's development started probably around December of 1999, and came out in June of 2001, making for a development time of 18 months. You can compare developer numbers yourself using Mobygames. (Shoutouts to The Golden Bolt for also looking down a similar path.)

Similarly, just look at the production credits for Shadow the Hedgehog, CTRL+F, and search for "Takashi Iizuka"

After Shadow in 2005, Takashi Iizuka was no longer an active developer on the Sonic series for the next five or six games, mostly relegated to distant "supervisor", "concept" and "special thanks" roles. Instead, he worked on NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, another game Sega jerked him around on. He came back to the Sonic franchise and started doing press again midway through the development of Sonic Colors in 2010.

Sonic Unleashed being expensive comes from, to my memory, an IGN Developer Diary that's impossible to find nowadays, where the director admits one of the producers at Sega pitched the Werehog as a way to slow players down and appreciate all the effort they put into environment art. Also they literally developed a whole entire rendering engine just for that game, of course it was expensive.

Here's a 2009 post mentioning a "Sonic Anniversary" leak from Sega's FTP. Details are fuzzy, but a Sega Spain leak a year later clarified that "Sonic Anniversary" was a game coming to Wii, DS, PSP, and PS3. A (physically) broken prototype of Sonic Anniversary for the PSP reveals a very early version of what would become Sonic Generations for the 3DS. And given how much content is shared between Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, it's not hard to connect the dots between Colors being built from the proposed Wii version of "Anniversary" (Generations). There may be a more direct source for this straight from the horse's mouth, but I can't find it right now.

Morio Kishimoto was a game designer for Secret Rings and Black Knight, his first games for Sega, and got promoted to Director for Sonic Colors where he's stayed ever since. He mentioned not being a part of Sonic Forces at first, but was brought in to get the game back on track, and the game's troubled development is corroborated by Takashi Iizuka in the liner notes for the Sonic Forces soundtrack.

You can compare the metacritic for Secret Rings and Sonic 06 to see just how much more favorably Secret Rings was received, despite both games coming out less than six months apart.

Here's an archived IGN interview from 2007 with Yojiro Ogawa describing how Secret Rings was split off from the development resources of Sonic 06. Exact dates would be fuzzy, but it's easy to assume the entire game was developed in less than a year.

Here's a 2010 Eurogamer interview where Takashi Iizuka (not Kishimoto, whoops) says Sonic Colors is a Sonic game meant to appeal to Mario fans.

As for Sonic Lost World being Sonic Colors 2, my source on that is "I mean, just look at it."

(For people many years in the future, this post is in response to this.)

[slauterhause]

Ugh this is gonna be a lot to explain

Video is a drawing of me and my boyfriend's idols, with some music from one of the side shops you can't enter in Splatoon; we think the track fits them :)

Second is a ref of Ebony that is more toony, made it for someone who is attempting to make a 3D model from it

Third and fourth image is of a new OC I made, he's a villainous engineer in the memverse and all that, Idk I'll probably never explain him if nobody ever asks

Silly lineless drawing of @toothpaste-for-the-skin 's silly inkling!! Go follow them, they're pretty rad

This drawing of Shockwave is not the best imo? It's good but it could be tweaked a little bit; it was a test reference for his more realistic features

Redesign of one of my personas from a couple months ago, I indeed favor this one the most out of the rest

Last two images are some Sonic OCS I've cooked up, but that first one is more of an inside joke between friends, nonetheless still a very serious character :)

[fantasiac]

Refined Stagger Sonic Moveset Concept (PS4 Controller) =

(Blue Emerald)

-

Chaos Action (s) =

-

Boost - Hold R2 to give a small boost of initial momentum, you slowly accelerate the longer you hold the button, you can triple tap the button to instantly go to top speed, but it's such a drastic increase of speed that it's difficult to control and not recommended (also the level design wouldn't account for it most times, so it wouldn't even be fun), the boost damages enemies if you run into them, you can boost in the air too, but it's significantly weaker to ground boost, effectively turning into Generations Air Dash. Jumping in a boost state will not curl you into a ball, and by the time it let's you curl, it's already killed enough momentum for a boost jump to not be able to fly through the air off a high place at Mach 10, it's fun when you jump from flat ground to flat ground though.

