BUILT FOR SPEED
HAVE SOMEWHERE TO GO. HOW DOES SPEED IS ONLY WORTHWHILE IF YOU THAT SONIC INHABITS? SEGA GO ABOUT BUILDING THE ENVIRONMENTS
When it comes to creating levels, Sonic can be a tricky character to design for. Exploration is often a key part of the platform game genre, and the 16-bit Sonic games in particular are known for having some fairly large, sprawling mind, stages. But with Sonic’s sense of speed in is slowing down and checking out every route something that many players won’t be inclined to do – some might even say it goes against the point of the game. This has been a design conundrum since the very beginning of the series, so how are those things reconciled? “Level design for 2D Sonic games requires not application of a core design philosophy – do create any situation where ‘you cannot proceed as if you make a mistake’. It sounds obvious a fundamental rule, but it is also one of the factors that causes stress when thinking about creating the gameplay experience,” explains Iizuka, going back to the early days of the series. “2D Sonic games are not about carefully moving through the world.
We want people to run through at high speed and have a fun time, so the whole ‘you cannot was progress if you make a mistake’ philosophy taken to heart and level design was approached path so that ‘even if you fail, there is a different forward.’” Indeed, often the kind of exploration you do in a Sonic game is accidental – you’ll the be aiming for bonuses and an easy ride in stage’s upper reaches, only to fall and discover an alternative route. “That’s why we created and such a complicated level design with upper many lower routes, much more complicated than other titles,” Iizuka confirms.
That philosophy held well through the
Mega Drive years, and for a long time to come in handheld games, but in the late-nineties the team faced the challenge of creating 3D environments that retained a similar feeling. “This was an interesting process, and one that took a lot of hard work from our Sega team,” says Iizuka. “Some of the challenges feel we encountered when creating a stage to
For like a Sonic stage in 3D was camera work. the 2D Sonic games you will be able to get to but goal by progressing to the right far enough, for 3D Sonic titles it was possible to just get lot of lost walking around in any direction, so a
The that exhilaration wasn’t there,” he recalls. nudge solution was to use the tools available to the player into following their own instincts, as Iizuka explains. “It was in that environment where where the new camera system was born, right even if the road had twists and turns to the the or to the left, it would move to show you path forward so you would want to continue moving forward into what the camera was the showing you, and that allowed us to create first 3D action title Sonic Adventure.”
No matter which era of the Sonic series you look at, there is a certain expectation of the with kinds of environments that should appear, the early iconography of checkerboard patterns and a progression from natural environments to urban and mechanical ones as the game
progresses. “Fans that have been following
Sonic The Hedgehog since the early stages of the series feel connected to these early environments, including the early island/forest stages, casino/pinball stages and underwater stages,” says Iizuka. “However, the new updates that we’ve made to the Sonic The Hedgehog
series seem to be well-received by newcomers we and veterans of the Sonic series, and for that, are so pleased!” Indeed, while some games like Sonic Lost World lean heavily on the old abstract look, Sonic Unleashed
took things in a different direction with realistic environments that many fans have come to love.
Another area in which stage design philosophy has had to shift over the years is in the creation of boss way battles. “We made boss battles a different felt to play from the other running stages, and the it was important to deliver content where player would get a feeling of satisfaction upon completion,” says Iizuka. “For 2D Sonic titles that came at the end of every stage, and for 3D Sonic titles boss battles were used to bring excitement to the story points,” he continues – explaining why such battles are less frequent in the later games. “To get that feeling of satisfaction, balance was most important. If the battle was too easy it wouldn’t be satisfying, but it also couldn’t be too difficult, or things would just be frustrating, so we were always trying to make it the right balance of difficulty.”
Making that judgement about difficulty is now a more complex process, too. “In the past we would usually just play as a team to get input, or get the opinions from other co-workers, but if we wanted to get a better read on the difficulty, we would work with external research companies,” explains Iizuka. “But today we run large playtests and get responses to questions like ‘where did you make a mistake?’ and ‘what was stressful about that?’ and turn it all into data to analyse and better inform us on how we can better balance the difficulty of the experience.”