#themes and whatnot off of each other and that also unlocks interesting stuff to go with it. all my friends know things i dont know abt!

[sforzesco]

I'm really curious about the process that goes on behind your art! Especially because you give so much importance to themes and it's like *chef's kiss*. It's always so well thought out and I find your references to all the snippets and readings really fascinating and very inspiring. How the heck do you organise your thoughts so well while reading ?

honestly organizing my thoughts. it takes. a while. to do it lmao

usually what happens is something like: I'll be reading a book on crassus, and the author refers to crassus as the leading domestic politician in rome while pompey was the leading military general. and this will set off bells in my head that go 'oh, roman household dynamics,' because the phrasing reminded me of a text describing the role of wives of roman politicians when their husbands were away (which I first came across in a text discussing octavia's role in her marriage with antony)

and while I'm doing all of this, I usually have a journal or sticky notes or literally any kind of scrap paper with me where I make short notes on what's interesting/what's connecting in my head/what would make an interesting subject to draw, no matter how unrelated it is, and then I'll look over everything once I've exhausted the train of thought like. man! this is borderline incomprehensible! let's make a comic about it.

then when I've done all that, I'll spend two or three days cutting down all the excess material and attempting to figure out the most direct way to convey what's going on in a scene so that someone unfamiliar with any of it might be able to follow along on vibes alone. sometimes it takes a week. sometimes I get stuck on something and I have to make a note to revisit it in a few months!

[aforestlife]

Hi! So I just restarted AC:NL after a long while of being away due to some hard times, and I figured it would be fun to restart. My friend showed me your town through dream address, and I kinda sorta fell in love??? Like ;; so what I wanted to ask was do you have any tips for starting a new town and like paths and stuff? Ahah I know that might be an odd question and such but like I love your town’s development and I can never figure out placing and such so yeah! Thx so much *^*

Come up with the general feel, theme, or atmosphere you would like your town to have

Come up with a town name that fits your town theme/feel

If you choose to reset for a town, figure out what town-features might become requirements for you: town fruit, building placements, river styles, town hall/gate colors, etc. Though sometimes you’ll just know the town when you see it without rigid rules... I love the feeling when I’m resetting for a town and I stumble on a town that I immediately find inspiring, and start thinking up what I would do with certain areas on the map in my head.

Once you have your town, it’s of course yours to play in and enjoy and you don’t have to feel pressured to get it all done right away! Working on a town can take a lot of trial and error sometimes to be completely happy with it, and that’s okay :) Here are some things I like to try to figure out and focus on once I have a new town that I want to build up:

I always like to create a gridded map for my town right off the bat. It might seem like a pain, but I find it kinda soothing, a great exercise in getting to know your new town, and really useful for planning in the future. I wrote about the process I use to create a gridded map at the bottom of this post, but there are other ways you can do it too (on paper, on a spreadsheet, simply taking a screenshot of your in-game map and making a grid on top, etc.) And of course, you don’t *have* to do this because your town is kind of a grid in itself (just larger and hard to see all at once), so you can plan out your town using patterns like this post shows

Make a list of all the public works projects you’re interested in unlocking (goes back to what you want for your town theme/feel), and if you’re up for it, do the diving trick to speed up the process.

Decide the villagers you would like to have permanently in your town -- ones that you love most, fit your theme/feel most, or even have house exteriors that fit your town most.

Do you want other human characters? If so, you can decide where you want their homes to go, what you would like each of their interior/exterior themes will be, what sort of personality they’ll have and add to the town, how their homes will be integrated into the town’s landscape, etc.

While you’re playing, thinking, and planning, make sure to also start stocking up on supplies like bushes and flowers, and work on unlocking your shops and tools and whatnot :)

Some say that it’s best to wait for town planning until you’ve moved in all your dream villagers, but I find it kind of hard to decide where the villagers will move into when the town’s still completely undeveloped. So I like to start landscaping with one idea for one key area that I’m set on and inspired by, and then build from there. In Citalune one of my first public works was the fountain in front of the train station and it’s still there to this day; that was one of my first building blocks that I branched other areas and paths from. Beginning by prioritizing the planning of a few of the must-have attractions in your town will help prevent you from running out of room for them later on :)

Once you have a few key areas planned out, think of how they will connect, and in general, how different areas and major buildings in your town will connect with paths and bridges. What makes most sense to connect the areas and what will look best with your theme/feel? Do you want a winding, wild look or something really structured? You can use a gridded map for planning this, or experiment with laying patterns in your town that you can always erase and edit.

