SAGE’19 — Interesting original projects

SAGE. Sonic Amateur Game Expo. Exhibition of amateur games based on Sonic the Hedgehog. What is it, where did it come from and – most importantly – why would anyone even need to create a full-fledged online exhibition of games made on the basis of someone else’s intellectual property, and actively support its existence for almost two decades. To answer all these questions, the organizers of the online event made an excellent video in which they give a quick history course and talk about the philosophy of SAGE in general, and I highly recommend watching it first, fortunately someone very kind and selfless has put together Russian subtitles.

I’ll try to condense the already brief background into a couple of sentences. SAGE emerged back in 2000 due to three key reasons:

People just wanted to see more games about their favorite character, and Sega had some problems with this during the Saturn era. Sonic R and the lightly powdered Sonic 3D Blast could not satisfy the hunger of the fan base, and people began making games themselves to fill the void left by the rights holder company. But there’s a problem.

The attitude of copyright holders towards fan games has always remained extremely negative, however, if in Japan you could declare yourself a doujin artist, come to Comiket and live in peace, then outside of it any activity that goes beyond the “acquisition-consumption” cycle was perceived as a direct attack on the financial bonds of the copyright owners. And SAGE, with its appearance, was intended to show that the fan movement comes from a great love for the original source and does not set itself the goal of profiting from someone else’s property.

Finally, the desire to be heard is common to many artists, but at that time search engines were just beginning to gain mass, and large social networks and video publishing platforms had not yet even begun to exist. SAGE promised to give figures from the amateur video game front a platform from which they could express their creativity in front of a large international audience, albeit located on the other side of the monitor.

Years passed, the exhibition grew and developed: new sections appeared, its own podcast began broadcasting, people associated with official blue hedgehog products were invited to interviews. And what’s most interesting for us is that, step by step, SAGE went beyond the boundaries of the purely local Sonic crowd and began to accept almost any indie that the organizers found interesting. For example, in 2012, a prototype of Freedom Planet was demonstrated at the exhibition – a game that subsequently went a long way from a free amateur craft to a full-fledged and very high-quality commercial product. In general, in its current form, SAGE may be of interest not only to Sonic fans, but also to amateur video game enthusiasts, and then we will see what interesting non-hedgehog developments the event has in store for us this year.

PROJECT Z-TREME

I’ll start right off the bat – https://luckyhavencasino.co.uk/ a first-person shooter for the Sega Saturn by a very enthusiastic person under the nickname XL2! True, this is not yet a full-fledged game, but rather a very, very basic technical demonstration of the engine’s capabilities, consisting of assets borrowed from other games, and capable of offering only one type of enemies, four types of weapons and two miniature test maps. But it plays smoothly and without brakes, which is already very cool for an engine that must run on a console known for its problematic hardware (problematic from the point of view of programmers). The author also, as a joke, included several adapted levels from Quake in the latest build, but they work very unstable in a non-native environment, which XL2 honestly warned about in the description. The tech demo also has modes of cooperative play and playing against each other, however, field tests over the network via mednafen showed that something was not working, and the second player (in his words) was in complete chaos. In any case, a homebrew shooter for Saturn is cool in itself, and if something more global emerges from this tech demo, I wouldn’t mind looking at the result.

By the way, in the first iteration of his engine, XL2 tried to recreate the gameplay of the canceled Sonic X-treme, and it was this demo that he showed to the public at last year’s exhibition. How it was possible to come from a colorful 3D platformer to a first-person shooter is known only to the author..

Vertebreaker

Apparently, Simon Thomley did not want gaming history to remember his company HeadCannon as “those guys who ported several Sonic games to mobile phones and then made Sonic Mania,” and at SAGE’19 he announced to the people from his digital platform that work was in full swing in the bowels of the studio on a new and first truly original game. Simon didn’t say anything and attached a link to a working prototype, based on the gameplay of which you can already get an approximate idea of ​​what to expect from HeadCannon’s new creation.

