A lot of 2D Sonic fan games still use the great grandson of The Games Factory – now called “Clickteam Fusion.” That’s because there’s now a pretty robust open source code base called “Sonic Worlds Delta” that closely mimics how the Genesis games worked. The advancements in tech are probably the biggest change. The rest is history.Ītkinson: How has the fan game community changed over the years? So, after acquiring my own copy of Click & Create, I set about learning. The graphics were incredibly simple, the game didn’t even have scrolling, and it was plagued by a bug called “Killing Death.” It meant that sometimes, when Sonic would bop an enemy, it’d also kill him at the same time, even if you had rings. The talk of the town when I got there was the final release of the original “Sonic Robo-Blast,” made in an earlier version of The Games Factory called “Klik ‘n’ Play.” I wasn’t impressed.
It linked to a website called “Sonic Fangames HQ.” Here was a whole community of fans making their own games, most primarily using a piece of software called The Games Factory (which was also available under a different name, “Corel Click & Create” – same software, different brand). Either way, it piqued my interest, because there hadn’t been any real Sonic games for a few years.
Or it was going to be, at any rate I don’t think it got very far. High school meant better access to internet-connected PCs, and eventually I stumbled upon something called “Sonic 2000.” It was a Sonic game running in DOS, created by a fan. So it was a challenge to make anything substantial. The only problem was, if your batteries died, all software you had written would be erased.
I started out by making simple text adventures (which I called “Moviegames,” usually involving whatever my favorite movie was at the time – Jurassic Park, Men in Black, etc.) and eventually started learning how to do ASCII graphics. Using what I knew about QBASIC, I taught myself TIBASIC by reverse-engineering games other friends would send me. Starting high school, we all had to buy TI-8x calculators for Algebra, which came with TIBASIC.
But the idea of making your own games stuck with me I started learning QBASIC on my home PC (an old hand-me-down 33mhz desktop running Windows 3.1). Unsurprisingly, we received a rejection letter shortly after. My friends and I wrote up some very barebones documentation for a game we called “Sonic: In Your Face” and mailed them to the address Sega printed on the back of their game cases. Sometime in middle school, I started to wonder just how video games were made. I’m hiding it behind the “Read More” tag because as always I tend to be pretty longwinded (as usual but that’s the entire reason I asked if it was okay for me to post)Ītkinson: How did you first get into fan games?
I also checked in with Atkinson and he’s okay with me posting our full interview. That alone makes the article worth checking out, if you ask me. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a very, very long time. Give it a read! I’m actually genuinely impressed the author (Ryan Atkinson) managed to track down Aytaç Aksu. I was interviewed to be part of this article over at Cultured Vultures! It talks about the history of Sonic fan games in the wake of Sonic Mania. There isn’t currently any ETA on when it will release but we’ll be sure to keep you posted.LINK: The Weird and Wonderful History of Sonic Fangames | Cultured Vultures
Since SEGA is really open to fan Sonic projects, we are pretty sure that they will not send a C&D letter. The camera position will be similar to the one in Sonic Mania and in order to showcase the current state of it, Sonic Maker’s creator released the following video. This fan project is created with GameMaker Studio 2 and features the same physics and collisions with the Genesis/Mega Drive version. Its creator may consider a way for Sonic Maker to read multiple level files in a folder as one continuous game, something that will obviously give the impression of a full game. As such, gamers will be able to create their own levels using a lot of the game’s assets.Īccording to its creator, the custom-created levels will be saved as single files full of numbers, not containing any external/editable images, and will be playable inside Sonic Maker’s play mode. This project is called Sonic Maker, and in theory it will be similar to Mario Maker.
Someone is currently working on a Sonic fan project that will let you create and play your own Sonic retro stages. Sonic fans, here is something special for you today.