Have you watched any of Jon Burton's GameHut videos on youtube? Some really interesting stuff about the development of games like Sonic 3D Blast and Toy Story. Also, how do you feel about him working on a Sonic 3D Blast Director's Cut romhack?
I think once the “Sonic R v0.03″ video went up and it became clear he was using GameHut to dump all kinds of interesting curiosities from the archives of Traveler’s Tales, I couldn’t subscribe any faster. It’s fantastic he’s willing to be so open about this kind of stuff. Imagine how much weird, cool stuff never gets seen from other developers. Projects that get started but never finished, pitches that get rejected, etc. There are thousands of games we never knew existed.
Sonic 3D Blast: Director’s Cut is a wild proposition. I think what maybe blows me away the most is that, like, it’s easy forget these guys are probably incredibly smart. Because Jon Burton is the founder of Traveler’s Tales. The success they’ve had with the Lego games earned him an executive producer credit on all of the Lego movies thus far. And you picture a guy like that, and you think of a guy in a suit who is in meetings all day long, and to be fair he probably is.
But he got his start making games. Getting his hands dirty. Writing code. And you watch him trying to get a Sonic R prototype running in an emulator, and it’s like, he’s injecting memory addresses and doing all this stuff that for me, a “modern indie developer,” is completely and entirely over my head. Even from the perspective of being around the borders of the ROM hacking community via Sonic Retro and stuff, some of the things he’s doing are still over my head. He may as well be a sorcerer.
And that after all this time, after the company he’s built, the fame he’s earned (at least in some circles), he’s still passionate about game creation to do something like a “Sonic 3D Blast: Director’s Cut.” To dip in to 23 year old source code for a dead platform and dump new features in to that game, just for fun. That’s just… wow, you know? That’s fantastic. Tremendous respect to that guy.
I had a spiel here about needing to see it in action before I pass judgement, but in the few days it took this to get posted, a video went up detailing some of his changes.
They’re definitely interesting and on some level I’m glad he’s not just ditching Flickies entirely as a mechanic. That’s not to say hunting out enemies is some tremendously fun thing, but we already have a hack that gets rid of the Flickies. I definitely approve of pretty much everything in this video, from the enhanced controls to the improvements to the camera, power-ups, and more.
Consider my attention grabbed.