Now that you have a rough blueprint for your town’s general structure and major areas, and how they will connect, you can feel more confident in planning the smaller things: the location of villagers’ homes, and the smaller public works touches here and there.

Start putting your vision together from what you’ve planned in the way that it’s organic for you! Though at this point, once you have plans for how things will be organized, I recommend putting a lot of focus on getting your dream villagers moved into the spots where you want them (with the plot reset trick and house-repelling public works or ground patterns), because once you have them moved in with no more stray homes or surprise move-ins getting in the way, you'll feel so much more free on the path to finishing your town.

You might end up needing to rework things, or as you’re working on your town, you’ll be newly inspired to try something else, and this is all fine and sometimes necessary to get the town you’ll be most satisfied with! :) I’ve reworked various parts of Citalune an embarrassing amount of times, and discarded lots of ideas that I had early on. What you want to be extra careful and sure of are the things you won’t be able to easily re-work later!

[returnerofthewrites]

Thoughts on Sonic Mania

This review/essay assumes that the reader has kept up with the social media releases in regards to the game, such as the reveals of Flying Battery and Stardust Speedway, the videos on the Special and Bonus Stages, gameplay videos of some zones released by Youtube accounts, and so on. However, it will not have any spoilers about zones, mechanics or things beyond this.

Everyone out there who’s already put out a review or video or whatnot on Sonic Mania has already started off by going into Sonic’s history, ups and downs and so on, so I won’t bore you with that. Everyone already knows about Classic Sonic, Sonic Adventure, Sonic 06 and Boom. There’s more interesting (and relevant) ways to do an intro for this anyway, and the 06/Boom stuff doesn’t bear repeating.

What does bear repeating, then? The fact that Sonic Mania is a very, very good game.

I’ve been a Sonic fan all of my life, starting with renting VHS tapes of both cartoons (AoStH and SatAM, not Underground) from the local Blockbuster, then eventually ending up with the PC versions of Schoolhouse and CD, and I’m willing to admit that, up until very recently, I was never particularly good at the games. As a child I always got stuck around Collision Chaos, and as I grew up and found out about emulation, I never exactly beat any of them, but it didn’t matter to me, because frankly, moving so fast, shooting through loops and the general feeling of momentum was so much fun.

The whole videogame news website meme of “Sonic was never good” thus understandably grates on me. The Sonic social media construct and everything else cracking jokes about his less-than-stellar outings and so on was cute at first, but it quickly gained that poisonous ironic tinge to it, like Sonic would never be able to step back out of the shadow of its own mistakes. Like when you see people on here or Twitter or whatever call themselves “furry trash” or “(X fandom) trash” or so on. Stop doing that. Don’t settle for acting like mediocrity.

Sonic Mania is the opposite of all of that. It feels like the freshest, most interesting, but most importantly, most earnest Sonic game in a long, long time. It was obvious to most people when the game was revealed that the game was going to be something special, and I think the hype for it only grew as time went on, even in the hearts of anyone who managed to be skeptical at first. There were no jokes, no self-deprecating wisecracks or memes, none of that. They simply stood up, head held high, and showed off gameplay after gameplay.

This game is exactly the game that Sonic has needed, now more than ever. This year in general has been great for games (between Breath of the Wild, Nier, Persona, and many other upcoming games like Mario Odyssey and the like), and Sonic Mania is another excellent chip to add to the pile. The sheer amount of passion and love for Sonic as a franchise that the developers (Taxman, Stealth, Tee Lopes and the rest of the Sonic 2 HD crew, and so on) have is palpable, and more importantly, it’s wonderful.

I have experience with Taxman’s work through the excellent Sonic CD port from back in 2011, so when I booted up the game and started a save file as Sonic and Tails, I felt right at home. Controls, as expected, feel very natural, and the physics and momentum are virtually unchanged from the CD port, which itself was already about as accurate as you could possibly get to the originals. I have the Switch version, which meant that I was primarily using the left buttons to play rather than the control stick, and while I would have preferred a normal d-pad, it worked just fine anyway.

There’s something to be said about how easy it was to pick up the game and slip into a groove. I had gone in intending to look at the same the way I had when I streamed Sonic 3 and Knuckles a while back (my first time completing that game, no less), looking at the level design and seeing how the game itself worked. Instead, I ended up getting completely sucked into each and every level I played, and I was completely enamored with the game as a result. While I could see the machine and its cogs all working together, I needed a couple days to cool off and some more time to play it after the initial rush to get my thoughts in order.