-

Homing Shot - Tap Square or R2 in the air when the target appears to home in on a target, targets can be enemies and level elements, the speed homing attacks happen in will almost always be dependent on the speed you enter them unless your speed is less than a spindash amount, hold down the button during and then after a successful homing shot to instantly home in on the next consecutive target without needing to let go of the button (it will show you which target is next), keeping all your momentum (not that momentum matters because you have boost now).

-

Base Moveset =

-

Running - Uses Left Analog Stick, running is momentum based Sonic has a 10% higher max base speed and 5% more effecient momentum gain and retention, at any speed above spindash, you'd be able to run on any surface, ignoring gravity, you can run on walls or ceilings, you're even able to run on the surface of water.

-

Turning - is based on your speed, the faster you're going, the wider your turning circle is, you'd need to rely alot more on the drift at max speeds, but jogging speed you can turn around almost instantly.

-

"The Zone" - Running at max momentum for long enough will build up a second meter, when maximized, Sonic will be slightly faster, invulnerable to enemies but not environment, and have an after image effect, this will also increase his Ring collection zone, and let him perform Tricks slightly faster, this lets Sonic build Chaos Meter faster, even letting him build up past up to twice the limit. slowing down, stopping, or losing momentum will end The Zone.

-

Drift / Whirlwind - Hold L1 / R1 at above spindash speed to drift, it will turn you in the direction based on the button pushed, it has a much smaller turning circle, letting you turn tighter corners without losing momentum, exiting a drift more than 25 degrees will reward you will a boost of momentum, drifts will reward you with more momentum the bigger turn you perform, Rolling will tighten the turning circle even more. Drifting in a complete circle during Flow State won't reward you with any momentum, but it will make a whirlwind that draws items, enemies and rings into the center of it, the size and power of the whirlwind depends on the speed and tightness of your drift ring. after 2 full rotations you can hold Triangle to aim from the center of it and launch yourself in the aimed direction.

-

Dodge Step / Parry - Tap L1 / R1 for a quick step to the left or right (based on the button pushed), it will also circle around a targeted enemy when close enough. holding both the buttons down will make you hold for a few seconds, when you're hit with an attack, you will send it back, the holding Parry state lasts one second and holds you in place a little bit, it kills momentum, but resets your air jump. a Perfect Parry will slow down time for a few seconds.

-

Jump / Double Jump (Air Jump) - Press the X button to jump, it will send you into a jump ball, you have less air control in a jump ball, but you carry momentum through the air losslessly, you are invulnerable to enemies but not environment exactly like rolling. A double jump uncurls you, you go into free fall, you have tighter air control at the cost of momentum, also, you turn around instantly, but it kills momentum the more abruptly you turn, but you can instantly change direction of an air boost if you make a mistake.

-

Roll - On the ground, Hold square to roll into a ball, letting go will uncurl you again, the ball damages enemies, on declines, the ball state gains momentum easier than the running state, but loses it much easier on inclines, making you switch dynamically, also, Roll Drifting has an even smaller turning circle at high speed, letting you turn near 90 degree angles without losing momentum. In the Air, tapping the button will curl you into ball state if you weren't already, you can also tap again to uncurl, this air curl is turned off and replaced with Homing Shot during Chaos Action.

-

Spin/Drop Dash - Hold L2 to rev, you can do this on the ground or in the air, letting go will send you off with a small boost of momentum, it stacks on top of your existing momentum, it doesn't matter how long you hold the button, it will give you the same Speed From Still everytime, the fun comes in dropdashing to add momentum bit by bit when you have the chance, and spindashing in tight areas you need it.

-

Drop Slide / Bounce - In the air, hold Circle until you reach the ground, this will drop you to the ground quickly, at the end of the drop, you will slide on the ground before running again without losing any momentum, the slide can also damage enemies. Tap circle in the air to bounce, which works exactly like it does in Sonic Adventure 2, you can tap it repeatedly.

-

Crouch / Peel Out - Holding Circle while on the ground and moving from still to jogging will make you Crouch, this Crouch state changes how Spindash Revving works, you mash L2, the more you mash it, the more initial momentum you build up, letting go will boost you off with up to 4 times initial spindash speed. also crouching makes you invulnerable to enemy attacks but won't parry.

