First, some housekeeping. Back in October, I finally finished the SonLVL object definitions; you can now find them both in the S&K disasm repo and alongside the main SonLVL download. I then used them to produce a set of full-sized level maps for both Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, which you can find at the Sonic Retro wiki.
I soon got back to working on my hack as had I longed to, and have been semi-regularly posting a dev log to YouTube. It's still not at a point where I'm ready to share all my plans for it, but you'll get the basic idea from the videos alone.
Anyway, a while ago, Sonic Retro user Travelsonic posted a thread asking for documentation on special stage object behavior. I suggested I could blog a bit about the process of adding green spheres to the special stage, and here we are. It only took me two months to get around to it!
So, what are green spheres, exactly? Green spheres are one of the two new sphere types Stealth implemented in his "Blue Spheres 2" concept demo, which eventually made its way into Sonic Mania as a bonus game:
Quite simply, green spheres function as an additional layer on top of blue spheres: just like a blue sphere becomes red when touched, a green sphere first becomes blue, and must then be touched again before it becomes red.
Pink spheres, on the other hand, are two-way teleporters that would be far more difficult to implement, not only due to the programming overhead involved, but also a much more pressing factor: the palette.
As I alluded to in an early post, all four sphere types use the same set of sprites with different color palettes, in order to cut down on VRAM usage. Specifically, the first half of each palette line corresponds to the red, white, blue and yellow spheres respectively, in which the white palette replaces two otherwise duplicate colors with shades of red, revealing a star design that is invisible in every other sphere type.
And therein lies the rub: this design implies that there can only be four different sphere types at play at any given time, which means that if we want to add a new type, it will have to replace one of the existing colors.
Famously, the goal of the special stage is to Get Blue Spheres, so obviously those cannot be replaced. And since blue spheres become red spheres when touched, red spheres cannot be replaced either. The conclusion is that in order to implement green spheres, we must sacrifice either white spheres or yellow spheres.
Over the course of this series, I will show you how to implement green spheres over yellow spheres, though you could easily go the other way with presumably little complications. I will also implement a method of marking individual stages as green sphere stages, which if present enables all the additional logic surrounding green spheres, and if omitted preserves their behavior as ordinary yellow spheres.
Continued in part 2!
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