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Alternative Metal Sonic (formerly "Charge Abilities")

I would like to preface this post by saying that I am not a sprite artist. I don't know how people manage to make the amazing sprites they do and it is all black magic to me.

I have been working mainly on Alt Metal's appearance for a while. I started by modifying the existing vanilla Metal Sonic sprites and quickly found that even that was something I struggled with. I managed some modifications of Metal's feet as I attempted to recolour Metal to look like Metal Sonic 3.0 from Sonic Rivals 2 after finding out about 3.0's existence on the Sonic News Network wiki. Then when it came time to tackle the markings on the head I quickly found myself unable to make anything look nice.

So a change in plans was needed. I kept the change in feet because I had that done at that point anyway and I like how it looks. But I needed something more to differentiate Alt Metal from vanilla Metal. In an attempt to get something going I dove into the game's vanilla sprites and came across the sprites for the first boss. Seeing those, inspiration struck. And the nice thing was that while I still needed to do some sprite editing, the bulk of work was actually coding related, which is something I find much easier (and more fun, honestly) to do.

A bit of a story to explain how I came to the following result:
srb20042.gif


Now of course, just having these boosters float alongside Alt Metal wouldn't be that amazing. So on top of being there, they also have their own visual effects for the various moves Alt Metal does, as seen in the following gif.
srb20044-gif.70633


The homing thok also has its own visual effect now. I'm personally not very fond of it, highly likely to change it to something nicer looking. Consider it a placeholder I guess.
srb20048.gif


On top of that, one might notice that the vfx (jet fumes, electricity, etc) are all yellow now. If this is not to your liking a new option to the settings menu has been added to switch between three colours for the vfx, these being light blue, yellow and red.
srb20046.gif


The affected effects are the electricity (both passive and homing trail), jet fumes and the boost circle effects.

On top of these visual changes, I have also done some more work on the abilities, specifically when in Super form.
  • Super Alt Metal Sonic gets 4 maximum charges rather than the default 2,
    • When charging Super Alt Metal is instantly at full charge,
    • All charge moves (Jump, Thok and Stomp) have an Armageddon shield effect (though with smaller radius).
  • Rush Mode builds up twice as fast while Super,
  • The Rush Mode boost can be activated in mid-air while Super,
    • Boosting like this makes it so no altitude is lost for the duration of the boost,
    • However, rings will be burned slightly faster than normal this way.
For a quick demonstration of some of this stuff, check this out:
srb20047.gif

(I do want to note real quick that I'm really happy with the fact that everything you see Alt Metal doing here uses only Jump and Spin.)

I might tone the super abilities down a bit. I'm also not sure on the super colour I've chosen. I might add a custom super colour instead. For now I just wanted something that wasn't the default 'rust' super colour.

Now, the main problem I have with this project's progression is that I will need CSS art at some point. If anyone who sees this is at all a sprite artist and would be willing to work their magic for me, please shoot me a DM.

Finally, I am still workshopping a better name so any suggestions are still very welcome.

Thanks for checking out this update!
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A fun little extra detail I added just now:
The boosters explode when Metal dies.
srb20049.gif
 

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Just caught up, gotta say what you have here so far looks rather interesting. Keep up the nice work~
 
Looking awesome as ever! The electric crackles and boosters have done wonders for his visual identity, and I love the aesthetic. If you're looking for another name suggestion from me, "Jet Metal Sonic" is what immediately springs to mind. You could even swap his color from black to jet to match.

Re: the super color, if you're looking for inspiration, Icezer's SuperColors Revamp is reusable and has a nice, varied selection.

One small suggestion on the visual side- if you'd like to go through the escapades, it might be worth swapping the reds on the boosters to yellow to make it match the rest of Alt Metal a little more. Buuut that's just what I'd do, personally.
 
An option to be able to toggle the boosters being there would be appreciated. They look cool, but some people may prefer to just have a regular-looking Metal Sonic with the new abilities. So far, though, I'm liking what I'm seeing, he looks fun.
 