-

Kick Bash - Tap R2, uses a targeting system (based on camera) to kick a bullet of stored Chaos energy at a target (will cost about 1 Ring worth of Chaos Guage), like enemies or level objects, you can do this in the air or on the ground, you can hold to aim up to 3 targets before unleashing the attack, with an upgrade, aiming slows time. Without a target, the kick bullet will fly forwards, you can catch up to it, running through a kick bullet will convert the energy back into momentum, giving you a boost of speed.

-

Twister Dash - Double Tapping R2, or Hitting R2 while holding X will activate Twister Dash, Sonic will spin violently, he slowly falls, mash X to rise in the air (also use this time to aim the direction you want to go in), this rising will also build up momentum energy, after a certain point, he won't rise anymore, that's your indicator for fully charged, hit R2 again to release, it will air boost you in the direction you aimed as fast as a spindash (without even needing Chaos Action). this move is amazing for saving yourself from mistakes.

-

Air Tricks / Trick Attacks / Ring Dash - Whenever airborne, tap Triangle to perform tricks, they fill up the Chaos Guage, worth half a single Ring. when close enough to an enemy, tricks will be available at all times, functioning as an attack button, you can tap it to damage an enemy, but you have to time it right as you intersect with the the enemy, this works in the air or on the ground, you can hold the button to aim in any direction (this slows time), after defeating the enemy with a Trick Attack, you will rebound in that direction, it should be easy and satisfying enough to not need homing attack. Near any trail of Rings, hold Triangle to fly through the ring trail, it is dependant of your entering momentum unless you are slower than a spindash.

-

Rail Grinding - You will automatically grind on rails, the entered speed depends on your momentum, you can hold circle (crouch) to gain momentum on declines, you can also roll and rev (spindash or dropdash) on rails, but in roll state, you need to use L1 and R1 to balance yourself, you will fly off if you're not careful, also you can't rail switch in roll state, you can use L1 and R1 to Rail switch in standing state. you can also Trick on rails, but rail tricks are slower per Trick than Air Tricks. Flow State will make momentum barely apply to rails, you will grind at the speed entered regardless of the incline of the rail, declines will still add momentum though, but during Flow State, inclines can only spend momentum that's been gained from the same rail, so the speed you entered in is your minimum speed until Flow State runs out.

-

Combo System =

-

(yet to be conceptualized)

[sonichedgeblog]

'Final Fantasy Sonic X: Unofficial Reimagination' by Serac111 A new take of the flash animation by BlackDevilX in a 3D RPG Engine. #SAGE23 https://sonicfangameshq.com/forums/showcase/final-fantasy-sonic-x-unofficial-reimagination.1836/

[vertebreakher]

Sonic T-pose with the new shader.

Part of what the shader allows me to do is warp lighting through a gradient texture, which gives me a lot of control over how the diffuse lighting affects the perceived detail of the model. The lighting is also affected by a hue shift as areas get darker, preventing it from looking dull. The color of the hue shift can be changed per-material (from cyan to dark blue for the fur, and from yellow to red tones for the skin.)

Overall the look is trying to imitate the some of the aspects found in promotional art and sprites for Mania and the genesis-era games, and attempting to recreate some of the lighting techniques found there. There are limitations to how far I can push towards that, but in the process I think I've landed on something very striking.

(Unfortunately I also still have a lot of work left to do on updating his model, and tons of animations undone. So the path keeps going...)

[catonator]

Funny heading to a blogpost on videogames that’s some sort of reference

Look, I already used the ctrl+alt+delete quote in a blogpost title. It’s February 2024, and it’s already a very wild year for gaming. We’ve had more layoffs than with the entirety of 2023, games shown off at events seem to be stagnating, interest in the art is waning. Youtube is filled with “modern gaming sucks” doomer blackpill videos. It’s a miserable time.

Is gaming just over?

Well, no. Of course not. The Sonic franchise has lingered for decades despite consistent failure. Games are more resilient than that.

Humanity’s relation to computing is still pretty fresh, and I’d say that despite the size and scale of a lot of it, we’re still going through major growing pains. Concepts like video games, the internet and special effects are still pretty new, despite being around for twice or thrice as long as most of the people reading this have been alive. Internal combustion engine -powered cars were invented in 1808, made mass produced in the 1910s, and even then it took until the 1950s for them to be common enough for the US government to bother designing cities around them. In the present day, many have come to resent the car-centric design mentality, even though the driving (no pun intended) factor behind them was mainly the same as with technology today: scientific and technological progression is unquestionably good, and therefore new and successful ideas should be pushed and relied upon as hard as possible. What could possibly go wrong?!