I suppose that, more than anything, is what speaks the most to the sheer quality of the game. The levels consist of a mixture of:

Recreated zones from older games, oftentimes with new mechanics or mechanics pilfered and repurposed from other games in the series

And entirely new zones like Studiopolis and Mirage Saloon, with their own unique gimmicks, setpieces and visual themes

And while it’s very easy to organize those things like that, the game itself is far more than the sum of those parts. Mania’s levels absolutely ooze with love and attention to detail, so much so that it took at least two full playthroughs for me to pick up on everything (and knowing me there’s probably more stuff I missed). The game feels like a best-of game, where it takes many of the fan-favorite or memorable things from all four of the classics (1, 2, 3&K, and CD) and mashes them together in order to get the most out of them.

Chemical Plant is probably one of the easiest examples to point to, and it’s just the second level. The second act’s arguably “major” gimmick is the chemical pools that can be altered into bouncy gel (both light blue and green), but it’s not the only gimmick the stage has on offer; there’s also sticky platforms that move on rails, pink bubbles that lift you from one area to another, as well as the classic pipes from the first act and the original zone.

That’s four different small mechanics, and I can happily say that all of them are integrated into the level design in very sensible yet surprising ways. The levels aren’t massive, but there’s still plenty to explore, and thankfully exploration isn’t quite limited to only Tails thanks to the addition of a carry ability you get when playing with Sonic and Tails.

Thankfully, the exploration never feels like it becomes the main focus (partly since the Special Stage rings are the only major thing to find, and partly because the game has a save system), and there were times during my initial playthrough where I was trying to explore but accidentally stumbled into a high-speed place, only to decide to just roll with it (hah) and see what I could find in the next section of the level I ended up in. It speaks to the heart and soul of Sonic as a game and as a character, and it’s a very, very happy feeling.

The game’s difficulty is also worth noting, mostly since it’s probably the smoothest difficulty curve I’ve ever seen in a Sonic game. I’m rather curious to hear how the developers picked the old zones to remaster that they did, since it often feels like they were chosen not just for their memorability and mechanics, but also for where they showed up in their original games. Zones like Green Hill and Chemical Plant are obvious choices; some of the ones that show up later on, when the game starts getting harder and nearing its finale, are not quite so expected, and personally are very welcome surprises.

This also goes for the bosses, which often feel like they were designed more to be interesting and engaging rather than simply difficult. None of them are all that complicated per-say, but around the end of the first third of the game, things start to become much more challenging, and by the final act everything reaches its peak.

That said, I never got a game over and actually ended my first run with my lives in the double-digits, despite having a few deaths in earlier zones and dying a few times to the final boss. I attribute this to the quality of the level design more than anything else, though. Bottomless pits are beautifully rare (aside from a couple sequences in Flying Battery, naturally), and all of my deaths were due to my own recklessness rather than unintentional crushes, spikes or enemy placement.

And best of all, the Special Stages aren’t annoying. In fact, I’d say they’re probably the best in the series, taking the best elements of the previous games’ Special Stages and mashing them together. They get tough, but still quite fair, and are rather exhilarating. The Blue Sphere bonus stages are quite nice as well, though I do kind of prefer the 3&K ones which get you shields and extra rings and lives. Mania’s bonus stages only give you a medal if you win, which counts across all saves towards unlockables, like the sound test and other, more gameplay-related specialties (which, unfortunately, can only be used in the No Save mode).

Also, have I mentioned the presentation? I talked plenty about the attention to detail in the gameplay, but the graphics! The music! Sonic Mania has catapulted itself into my top pixelart-y games ever. It is to 2D Sonic what Symphony of the Night is to Castlevania: rich, colorful, smoothly animated, and full of vibrant details and lots of foreground and background elements that are just as much fun to sniff out and spot as actual secrets in the levels. Seeing all of the goofy EGG TV things in Studiopolis, or spotting the ever-recurring Eggman face logo in various zones (stylized, of course, in the look of classic Robotnik’s face), had me smiling the whole way through.

The music, much like the rest of the game (as I keep repeating) feels like a mixture of the good of everything that came before it, and it’s often the highlight thanks to how the old zones, new zones, and their remixes/music respectively shake up the genres and moods. It’s very similar to Sonic CD’s soundtrack in that regard; the final zone’s music gave me a similar sense of foreboding that Metallic Madness’ US track did, and there’s the obvious, funkier comparisons to draw between something like Stardust Speedway and Studiopolis. And classic tunes remixed, like Chemical Plant and Flying Battery, amp things up nicely.

