is it just me or is there literally no good 3d sonic levels in fan games outside of sonic generations mods? i'm looking through youtube for sonic fan levels and most of them seem to either just be giant wide open plains with no direction & nothing interesting in them or they're just massive boring tunnels with maybe a few loops thrown here and there. that chishado dude you link a bit back, his stuff tends to look alright for the most part though. what's your take on all this?
3D level design isn’t easy. I tried to make some SRB2 maps once and none of them were very good. You have to think about space in a different way, and to some degree, game designers still don’t really understand it.
Because there’s that disconnect, right. When you’re making something versus playing something, you have a different perspective and expectations.
Plus, I assume you might’ve looked at a lot of BlitzSonic stuff… which developed this weird sort of fad where people didn’t actually make levels for it. They were mostly like… playgrounds, I guess. Because most builds of BlitzSonic didn’t have enemies or anything, so you’d just get these huge environments where you… ran around exploring, and didn’t really do anything game-like. Like a Sonic version of Dear Esther, or something.
That versus Sonic Generations is like… Generations also had an established structure, right. Something tangible that you can grasp on to and say, “this is how a Sonic Generations level plays.”
With BlitzSonic and to a lesser extent SonicGDK, you’re a little more free to define whatever you want. And you kind of have to, because that’s the point. So you end up with people experimenting a lot more, I guess.
Or, alternatively, artists who just want to make environments and don’t know how to flesh anything out on the coding end (like add enemies or level gimmicks).
You can even see my example when you look at something like Havok Harbor. Though it’s made from SonicGDK, it’s definitely following the Sonic Generations example, and features the same sort of tangible, focused level design I think you’re looking for. It’s saying, “this is how a Sonic Generations level plays, so this is how my game plays, too.”
