Stonecutter
Member
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.
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.]
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.
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?
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.
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.]
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.
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?
