Hardlight Studios have released episode one of their developer diary for Sonic Forces: Speed Battle. The behind the screens feature gives insight into the games’ development process…and even teases what to expect in the future!
Andrew McMillan and Chris Southall give a retrospective of the project as well as insight into the process of making the game. There are a number of fascinating tidbits to be taken from this introductory episode.
- The game is currently in soft launch. It’s only available in a couple of countries (officially) for tuning of character balance, performance and removal of bugs
- Development began in 2016 when Hardlight saw that the mobile market was advanced enough along for a synchronous multiplayer game to be feasible.
- Assets from Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom were used for the early prototype stages, presumably before the games’ identity was finalised.
- Takashi Iizuka of Sonic Team really liked some of the ideas in this early stage, and it was at that point they followed up with a formal proposal; the decision to make it a racing game was made soon after
The footage also hides other interesting features: In one video clip, Silver can be seen among the rest of the cast on the character select screen, indicating that he may be playable in the future (Rouge also has a green background in the clip, when usually she has yellow to represent her being a rare character). Later in the video, there is a frozen image of game play on a monitor that indicates Metal Sonic may become playable as well.
The team state they are aiming to launch the game globally to be soon. In the meantime, expect another behind the scenes episode somewhere along the way.
Source: SEGA Europe (Youtube)
Not big on endless runners (or mobile games in general) but the fact that it has synchronous 4 player multiplayer is pretty darn neat. I’ll probably check it out.
It’s not an endless runner. It’s more like a racing game using the Sonic Dash game mechanics. I’m pretty sick of Sonic Dash, but his game is pretty fun. You can easily download it now, even if you don’t lice in an area that officially has it.