Coincidentally, today also marks my 200th post on this blog. Holy goodness, I swear I did not plan this far ahead when I started the blog nine months ago. It's been a lot of work writing a post every weekday, but also a lot of fun, especially when I was able to answer your questions. Doing so has made me learn a lot of things I previously did not know.
To all of my readers, especially those who have contributed to the discussion in the comments: thank you so much.
I would like to take this opportunity to make a couple of announcements. At various times, people have approached me on Twitter, YouTube, and even the Sonic Retro forums, asking me to work on a new version of Sonic 3 Complete, or to release my work in some other form. I'm not really interested in the former, because if I had my way, half of the stuff in that ROM hack would be thrown out, which would be a tremendous disservice to everyone who's ever contributed to it, as well as everyone who had played the previous versions.
I've also been reluctant on pursuing the latter, because "Sonic 3 Complete except with a lot less features" is a hard sell, both to the developer and the consumer. However, over the past few months I've been doing a lot of brainstorming, and I feel that I now have enough original ideas and a sufficiently unique direction to warrant pursuing them.
I'm excited to announce that starting today, I will begin development of my own Sonic 3 hack.
Which brings me to my second announcement. Like I've said, writing this blog has been very fun, but it has also been a challenge, and I have learned the hard way that I am not good with deadlines, even when it's doing something which I enjoy. Combined with the time I'll need to work on the hack, I am hereby suspending regular updates to this blog.
Let me make that perfectly clear: the blog isn't going anywhere. I still have more than 100 potential blog posts in my bag, and they will materialize sooner or later. Plus, working on a hack is bound to give me even more subject matter to work with. I just won't be posting regularly for the time being, that's all.
To that effect, I would advise you to follow me on Twitter, since I'll tweet out each new blog post. I'll probably also post some hack updates on there, and I promise I'll try to cut down on the memes.
I've gone back and tidied up the formatting on the older blog posts, and over the coming weeks I'd like to make the tags more helpful, as well as optimize the first animated GIFs I made, because they weigh a ton. Next thing I'll probably do however is write an updated about page to reflect the current nature of the blog, as well as the hack.
Again, thank you so much for reading this far, and I hope you'll stick around -- this ride ain't over by a long shot.
congratulations on getting this milestone!
ReplyDeleteI'm happy with how you managed to have regular updates for this long, even though they were inevitably going to end at some point.
Well, this gives me a lot to say. And to think I was celebrating the 24th anniversary by playing Sonic 3 again, now with a new appreciation thanks to this blog. I've had fun for the past several months. I've also noticed how you've updated your posts to use a block quote format rather than simple indentation and italics, newer GIFs are closer to 60 FPS, the joke at the end of the "Too tall Knuckles" post has been changed... this has come a long way, and I imagine the slower post speed will bring some advantages too.
ReplyDeleteI've actually considered working on some hacks myself, although I'm starting with creating vanilla "patched-up" versions of Sonic 1, 2, and 3 as bases for when I make them. As for the hacks, I'm definitely interested in playing yours when it comes out, and I'd be perfectly happy if future S3C updates are resolved to IPS patches that merely fix a few bugs here and there, but even that is Tiddles's call.
I'd follow you on Twitter if I had one. and I liek my meems :(
Congratsss
ReplyDeleteWell great job with 200 consecutive posts! It is understandable that weekdaily posts are no longer as I know I wouldn't have been able to get that far!
ReplyDeleteThat leaves me with two questions:
How often will you be creating new posts?
When you mentioned you were working on a Sonic 3 hack do you mean S3A or S3B?
New posts will come as I feel like making them. No set schedule, but I'd like to post something at least once a week. We'll see.
DeleteI'm starting the hack from the latest revision of the game, like a sane person. However, making that S3A disassembly is still well within my plans.
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but do you think you're going to add knuckles gliding and climbing in competition mode in this hack?
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone even play Competition? I'd remove the mode altogether, but it'd be a shame to lose all the cool graphics and music...
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