Video games are far from the only medium which is seeing similar problems. Movies have suffered greatly from a capeshit infestation, in which the abuse of VFX artists is valued over, you know, basics of good filmmaking, and the general public is clearly sick of it. On the internet, we’ve decided that megastructures like Twitter are better than forms of communication we’re good at, and it’s gone horribly wrong. We’re still learning the “do”s, “don’t”s and “who the fuck thought this was a good idea”s of tech.

Games as an artform are as alive as they ever were, but the sheer scale of the operations has grown to a point where nobody can really understand it. The numbers behind playerbases and the money traffic have so many zeroes that you can’t even fathom the number. Even if I used some metaphorical figure, like 20 000 cars. Shockingly, despite how console sales haven’t really increased in numbers (the top selling console of all time is still the PS2), most of the top-grossing games of all time are relatively recent. This implies that the behaviour of consumers has shifted from purchasing a variety of different kinds of games into purchasing fewer games of fewer different kinds. And I don’t think it’s a case of customers deciding to shift over naturally.

In the past decade or so, the gaming industry has decided sensible experiences are a way of the past, and the future is making games for debt and making back the money with horse armour and other garbage the general public doesn’t really want.

But we’ve seen this shit before. In the 90s, 3D was “the future”, and 2D pixel art or hand-drawn art in general seemed to go the way of the dodo for polygons and ““realism””. About a decade later, 2D art would see a resurgence and in some cases overtake the big lads in lasting impact. In the end, people crave personal stories, varying ideas, and interesting ways to tell them. Not much has changed since ancient Greeks, besides that the medium of storytelling has largely shifted from some guy standing on a stage, trying to explain another world, to electronic devices actually showing us the other worlds.

I think as we play out the Icarus stories in real time, we’ll also learn when boundaries are pushed too far, and the scale of the bullshit simply collapses in on itself. When that happens, the public is forced to step back and reevaluate the ways we thought were the future, and what really is better for all of us.

When a storm flattens a forest of dead, decrepit trees, the sun and rain can now reach the ground and cultivate a new generation of different plant life. Once hidden beneath the dead corpses, now able to grow and bloom in a way the old generation never could. You should just keep doing what you think is right. Now’s the time more than ever to be the backbone of a better industry, for many applications of tech, from games to communication. And it’s better, if the backbone comes from the grassroots, and isn’t defined by the megacorporations. Because those cunts will never learn from their failures.

[miloscat]

[Review] Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (Wii U)

A mess but still underrated.

It's no secret that the development of Rise of Lyric was kind of a mess. The first game released by Big Red Button, an American studio founded by ex-Naughty Dog devs, it went through a few iterations before Sega required it to be released on the Wii U as part of an exclusivity deal. This caused problems for the engine which was not designed for the less powerful hardware, and it shows in persistent performance problems. This combined with an infamously large post-release patch led to the game acquiring an odious reputation in general and particularly among 3D Sonic games, which already have a spotty track record.

Knowing all this, I actually had a good time with this game. It has its strengths and you don't have to dig too hard to find them. The textures may be low-res but it has strong art direction. The slower-paced gameplay with exploration, combat, and puzzle-platforming sections is something I prefer over the usual 3D Sonic style. It's a forgiving co-op adventure set in a sub-universe that I've quickly come to love (mostly thanks to the silly and easy-going TV show). In short, its poor reception is a bit overblown.

The Sonic Boom subseries launched with this game, a 3DS game, a toyline, and a TV show. Archie Comics ran a short spinoff set in this world and another 3DS game followed, as well as a throwaway Hardlight mobile runner game. So far, I think the show is the strongest work: it's a short-form comedy adventure episodic series with emphasis on the funny, and it consistently hits the mark as far as I've seen. (It also struck me as oddly similar to the Donkey Kong Country animated series with its tropical island setting, flamboyant and ineffective villain, and being a French coproduction.) The comic didn't quite nail the tone—aside from the issues written by the show’s writers—and was interrupted by financially-disastrous crossover event shenanigans, and as for this game, well I'll get to that.

