Sophia III Proof of Concept

I've been screwing around with concepts for a new project instead of working on any of my existing ones, because of course I have. My initial concept going into this one was Sophia III, the tank from Blaster Master. (Personally, I always knew her from Super Mario Bros. Crossover. Not sure how universal of an experience that is, though, even for people around my age.) The project started to diverge when I decided to integrate a scrapped system from an older version of a character I'm currently working on. From there, things got more and more different, and eventually I wound up with something closer to Gamma or the Cyclone than the original tank I set out to recreate. It is pretty fun, though, so I guess I'll post it here.

Right now, she has the bare minimum amount of spritework to test the separately-rotating head followitem idea I had that kicked this whole thing off, so she's just an owl-necked green Sonic that eerily slides around everywhere, staring down her enemies and making popgun sounds at them until they die. As one does.

Her jump ability is the standard Glide and Climb. I initially wanted to give her Slowfall and integrate the wall climbing in a way more accurate to Blaster Master, but then I took a peek into the most recent StephChars update and realized that Kou was able to have the climb part of Glide and Climb integrated into a custom moveset because DrStephen re-programmed the move from scratch via Blua, something which I was very much not in the mood to do, nor was I in the mood to ask them to use their code for something that may or may not even release as a full addon.

Sophia's spin ability is a hitscan shot. Well, actually, it's a line-of-sight attack, no rays being cast here. (Unless P_CheckSight uses raycasting, I'm now sure.) It takes 4 hits to deal damage to an enemy by default, but doing so will grant you a ring for each point of damage you deal, similar to First Person Sniper, another addon of mine. If you're going to play this extensively, make sure you've got Spin mapped to something easily mashable. Additionally, once you get enough rings, you can press Custom 1 to spend 2 rings to fire a missile that will always deal damage, provided it makes it to the target. This currently uses Brak missiles because I couldn't be bothered to make a custom object at this stage. Just watch out for the fire.

Lastly is the aforementioned Gear Shift. As you collect more rings, your stats increase, including your acceleration, top speed, and ability speed. You start at Gear 0, and can work your way all the way up to Gear 3. At Gear 1, you unlock missiles, and at Gear 3, you can fire two missiles at different enemies at once. The higher your gear, the less shots it takes to defeat an enemy. This particular effect caps out at 2 shots to kill at Gear 2.

If I were to move forward with this project, I have a few ideas for what I could do for her final design. Here's the main ones I'm considering:

• Sophia III from Blaster Master, just straight up. Not my favorite, since she's a relatively obscure character, and the way the mechanics here work are quite a bit different from Blaster Master. The other options would still be inspired by her, though.
• An E-series robot
• A robot inspired by the Cyclone and Egg Walker from SA2
• A Gizoid
• A Crawla, 50% as a nod to her origins as a tank and 50% because it's funny (though perhaps not quite as funny as it would be if she were also incredibly bad)

I know she kind of trivializes most if not all of the bosses in the game, but eh, I don't think that it's anything I could fix without either changing the bosses' patterns or radically changing Sophia's design. I could make the bosses take more hits to deal damage than standard enemies, but that would just make them require more mashing rather than actually making them more engaging. Besides, while SRB2's boss design is miles better than most of what the official Sonic series has to offer, I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little euphoria from mowing down CEZ3 or ACZ3 with little to no resistance. Maybe if I were to build a custom campaign around Sophia, she'd present an interesting boss design challenge, but I doubt that'll happen.

Oh sweet! Someone else who also wants to add the Sophia from the Blaster Master series to SRB2.

You familiar with the Zero games? Because if you want, I could help you with this.

I'll have to ask TehRealSalt how he managed to get the segmented sprites to work (like he did with Gamma), so that it can look smooth in motion (In the OG game and the BMZ trilogy, the sprites for the Sophia were made up of multiple sprites for the main body, the cannon, and the wheels).

This is honestly already pretty fun, so I'm definitely looking forward to progress on this. I think the "Sophia III is a relatively obscure character" point probably doesn't matter too much, if that's a big issue for you. I'm pretty sure the Sonic fandom in general has a decent amount of overlap with the Mega Man fandom and the retro gaming fandom in general, so for a lot of people (myself included) Blaster Master is at least at "Oh right I should play that sometime" levels of recognition, especially with it getting a relaunch by the Gunvolt people, who are also the Mega Man Zero people. Plus, when the character turns out interesting, people like other people's Sonic the Hedgehog OCs in SRB2. Even if Sophia didn't at least have "oh right I should play that" levels of recognition, a tank stands out more than that. (No shade on the Sonic OCs in this Sonic fangame, maybe it's just having gameplay attached making a difference but they're usually pretty cool!)

One idea to make boss fights a little harder could be to reduce Sophia's damage VS bosses, maybe?

Also it sucked getting max gear and then losing it for the boss fight, but changing that would make bosses even easier.

Anyhow good luck.

--Edit
Plus, Sophia being a fairly obscure character just makes seeing her get this kind of attention more special for the fans, right? At least that's my experience with this sort of thing.