Icezer said:
Just caught up, gotta say what you have here so far looks rather interesting. Keep up the nice work~
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Thank you. I am glad you think so and I will for sure; I'm having a lot of fun with this.

GentlemanOctopus said:
An option to be able to toggle the boosters being there would be appreciated. They look cool, but some people may prefer to just have a regular-looking Metal Sonic with the new abilities. So far, though, I'm liking what I'm seeing, he looks fun.
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I understand the sentiment, but I will probably not add a toggle for that. In my eyes they're a big part of Jet Metal's identity. Maybe I'll change my mind on that later, but for now the boosters are a core part of Jet Metal's design.

Also, as people might notice I just referred to this character as Jet Metal rather than Alt Metal, gotta respond to this:
poksonkirmar said:
Looking awesome as ever! The electric crackles and boosters have done wonders for his visual identity, and I love the aesthetic. If you're looking for another name suggestion from me, "Jet Metal Sonic" is what immediately springs to mind. You could even swap his color from black to jet to match.

Re: the super color, if you're looking for inspiration, Icezer's SuperColors Revamp is reusable and has a nice, varied selection.

One small suggestion on the visual side- if you'd like to go through the escapades, it might be worth swapping the reds on the boosters to yellow to make it match the rest of Alt Metal a little more. Buuut that's just what I'd do, personally.
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I like the ideas you put forward here. In fact, it is progress time!
Yes, progress is here. Mainly, I did a bunch of messing around with custom skincolors, which isn't easy for me due to my colour blindness but I tried my best. As it stands, regular form Jet Metal Sonic (love the name, thanks @poksonkirmar) has a slightly modified version of the "Jet" skincolor now as can be seen here:
srb20050.gif

Also, due to how I had recoloured the feet on the base sprites initially I had to re-do them partially so this took a bit more work than it might appear.

Also, initially I had lost the flashing while charging due to how it used differently coloured sprites. But thanks to some coding, the flashing is back and is now also adjustable using the custom menu as it counts as an effect colour. This is demonstrated here:
srb20053.gif

It took some finagling to get the charge meter to not also flash. I do like how the life icon does flash due to how the flashing is coded (just using colorization and swapping skincolor values).

Finally, I made a custom super colour, showcased here:
srb20054.gif

Unlike regular form, Super Jet Metal Sonic (what a mouthful) does not flash when charging, I might look into getting that to work, but the way I have flashing in regular form work now looks weird when super. I have some ideas on how to fix that but for now the charge flash is simply not applied while super.

Oh, and I have made a quick placeholder for the CSS art for now. I will admit I am not actively looking for a sprite artist for that, I am a bit too busy for that, but I am still very open to anyone offering their skills. This is the placeholder:
srb20008.png

Next steps will include all sorts of clean-up and tweaking, as well as some thorough playtesting and bug fixing.
Thanks for checking out this progress update!
 
It has been a while but some decent progress on this project has been made.
I have done a lot of bug fixing and a few other things.

One of these aforementioned things being that Super Jet Metal Sonic has been reworked a little:
  • Rather than being instantly at full charge, SJMS charges 50% faster than normal JMS,
    • This has been done to allow SJMS to still use partially charged abilities,
  • SJMS can now perform two Charge Jumps per jump.
Everything else regarding SJMS is still as described previously.

The Charge Thok and Rush Mode have also been re-balanced a little:
  • Charge Thok now uses only a portion of stored speed instead of all of it, effectively lowering its speed but improving control,
  • Rush Mode build-up is slightly slower (unless it is built up through spin dash charging).
A slight amount of vfx work has been done:
  • All jet fumes spawn as small bubbles now when their source is underwater,
    • srb20055.gif
  • An additional circle effect spawns when the boost is activated.
    • srb20057.gif

      This also applies to a boost started from Rush Mode while moving.
Finally, JMS now has a slightly lower maximum speed compared to vanilla Metal Sonic. There's some other tinkering I plan on doing when it comes to JMS's base stats, but we'll see what happens on that front.