If there’s one aspect that I do feel like nitpicking, though, it’s the stage transitions. The game has an intro cutscene and does transitions between the acts and zones quite a bit during the first half of the game, but after a certain point things slowly start to go more of the Sonic 2 route of just going from zone to zone, with little tying them together aside from being in older classic titles. Like I said, though, it’s a nitpick, and certainly not enough to really put a damper on how good the game is.

On the whole, Sonic Mania feels like an absolutely triumphant thing, not just for Sonic fans but anyone who loves videogames. It really is like a bolt from the blue (heh), coming at just the right time to remind everyone, fans, non-fans and newbies alike, of just why Sonic was such a massive hit in the first place. By the time I finished my first run, I immediately had the urge to play it again, and the only thing that stopped me was the fact that I really needed to go to bed and get to work early the next day.

As for right now, though? I think I’m off to play through another zone or two of my current Tails run. Gotta speed!

[bellumu-ec-lida]

This is a REALLY long theory; you can read it under the cut!

Before I can answer any of these questions--if you don’t already know about it, you need to learn about the Dream Sequence.

This comes up again in the game waaaay later, after Sora defeats Riku at Hollow Bastion. Sora goes back to Traverse Town, talks to Kairi, gets a badass keyblade, and then a mural in the Underground Cavern changes from a sun to a moon. This switch from “dawn/midday” to the “dead of night” symbolizes a switch in the player’s leveling pace.

*Note: This Dream Sequence stuff isn’t part of my theory. It’s certified canon.

Okay, now that we’ve got that squared away, we can partially answer one of the questions: what do the Hotel Paintings mean?

In the Second District of Traverse Town, there’s a Hotel with 5 cryptic paintings adorning its walls. If you click ‘X’ next to the paintings, the game tells you their titles, which are:

• Midsummer Dawn • Midday Jungle • The Autumn Dusk • Bald Mountain -7:00am- • 18:00 in the Past -Time Flies-

Hmm, dawn? Midday? Some of these paintings’ titles are strikingly similar to the Dream Sequence. Sure enough:

Pretty interesting parallel! It seems each of these paintings represent a part of Sora’s adventure from the first game.

It also implies that Sora’s journey begins in midsummer and ends in autumn, which is probably more metaphorical than literal. Seasons are often portrayed with symbolic meanings by poets and writers; I’ve listed some of the most common ones below:

So we’ve figured out the meaning behind three of the five Hotel Paintings. That just leaves Bald Mountain -7:00am- and 18:00 in the Past -Time Flies-. I can’t explain these two without outlining some other points, though, so we’ll come back to them later.

The Hotel Paintings point out a seasonal metaphor within Kingdom Hearts, as well as one other metaphor--one relating to the time of day.

Dawn = beginning of the journey Midday = midway through the journey Dusk/Dead of Night = climax of the journey, ‘the beginning of the end’

A lot of things throughout the game exemplify this metaphor, including the Dream Sequence, the Underground Cavern mural, and even the Disney worlds’ skylines. You may notice, by looking at the skylines, that it looks like it is midnight in Traverse Town, roughly noon in Deep Jungle, and night by the time you get to Halloween Town. This indicates the passage of a full day:

Note that Sora isn’t literally traveling through all of the Disney worlds in a single day. This is merely one huge metaphor that shows the progress of his journey.

This symbolism is REALLY cool imo, because it also ties into the “light” and “darkness” theme of the game. In general, the “daytime/light” parts of the game tend to be easier and more lighthearted, while the “nighttime/darkness” parts of the game are harder and more serious. Also, remember when the game gives you this iconic line during the tutorial?

As you progress through the story, you go from dawn to midday, and the sun gets closer to setting, which brings out more “shadows.” You confront the ultimate darkness (Ansem) in the dusk/dead of night when it is completely dark out. And then you get a new sunrise at the end of the game—a new light. (“I KNOW NOW, WITHOUT A DOUBT.....THAT KINGDOM HEARTS IS LIGHT!!1!”)

This metaphor is also supported by clocks scattered throughout the Disney worlds, which roughly indicate the passage of a full day:

Some of these times are approximated. And this is NOT all of the clocks found throughout the game; I’ll spare you a list of all of them. But for the most part, with very few exceptions, the clocks fit nicely within the time metaphor.

(One exception, for instance, is the White Rabbit’s clock in Wonderland, which displays a time of 5:00. This doesn’t make any chronological sense, since by that point we’ve already seen a clock during the Wonderland opening cutscene that says 7:00. But in traditional depictions and illustrations, the White Rabbit’s clock often says 5:00...so it’s merely a design element and is not counted as part of the time metaphor.)