A few months later, and I randomly decided to come back to this one for a bit! ...to avoid working on other, longer-term projects... and a writing assignment. At least I'm getting something done?

Updates include:

• Autofire: Instead of mashing Spin, now you can hold down the button! In fact, mashing just makes you fire slower.
  • Your firing rate increases with your Gear, going from just over 2 shots per second all the way up to 7 at max Gear!
  • To compensate for this, the power of your shots no longer increases; you'll need 3 shots to hurt an enemy at any gear.
• Tougher Bosses: Since mashing is no longer an issue, bosses now take 8 shots to hurt rather than the same amount as an enemy. This allows pretty much every boss to get an attack off before getting stunlocked.
  • However, they also give you 2 rings for every hit, allowing you to get up to Gear 2 just in time for the final hit of each boss, if you don't get hit or use any missiles!
  • Also, Metal Sonic now slows down when shot, making him a lot less annoying to try and attack.
• Sprites: Still nothing permanent - even if I do end up making her a Crawla, I'll almost definitely edit the sprites more than I have here.
  • (Those eyes look downright uncanny on bubblegum pink...)
• Sounds: Ripped straight from the source.
  • Also gives a smidge more information than before on top of sounding nicer.
• Shot Tracers: Now you can see what Sophia's actually doing half the time!
  • This'll probably use a custom object in the final release (if such a thing comes to be), but for now it just uses MT_THOK.
  • You can use the cvar sph_beamresolution to control how many objects make up this tracer, on a floating point scale from 0 to 1. You shouldn't have to go higher than the default, and, in fact, it might be a good idea to turn it down if there's a lot of objects onscreen at once.
• Lava Resistance: To make RVZ less brutal. Now walking (driving?) on lava drains your rings rather than destroying all of them instantly.
  • The higher your Gear Shift is at, the faster they'll drain.
    • The higher performance puts more strain on her internal components, making them heat up and therefore making it harder for her cooling systems to counteract the heat of the lava. Or something like that. Whatever, she's a tank that's half the size of a hedgehog (for gameplay purposes), things don't have to make sense.
• Small: Using the barrel of her turret as a guideline for the center of her sprite, she's now half the height of other characters, meaning she can just kind of casually slide right under spin gaps.
  • I guess that means she doesn't have to do the Dust Devil section near the end of ACZ1 now?
  • I just looked up the plot of Blaster Master to see if Jason got shrunken down at the start of the game like I thought he did (he doesn't, his frog just gets really big), but it turns out the Japanese version has a completely different story? And Sophia III was the name of the planet, not the tank? And the tank was called Metal Attacker instead? What in the...
• Bugfixes: Probably? Maybe? Hell if I know what bugs the last release had. I know that shooting other players is disabled because doing that to another player in splitscreen co-op crashed the game, which also probably happened in the last version.

Just now got around to this, don't know why I didn't before, maybe Blaster Master in general just falls straight into "I should play that" for me?

It's already really fun, got the full "forgetting SRB2 takes time to play until Deep Sea Zone" effect, but even moreso than usual because the combination of Sophia's size, mobility, and AntiMetalSuffocate (if that's not currently a default feature of the character, you should add it to her. Also, sorry I forgot I had all my mods loaded before testing) made Deep Sea Zone actually pretty fun too, until I got to a soft lock that come to think of it probably wasn't.

Some slightly more detailed notes:
1. I still say "if you want to do Sophia from Blaster Master then do that, being obscure doesn't matter," but I will admit, Sophia The Crawla with her full head rotation is pretty cute. If you wanted to keep that, aside from the obvious need for some climbing and hovering sprites, that would also be cool.

2. It'd probably be better to use missiles to break breakable objects than just walking into them? Sophia isn't very big, it's weird to just walk through breakable walls and floors, especially with explosives on hand. I could see two ways to do this, either making missiles also lock onto breakable walls and floors, or to allow non-locked on fire when there's no enemies nearby. Maybe even with full blown "First Person Sniper" type manual aim as an option?

But then using missiles for that could cause soft locks when there's no rings. Does Sophia III in Blaster Master have something similar to Morph Ball Bombs? Having those for when there's no rings would fix that soft lock problem.

3. Especially if you switch to missiles to break things, Sophia should probably be able to break spikes. I thought I got softlocked in Deep Sea Zone when I wound up in Amy's route around the door you have to spin dash to open, although it has occurred to me now after eating that Fang ALSO cannot spin dash or break spikes so there's probably a way around I missed.

4. Probably not intentional, but Sophia can shoot through walls.

Still, overall this is already a very fun mod and I'm looking to see where it goes. (Might even load it back up after my cat quits bugging me. Also seems great for emblem hunting . . .)

As an aside, man, I really should play Blaster Master. Besides the NES game, how's Blaster Master Zero 2 as an entry point? NES or Zero is probably the better choice, but man, that Copen DLC option . . . I do love me some Copen . . .