And the first thought that arose in my head after what I saw: “so, someone didn’t play enough of Umihara Kawase, didn’t find an additive and decided to make it himself, for the sake of variety changing the setting to the afterlife?“And indeed, the nameless skeleton, for whom we have to play, with its habits very much resembles the main character of the “fish” series: it runs and jumps extremely reluctantly and can barely even climb a hill on its own. In order to somehow compensate for his weakness, the main character armed himself with someone’s spine, with which he can not only whip ill-wishers, but also cling to any protruding pixel and thus cover much greater distances compared to walking. In general, if you think about it this way, the hero of Vertebreaker was not shown to us during his lifetime, and his resemblance to a girl with a fishing rod is striking… It’s all suspicious.

If you have not previously been familiar with Umihara Kawase, the creation of Simon Thomley and HeadCannon may at first be quite puzzling in terms of control. It’s one thing to simply grab onto something, it’s another thing to gain acceleration in the right direction and at least gain it at all, because up to five buttons can be involved in the process: grab onto, pull up, loosen, pull up sharply, jump. Not a piano yet, but you have to figure out quite quickly which action needs to be used at what point in time so that the protagonist flies to where he needs to go. Well, it will take some time to get used to the local physics.

For those who liked the game, I have two news. I’ll start with the bad: the release of Vertebreaker is scheduled for the second half of 2021. Good: the project plans to go to kickstarter at the end of October, and Simon Tomley promises to create a new demo for the fundraising campaign. Well, you’ll have to wait.

Phantom Gear

Also at the exhibition was the Argentine indie studio Bits Rule with a demo version of its platformer for SMD, which successfully received funding on kickstarter this summer. Although the developers claim that by the time of the release, scheduled for the fall of next year, a lot of things in the game will have changed a hundred times over, now it’s quite possible to form a first impression of exactly how the Bits Rule creation will be played. AND…

The game definitely looks very nice. Well-designed backgrounds and surroundings and pleasant animation of the main character set the mood, and the excellent soundtrack also contributes to this. But regarding how the game actually plays, I have a number of awkward questions. Firstly, the level design is controversial. Due to the presence of microscopic platforms that need to be jumped onto with special care, the character really lacks the ability to take tiny steps of a couple of pixels. Each click on the d-pad results in a small but noticeable inertia, due to which attempts to correct the initially incorrect trajectory of the heroine’s jump only create unnecessary problems. There are also “blind” jumps, when it is not clear whether there is a platform below or an abyss. Secondly, the game in some places is clearly trying to encroach on the laurels of hardcore platformers like Super Meat Boy or Celeste; well, you know, when you need to jump into an abyss, in the process make a dash to the side, and then also jump, at the same time avoiding falling on the spikes. Maybe this is some kind of problem with me, and other players won’t experience this, but I wasn’t always able to get the timing right and take the right action before the character plunged into the abyss with no end. Third, jumping back after taking damage. Just… just jumping back after taking damage. Of course, straight into the abyss. Otherwise how?!

Although I have some complaints about the game, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy playing through the first and only level available in the demo version.

Brock Crocodile

Despite the fact that the earliest mentions of this game date back to 2014, the first public demo version was released only recently. By the way, it caused a certain stir at SAGE’19, and some users waited for the start of the exhibition just to get acquainted with this amateur long-term construction.

As a result, people squeal with delight in the comments, and I am completely bewildered by what I see. An unattractive motley and flat picture, in which there is nothing for the eye to grab onto, is complemented by twitchy controls. However, before I had even completed a third of the demo, my eyes stopped bleeding, and the character began to obey commands better. Played out, apparently. There are a total of two locations in the demo version. The first is the city in which the hero begins his adventure and where he can return from time to time to chat with non-playable characters about daily needs and replenish supplies in shops. The second available location is a spacious and moderately non-linear level, which is not enough to just run from edge to edge – it would also be nice to find all the caches with treasures. To do this, the hero is armed with a pistol that can be loaded with various cartridges, as well as a multifunctional whip, which can not only bring bad guys to reason, but also cross uneven terrain.

The pistol, however, seemed unbalanced to me. Having loaded it with cherry pits, I stuffed the first boss so much that I ended up feeling like a cheater. Well, something needs to be done with the controls, since making targeted jumps with such a tiny character sprite is not so easy.