The season/time metaphor is elaborate and pretty awesome imo, and Kingdom Hearts hints at in a lot of subtle little ways throughout the game. It adds some nice flavor to Sora’s story.

Bear with me here, because now we’re going to delve into the stuff that will end up explaining the meaning of the remaining two Hotel Paintings, the Gizmo Shop clock, and the Green Room clock.

If we expand upon the “world skylines” idea, we can actually lump Kingdom Hearts into a journey of 7 metaphorical days:

Days 1 and 2 take place on Destiny Islands. They are pretty straightforward, as you can literally see the passage of time with the skyline and Sora going to bed and whatnot. These days are what the Hotel Painting Midsummer Dawn is referring to.

Day 3 encompasses the bulk of Sora’s journey, with the Hotel Painting Midday Jungle marking the midway point of the day. You can see the world’s skylines progress from morning to midday to evening to night. (I included the coliseum tournament skylines in the timeline above to help exemplify this.) Sora gets to Big Ben, which displays a time of 12:00am, announcing the end of Day 3.

Tons of major plot stuff happens during Day 4, which takes place mostly in Hollow Bastion. The Riku fight, portrayed in the Hotel Painting Autumn Dusk, occurs on this day. This day concludes when the Underground Cavern Mural switches to “dead of night.”

Off-topic a bit, but this is also the day Roxas is born. Kind of fitting that it occurs during the “twilight” of Sora’s adventure, eh? ;)

Day 5 is a day of tying up loose ends before the final showdown. Sora returns to Hollow Bastion to seal the Keyhole, which unlocks the long ass 50-seed Hades Cup--which is so dang lengthy it spans the entire day (as you can see with the changing tournament skyline, from dark to light to dark again). Sora hunts down remaining trinities and puppies, does last-minute item synthesis stuff, and fights whichever optional bosses his heart desires.

This day ends when Sora travels to The End of the World, which is evidenced by the Bald Mountain -7:00am- Hotel Painting. (I’ll explain that soon.)

Day 6 is lots of plot plot plot plot. It consists of traversing through The End of the World, battling Chernabog, and shoving a Keyblade up Ansem’s ass. It ends when the door to light is opened, revealing the “light” of a new day.

Day 7 is “the end” of the game as well as the epilogue. We finally see the Mickey Mouse cameo we’d been waiting for, and then Sora runs down some strange path chasing Pluto.

So there you have it, the 7 metaphorical days of Sora’s journey. This theory is supported by the synergy between Hotel Paintings, the world’s skylines, and the world’s clocks.

The timeline also fits well with the seasonal metaphor. It might be a bit of a stretch, but you could even argue that most of the Disney worlds you visit are “summer-like.” Halloween is an autumn holiday, so visiting Halloween transitions us into Autumn. And then eventually you get to the End of the World, which is winter-like with its snowy fragments of landscape (pictured below). And finally, the epilogue, with its bright blue sky and lush greens, brings us into “spring.”

With all of that explained, we can get back to the Hotel Paintings. We can fit Midsummer Dawn, Midday Jungle, and Autumn Dusk on our metaphorical 7-day timeline:

Where does that leave the remaining two paintings, Bald Mountain -7:00am- and 18:00 in the Past -Time Flies-?

Bald Mountain -7:00am- refers to the battle against Chernabog in the End of the World. We can deduce this because “Night on Bald Mountain,” composed by Modest Mussorgsky, plays in the background during the Chernabog battle. -7:00am- tells us that this happens chronologically at the beginning of this new day. It tells us this is “morning” occurring after the “Dusk/Dead of Night,” building up to yet another climax in Sora’s journey.

18:00 in the Past -Time Flies- is talking about Sora’s fight against Ansem. 18:00 is about 6pm in military time, so it is referring to some point in the “evening” of the game. In the Past represents Sora going back to where he lived in the Past--in other words, Destiny Islands. -Time Flies- is like, “Wow, I’m back here on Destiny Islands? Seems like only yesterday I was dreaming about getting off this island. Man, time sure flies.”

With that being said, both of these Hotel Paintings denote events that occur on Day 6 of our timeline:

So that’s what the Hotel Painting titles mean! They highlight some of the key points in Sora’s journey and establish a metaphor about seasons and the passage of time.

Go on to PART II to learn about the meanings behind the Gizmo Shop clock and the Green Room clock. (Part II is shorter, I promise.)