PREFACE: My first ever devlog, and it isn't even a video...😔. I don't know when I'll ever be ready to make videos for devlog, so for now, I'm using this as a way to log my progress and gain attention until I someday start making videos. Who knows, I could even go back to these logs and remake them as videos.
November 30, 2024
Yesterday was the end of the November Nut Fest Game Jam, probably the first jam where I can truly say I made a game. Still emitting from the energy of having completed a game (sort of, it was only two levels with the second being mediocre), I set my sights on a new idea, one inspired by the blue blur himself - Sonic the Hedgehog
I'm a big fan of Sonic the Hedgehog, the feeling of catching that good momentum that makes everything a blur, the iconic and memorable characters, the music, I always dreamed of being able to recreate that feeling as much as I wanted. My dream isn't to just recreate these feelings though, I wish to create a game that could potentially rival the popularity of of the Sonic franchise (a very ambitious dream, given how long the franchise has existed and that I'm just a no-name solo developer with an obsession with starting projects and never completing them). Either way, I wanted to try and one-up my favorite game mascot with a whole new game, and to do that I had to look at what I could do differently to make my game a lot more popular. Enter shooter games. (NOTE: I'm not saying my game wouldn't reach popularity if it wasn't a shooter, in fact, I highly doubt making a a shooter would change anything. I mostly chose this genre as it's the most popular one as of present, as Sonic became popular at a time when platformers were the reigning games)
I don't like shooting games all that much. I can certainly see the appeal, but I could never get into them. Unfortunately, if I wanted to attract some attention I had to find a way to combine Sonic's high-speed platforming with FPS mechanics. So I hit up YouTube and searched for games with this idea. One notable one was Ghostrunner, a game I actually played when I had a similar idea to this one but for a more Naruto-inspired FPS (that game didn't see the light of day and probably never will). While Ghostrunner did have fast-paced gameplay and platforming, it didn't have the Sonic feel I wanted. I even looked at Sonic games with first-person mods The BEST Sonic First Person Experience and they were... a bit disorienting. I'm still working out how I'll implement this though, but for now, thats it for devlog 0. I don't plan on future devlog being this long, I mostly wanted to get a story down at the beginning of this devlog on what game I'm working on now.