News/"Socket the Hedgeduck" project

News/"Socket the Hedgeduck" project!

    Although last year was a very productive year for EagleSoft Ltd, to the casual passerby to EagleSoft social media, it would appear that our development on software is going slow this beginning of the new 2016 year. However, nothing could be further from the truth; there is usually something going on behind the scenes at the software engineering laboratory!

Colonial Combat progress:

     Although I graduated from the university in December, work on Colonial Combat is still ongoing. The fighting engine is mostly finalized and coded, and I'm patiently waiting on the pixel artist to finish drawing up the remaining levels and more character art so that I can import the level art, design the levels, rig the other characters, and code in other level objects and gimmicks as necessary for the object handler script. (Drawing both art pieces for the artist are very time consuming, due to the art being original pixel art. Fun fact: each character has 115 sprite frames. 115 sprite frames * 13 characters = 1,495 total sprite frames for all characters. That's a lot of sprites for our artist to draw!)

NEW Project "Socket the Hedgeduck":

 

    In the meantime while waiting for the art to be created for Colonial Combat, I privately began work in December 2015 on a new side-project for fun and as a programming challenge: "Socket the Hedgeduck"! It's a modification (or in technical terms for the retro-technically inclined, a "ROM hack") of Sonic the Hedgehog (16-bit), which is an advanced hack which serves to be an unofficial port of Socket/Time Dominator assets (music, level layouts, art, objects, and more) to the Sonic the Hedgehog Engine. It's my first Genesis game modification since 2012, when I went on hiatus from game modification in order to focus on my university studies. It feels great again to be tinkering around with Genesis hardware, the Sonic the Hedgehog engine, and with Motorola 68k assembly programming, especially now having more formal knowledge on computer internals via a Computer Architecture class. Full details about the hack (including pictures and videos) available at the project page. Development is going full-steam ahead on this side project, and I hope to have a demo build sometime soon in Spring (released via a patch file, no concrete date on this).

-Tamkis