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A New Moveset for Rouge

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Stonecutter

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About two months ago, I had just about finished porting Bunnie Rabbot to 2.2, and decided to look into bringing other old, re-usable characters into the new version as well.


I started playing around with concepts for a Rouge update. I hoped to find a way to make her gameplay feel distinct from Knuckles while staying true to her character. To accomplish this, I looked to inspiration from official Sonic titles other than Sonic Adventure 2 for inspiration. Specifically, I noted that she was usually portrayed with abilities identical to Tails in nearly all later titles, with the exception being Sonic Battle.


Sonic Battle is an interesting game for many reasons, but one that stands out is that, unlike much of the franchise after the first Sonic Adventure, Sonic Battle does not attempt to shoehorn its characters into one of three gameplay archetypes. Instead, Sonic Battle treats each character as an individual with a unique moveset.


I found two potential abilities for Rouge from Sonic Battle: an air kick, and slowfall.


In Sonic Battle, Rouge uses these abilities in combination to remain airborne as much as possible. I thought that it could be interesting to play a character that could chain together attacks to remain airborne for extended periods of time.


I considered how her kick would work in SRB2. It seemed a lot like the twinspin. I didn't really like the idea of Rouge using a spinball very much; a melee/twinspin character can clear the vanilla stages without the spindash and can defeat the vanilla bosses without jumpdamage, so it seemed that pairing the melee/twinspin ability with the glide ability would be a good experiment.


For the first prototype, I gave her the glideandclimb ability and the melee ability2. I also gave her the nojumpdamage, nojumpspin, and multiability flags. The multiability flag was a simple way to enable her to perform her attack after a glide which was vital for enabling her to capitalize on the concept of chaining her attack and glide to remain airborne. I buffed her actionspd slightly to help compensate for the loss of the spindash. I was skeptical that this ability combination as well as the glide and the spindash, but gave it a try anyway. Here is a gif showcasing the ability combination.


srb20012.gif


It was satisfying to use at times, but was extremely situational. This sort of bounce didn't see much use after GFZ2.


The most interesting thing about this prototye is that it could take nearly any path in the game. By using her glide to slide under spingates, you could take a character without a spin (or a normal slide-like pin substitute) into spin-only paths. I had a lot of fun playtesting this prototype, but wasn't nearly satisfied with the moveset.


This moveset felt to noncommital relative to the main cast. While I could easily replace multiability with an algorithm that gives her normal glide behavior while allowing her to attack after a glide, she would still be able to attack after gliding. Flight abilities (and Fang's bounce) usually place their users into a helpless state upon cancellation. This can be seen in Knuckles, Tails, Metal Sonic (initiating his hover takes him out of his spinball), and Fang. While Sonic can inflict damage after thokking, he sacrifices course-correction capabilities by using his thok, making its use a hard commitment similar to the other character's abilities (to some extent, this is also true of Metal's hover).


Furthermore, both the glide and the melee abilities were already in the game and a better ability combination already existed in the form of the spindash and glide.


I also didn't like having to remove her shield abilities to implement this moveset on two-buttons. This problem also existed in my update for Bunnie, but her moveset felt more committal. and consistant with the main cast (save for the lack of shield abilities, which I am still disappointed about).



Lastly, I didn't want to make another character that was, essentially, Amy with more air mobility. I had already designed and implemented Bunnie at this point (I held off on releasing her for two months to try to contact the original creator), and she was basically Amy with a normal jump height, weaker ground attack, and a flight ability (at the cost of shield abilities). I was concerned that Rouge would be too redundant like this.


My next attempt to designing a new moveset for Rouge focused on the slowfall ability. I decided to create a new ability based on both her Sonic Battle slowfall and the Sonic Heroes flight. It would involve a low double-jump followed by a slowfall which could, perhaps, be used multiple times before landing, and could be used to carry other players. Here is a short demonstration of this ability.

[See the following post. I'm having trouble getting this image to display.]
mf6ggi

86k9vm



I wasn't totally satisfied with this for three reasons. First, this basically sounds like Tail's ability. Secondly it seems a lot like Katmint's arcjump, but potentially without the increased horizontal mobility, potentially with multiple uses, and can be used to carry people. Lastly, depending on what ability2 was paired with this ability, it could have several of the same problems that I had with the first moveset idea.



I wanted to try out a drilldrive style jumpspin ability as a replacement for her twinspin, allowing Rouge to quickly descend. This made her a more vertically mobile character than Tails since he moves up and down relatively slowly and Rouge can do both faster at the cost of height and horizontal distance. I modified it so that it bounces whe she strikes an enemy instead of passing straight through like she would have in SA2, so she can still perform bounce-into-ability chains with it. Here is a demonstration of the drilldrive.


86k9vm



I still wasn't satisfied with this combination because it was still relatively noncommittal and because it got in the way of shield abilities. A new problem arose with this one though. A little while ago, Whirl released, and he had an extremely similar air game to this Rouge. So close, that if I polished this version, she would be redundant.