And that is about it. Thanks for checking out this update!
 
I've been on a bit of a hiatus as videogames I'd been interested came out but I recently have come back to working on this and a pretty big overhaul is in the works as I look at this mod with fresh eyes. I'll work on writing a more full update later but for now I can say a few things:

For one, under the age old adage of "less is more" I have removed Rush Mode. While it is a lot of fun, JMS's main ability is all about air mobility and control and Rush Mode just doesn't gel with it as much as I'd like. I might revisit this decision but for now, Rush Mode is off the table. I have ideas for a replacement but we'll see how that pans out.

I have also reworked the homing attack with a custom LookForEnemies function based on CobaltBW's Fang Popgun Modifications, as well as new animations. I will post gifs later.
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srb20058.gif
And here is that gif I promised to showcase the homing attack animation change. Compared to the vanilla homing thok JMS can home in on enemies from 75% further away.
 
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Zarosguth said:
I've been on a bit of a hiatus as videogames I'd been interested came out but I recently have come back to working on this and a pretty big overhaul is in the works as I look at this mod with fresh eyes. I'll work on writing a more full update later but for now I can say a few things:

For one, under the age old adage of "less is more" I have removed Rush Mode. While it is a lot of fun, JMS's main ability is all about air mobility and control and Rush Mode just doesn't gel with it as much as I'd like. I might revisit this decision but for now, Rush Mode is off the table. I have ideas for a replacement but we'll see how that pans out.

I have also reworked the homing attack with a custom LookForEnemies function based on CobaltBW's Fang Popgun Modifications, as well as new animations. I will post gifs later.
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View attachment 76521
And here is that gif I promised to showcase the homing attack animation change. Compared to the vanilla homing thok JMS can home in on enemies from 75% further away.
Click to expand...

Dang, this looks incredible! Been following this mod's progress for a while now and I like where it's going. Hope to see JMS in Releases some time! :worry:
 
Some more tinkering has been done on the homing attack. For one, I nerfed the range. Instead of having a +75% longer range than vanilla, it is now a 33% longer range. I might nerf it a bit more but +75% range was just kind of ridiculous on top of another already powerful ability.

On top of that nerf, I have also added a new feature. It is purely cosmetic and can be turned off via the mod's menu but there is a combo counter now as demonstrated here:
srb20060.gif

The counter shows up at a 2 hit combo and counts until you hit the ground at which point the counter disappears again. Note that hitting the ground via ground bounce does not reset the combo (just as doing so does not reset the available charges).
As mentioned, this is purely cosmetic and there is nothing tied to this, not even score.

The charge abilities have also been changed a bit. Before, there were only really 3 levels of charge (none, half and full) but now there is an actual gradient to the effect of charging. Meaning that if you charge up to a quarter or a third or however much of the total charge you'll get an effect appropriate to the amount of charge built up. Granted, the differences might not always be noticeable but it'll be there in terms of calculations either way.

I also removed the smooth trails. I just didn't like how it looked when I came back to this mod after my break and so I opted to instead go with regular ghost trails.

And that's about it for now. Overall I'm very close to being able to call this addon done at least as a first version. I'll be looking everything over critically in the coming days but I expect JMS to show up in releases Soon™
 
Considering I played the Spark The Electric Jester Trilogy, this gives me way to many Fark vibes, So much that I might as well call this metal sonic: "The Metal Electric Jester" or "Electric Jester Metal" (I will be doing that for the years to come)
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Cause we got: A Fast Robotic Doppelganger with Electric abilities, A Combo Meter, A Dash Mid Air, A Charged Move for mobility, A Homing attack that gives you a fair amount of momentum, and a Golden Super Form that gives them even more speed. All we need is a Electric Jester Sonic, and a Jester Hat with circles on the blue side and we got ourselves basically discount Fark in SRB2!
 
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