A rework of the Time Bonus in Classic Sonic games.

Aquavine

📀🌻Frutiger Aero enjoyer :3🌻📀
While playing classic Sonic games, I noticed a slightly annoying thing with how time bonus works. And it works in a pretty unfair at times way.

For example, a thing that probably happened to almost everyone at least once; You’re on a great pace and you’re about to reach the goal with 0:29 on timer... but actually no, you were 2 seconds late and your 50000 score bonus turned into a 10000 one instead. :P

Like, according to the bonus, you were going extremely fast and you deserved a big score prize, but the moment timer hit 0:31 the game was like "Actually no, you’re too slow and deserve 10000 points instead... :3" Even though it’s literally a 1 second difference. Kinda unfair right? Well, the funny thing is that we already have a solution to this problem in a form of...

SA2... which has it’s own and personally, the best time bonus system in the whole franchise, and it works like this:

Your max time bonus pole is 10000 points, but instead of the pole decreasing in set time frames, the pole decreases dynamically instead. Which means that after you pass 30 seconds in the stage, there’s no jump from 10000 to like 5000 points, but instead the time pole losses 20 points every second. Which is way more fair compared to the classics, because now at 0:31 you’ll get 9980 points instead.



And now... just add this system to Classic Sonic games with a few tweaks and we’re good. :>

So here are a few versions of this system I thought of:

-Every version works the same way. Max time bonus pole is 50000 points, and it starts decreasing only once you go past 30 seconds. But by how much score you lose by second varies from version to version, so:

1. Strict - You lose 1000 points every second past 0:30, so you have only 50 seconds before the bonus fully drains. And including the 30 second time frame means that you’ll have zero bonus at 1:20.

2. Medium - You lose 500 points every second past 0:30, so you have only 100 seconds before the bonus fully drains. And including the 30 second time frame means that you’ll have zero bonus at 2:10.

3. Casual - You lose 250 points every second past 0:30, so you have only 200 seconds before the bonus fully drains. And including the 30 second time frame means that you’ll have zero bonus at 3:50.

I think that every version could somehow fit in every Sonic game with it being farily balanced. Like for example, Sonic CD could have tha casual version due to heavy exploration focus, Sonic 2 could have medium to encapsulate the slighlty bigger yet still quick to get through stages. And stuff like that.

But honestly even specific stages could have their own specific versions of the bonus to fit the stage. For example, stages like GHZ and EHZ would have a strict time bonus due to them being quite short and speedy stages. But stages like Marble zone (or most of S1 stages... ;v;) could have medium time bonus. And stages like [Insert a quite long stage that IS actually long and not just skill issue...] could have casual.

(And this honestly would also go hard in SRB2 itself... too bad I still can’t code... ;v;)

But ye... I can at least share the formula for calculating the score bonus yourself:
50000 - ((OT - 30) * SM)

50000 - Score pole,
30 - The 30s safe zone before score starts to count down,
OT - Overall time (in seconds,)
SM - Score multiplyer (Based on version of time bonus. So either 1000, 500 or 250)
 
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