Does anyone have any ideas for a new moveset I could prototype?
 
Please tell me you don't gonna cancel this I have an idea for her moveset
You can make her battle glide, when she jump she starts to flight, 1 second later she starts to fall but if you use her ability that would be the homing cutter of sonic battle, she will lose height but she will flight more and if she hit a badnick she would gain some height, this would be a good moveset
 
Please tell me you don't gonna cancel this I have an idea for her moveset
I haven't given up on the possibility of overhauling Rouge's abilities. I can say that I haven't cancelled anything, but I can't really continue until I have a moveset design for her that addresses the issues that both prototypes 1 and 2 shared. Those issues are:


1. Melee attacks with air abilities that provide altitude make Amy basically obsolete. Furthermore, Bunnie already combines melee/twinspin with a flight ability, Rouge may not be different enough from her with the movesets I've worked with.

2. Rouge should be able to deal damage while in the air, but should also have the ability to activate shield abilities like the vanilla cast. This becomes a problem because I don't think that Rouge should use a spinball for her jump animation, and that if she doesn't, then she should be a nojumpdamage character. This line of thinking led me to give her an air attack separate from her air mobility option, thus taking up both the jump and spin buttons, preventing her from activating shield abilities normally.


Furthermore, someone else has already finished and released a port of Crispy's Rouge. Because of this, I want to wait until I have a new set of sprites before releasing another Rouge.



You can make her battle glide, when she jump she starts to flight, 1 second later she starts to fall but if you use her ability that would be the homing cutter of sonic battle, she will lose height but she will flight more and if she hit a badnick she would gain some height, this would be a good moveset
I tested this moveset already. I had implemented Agent Eagle as a twinspin in the first prototype, which can be seen in the first video. I then replaced glideandclimb with a modified Rouge Flight. After playing around with it for a bit, I replaced Agent Eagle with a modified version of Drill Dive (it bounces off of enemies, giving Rouge height and restoring her flight, see video 2).




In Sonic Battle, Rouge's flight, which is really more of a slowfall or glide than a proper flight, lasts until either the player presses the ability button or she hits the ground. This is similar to what I already have implemented, but without giving Rouge any height. Are you suggesting that I make the ability automatic, cut the height boost, or both?


Cutting the height boost would feel pretty weird in this game. Since Rouge has wings and has had both a proper flight ability in a previous game (Sonic Heroes) and glideandclimb, it would seem wrong for her not to be able to gain height to reach higher places by using her air ability like Tails, Knuckles, Fang, hammer jump/flip Amy, and the majority of the messageboard characters can.


Making her flight automatic, on the other hand, would free up the jump button for shield ability use, solving one of the issues that I hadn't been able to resolve with the previous two prototypes. The only problem would be that it wouldn't play well combined with the height boost, and the lack of a height boost would be really weird for Rouge in this context.




As for the Agent Eagle/Homing Cutter, I had implemented twinspin in the first prototype which behaved similarly, as seen in the first video. It was too situational due to its reliance on enemy placement. Making it her jump spin ability also got in the way of normal shield activation (unless she uses automatically activated flight). Furthermore, giving Rouge a proper twinspin pushes her closer to Amy, who doesn't have many strengths of her own, and is easily overshadowed.


Drill Dive on the other hand seperates Rouge from Amy, gives Rouge a unique movement advantage (relative to the vanilla characters, that is), and gives her a unique weakness. When her attack sends her mostly downwards, Rouge has trouble hitting enemies horizontally from her jump state. She can dominate over most enemies by striking from above, but certain enemies, such as the CEZ3 boss give her a really hard time, pretty much forcing her to use her ground attack, a flying axe kick.
 
i think she should play like she did in sa2
because thats the first 3d games she was in
also i think the glide should make here lose highet slower (like in sa2)
 
i think she should play like she did in sa2
because thats the first 3d games she was in
also i think the glide should make here lose highet slower (like in sa2)

They have said they don't want her to be just a Knuckles clone, however.
 
maybe make it so that she can slow fall but she can glide onto wall she needs to go up to said wall when she is not floating and have a faster climbing speed?
 
I imagine a glide would be made unique for her if you were allowed to press it multiple times to slightly nudge the glide higher two or three times, kind of like micro double/triple jumps (the bat wings would flap as part of the visual for it). She could have Knuckles' low base jump height, but those extended jumps would make it where she can potentially get as much vertical height as anyone else, if not slightly more.
 
I imagine a glide would be made unique for her if you were allowed to press it multiple times to slightly nudge the glide higher two or three times, kind of like micro double/triple jumps (the bat wings would flap as part of the visual for it). She could have Knuckles' low base jump height, but those extended jumps would make it where she can potentially get as much vertical height as anyone else, if not slightly more.

That could be good.
 
I edit the jump launch and put it on rouge and it function very well
Using it and glide make her go to the same height of amy's jump I have a gif of it

srb20004.gif
 
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