Along with refreshing the setting, Sonic Boom reframes its main characters in ways that I appreciate: they work well as comedy characters, with redesigns that better get across their personalities. Sonic has blue arms as he should and a nifty scarf, Amy has a practical tunic and a personality beyond “loves Sonic”, Tails is given goggles and pouches, and Knuckles is now actually big and brawny. New to the main cast is Sticks, an oddball wild child-type character with a raspy voice. She has a great design and works well as an agent of chaos, although some of her "paranoid" humour falls flat for me.

Now that Boom has been cut off as a failed spinoff, Sticks is the biggest loss. She showed up in Runners and the Rio Olympics game and that's it. Also, she's barely in this game! Her role is simply as an NPC who sends you to find collectibles, and she has only a couple of voice lines. It's a real shame, and another symptom of the game's troubled development. As for the rest of the cast, Boom has a lot of fun new side characters, some of whom appear briefly in this, but RoL also includes Metal Sonic and Shadow, who are only in a couple of episodes of the show. Their roles in this game are pretty underwhelming, only showing up for boss fights and then getting forgotten about.

The main new face here is Lyric, a snake cyborg guy who has been imprisoned for a thousand years. The game starts with a few gags to make you think it's still a comedy but when this guy shows up they pretty much drop all that, and in tone the game becomes a pretty bland action story (although I did like the very brief time travel arc). Naturally he teams up with Eggman for a bit before they betray each other, and his army of very shiny robots forms the goon squad that you spend the whole game smashing to bits. The story seems to have been another casualty during development, with none of the show's writers involved and meddling by Sega combined with content cuts leading to a bland and rushed plot despite some clear ambitions.

The four playable characters can be swapped between at any time, as long as they're present in the story (the game frequently separates them into pairs). They largely play the same but also have unique abilities, and get tasked with specific segments tailored to their skills (often in 2D). For example, Knuckles can climb walls while Amy can swing and walk on balance beams. When given the choice I often favoured Amy for her mid-air triple-jump or Tails for his ranged combat utility. Another central mechanic is the Enerbeam, a laser grapple that can throw robots around or let you swing or ride rails. When playing in 2P co-op, one player uses the TV while the other has their own screen on the Gamepad, which I'm always a fan of. Up to four players can compete or collaborate in the specific multiplayer modes which seem kinda fun if you have willing participants.

The structure of the story mode has you returning to two hub zones between levels, where you can explore and do a scarce few NPC quests. The characters' slow movement speed works well for the levels but less so for these open zones. Here you can also spend scrap found in levels to rebuild landmarks, a nice but underused mechanic. In levels there's robot fights which feel a bit clumsy and there's sure a lot of them, and the occasional mediocre vehicle section. But this is a 3D Sonic game so there's also a lot of autorunning sections: the pace in these is so fast that you can barely react and the framerate absolutely tanks, but there's little penalty for mistakes and they're decent as flashy little setpieces with changing camera angles and such.

I have to talk about the collectibles and currencies in this game. There's scrap from beating robots and opening chests, which you use for buildings but also passive upgrades to your characters. Accumulating crowns unlocks new tiers of these upgrades. But there's also rings because this is a Sonic game. These act as a health system but you get tons of them so you rarely go beneath your cap. Why is there a cap? Well you only lose a few when you get hit. You can extend your cap by making progress in Shattered Crystal on 3DS and connecting your systems, which is very dumb and funny. But even at your cap you want to collect them because your cumulative total unlocks concept art and stuff. Also, doing sidequests unlocks selectable passive buffs which are mostly useless. The whole customisation and upgrading thing frankly needed some work, but it's a neat idea.

That's Rise of Lyric in a nutshell really. Sonic Boom is a breath of fresh air for the Sonic franchise, and the idea of this game as a change of pace for Sonic gameplay has potential. But as so often has been the case, Sega shoots themselves in the foot, development goes through hell, the games suffer as a result, and then no one is happy. I want to get across that I find the game inoffensive and a decent example of its genre, not totally deserving of the scorn it gets, but it could easily have been so much better and that is obvious for anyone to see. Oh well, maybe next time Sega launches a Western-focused multimedia Sonic spinoff it can get a tie-in game that gets the time and attention it deserves... you know, the next one after Prime which didn't even get a game at all!