pico sonic

Description

pico sonic is a partial demake of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 made with PICO-8. It features a simplified version of Angel Island Act 1 with some tweaks. Various classic Sonic games were used as reference, including the 8-bit games (Game Gear and Master System), which have sprites closer to PICO-8’s resolution and color palette, and the GBA titles, which have more clear-cut graphics.

Disclaimer

pico sonic is a fan game distributed for free and is not endorsed by Sega. Sega Games Co., Ltd owns the Sonic the Hedgehog trademark and copyrights on the original assets.

Screenshots

Context

The project was started as a personal challenge and was meant to be a fully-fledged fan game, but I eventually dropped many features to focus on Sonic’s main movements and the exploration of the stage. Consider it a technical demo with some exploration challenge.

Role

Programming

I programmed the whole game in PICO-8’s Lua flavor, using my own framework, pico-boots.

• Splash screen with sampled voice
• Main menu
• Game start and level intro cinematic
• Platformer physics following Sonic Physics Guide and TASVideos Resources for Sonic the Hedgehog
• Emerald pick-up logic and HUD
• Audio programming: dynamic music and SFX
• Stage clear animation
• Try again screen
• Credits roll

Sprite/SFX/jingle adaptation

I adapted sprites and sound effects from the original game to fit in PICO-8’s 8-bit color palette and audio synthetizer.

BGM adjustments

The core work of converting original tracks to 8-bit tunes for famitracker was done by danooct1.

My work was to convert those them to PICO-8 chiptune by simplifying them even further, selecting the most relevant channels and notes.