Sonic City.

You love it and so do our Japanese friends - notice how Sonic Channel’s wallpapers are using the English text descriptions from City? Yes, SONICTEAM and SOJ like City too, which as you might expect means a lot to it’s guardian, yours truly.

However, as you know since Sonic City, er, keeled over backwards bellowing hysterically for mercy at the end of A Race To Name from the traffic its been conspicuously absent from general items. You will also be aware if you keep track of my fansite doings and of course here on the Blognik (you ARE paying attention, yes?) that I’ve been in the process of getting things down on paper for a new iteration of the site.

So the latest: I can tell you while there’ll be some visual changes there won’t be much by way of any major graphical changes. Boo hiss.

But it now seems pretty set that the site will be vastly expanded upon - though this won’t be obvious at first exactly and it will also thankfully, for me at least, be MUCH easier to update with new items. Much as others may like slaving over a hot, crazily complex nest of xml files, er, I don’t. Sorry.

Another annoyance of the old Sonic City was various sections were somewhat destined to hit a dead-end anyway. The characters section for instance was such, as we would require Sonic Channel-style artwork for any new entrant. Considering Channel (City’s Japanese counterpart) has stopped doing that style you can see the problem.

I won’t even start on how many problems the Games Archive gave us with those timeframe sections: 1991-1994, etc.

The aim of course is to incorporate as much as possible to tie in with the Content Management System (CMS) operating on the new SEGA West site. Now Sonic City is going to require a lot of reconfiguration in this regard and I and the SOE online design team sat through a meeting the other day where we thrashed out various details and argued various cases for this that and the other.

One of the things I’m realllly high on is that we get the Downloads section sorted for you guys; this would hold things like the you’d see on Channel but a little bit of a different style. When I’ve had a spare second I’ve been putting together some designs for things which I hope you’ll like; I’ve always found that the Sonic fanbase have been of a “We don’t CARE what it is - Gimme gimme!” persuasion when it comes to media. Heh. But I know you’re appreciative of truly cool stuff, so hopefully you’ll dig what I’m considering.

So, lots of work to do. There’s a change eh?

Sonic City is looking to go up in phases - which I still have to time naturally - but hopefully we’ll be going back live with the first of these near the end of July. This date is obviously not set in stone, but like Big the Cat it’s not going to be shifted easily.

I’m going to be keeping you up to speed (where I can) on our progress with the site, mainly because I’d have thought you’d be interested to know.

“Let the speed mend it!”
AAUK

Hi everyone, from now up until launch you’ll be finding on this blog every two weeks or so a guest blog from one of the production team behind upcoming DS game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.  These will range from people at BioWare, SEGA Europe, America and even maybe Japan from testers to producers and from top to bottom.

The first off is Randall Bishop from our friends at BioWare, I’ll let him take over from here.

5 Reasons Why Working on Sonic Chronicles is Fun

Hello Sonic Fans! My name is Randall Bishop and I am the Assistant Brand Manager for the upcoming Nintendo DS game Sonic Chronicles.  I work for a company called BioWare who is in charge of developing the game.  I am the caretaker of the game when it comes to external communications, advertising plans, and messaging.

In other words, I am the marketing guy from a developer’s perspective.  I also work very closely with the great people at Sega who are publishing the game.  My typical day mostly revolves around writing emails, talking on the phone and attending meetings.  But don’t let that fool you, my job can be pretty exciting!  So I have made a list of the top 5 reasons why working on Sonic Chronicles is fun.  

1. Sonic’s universe is incredibly vast – The sheer amount of detail that has been put into the Sonic universe throughout the years is astounding!  Sega has obviously put in a lot of time and effort in creating this universe and it shows.    You could spend an enormous amount of time familiarizing yourself with all the different stories, characters, and locations from past games and comics. It’s great to get lost in this world and discover how much fiction has been written on it.  I think its quite an achievement for anyone to become an expert on Sonic the Hedgehog!
 
2. The art team here at BioWare is amazing – After our artists, I am luckily the first person to see the artwork produced for Sonic Chronicles; and that artwork is truly amazing! Once I get my hands on a piece of it, I circulate it throughout our marketing department so we can ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahh’ over it.  Our favorite type of artwork to look at is the world maps.  The world maps are masterfully hand drawn and have an incredible amount of detail.  We put these maps up on my 24 inch monitor and with our fingers trace out the path we want to take through the level and point out all the places we want to explore. 
 
3. The game is amazing - Probably the coolest part of my job is that I often get to play the game in order to capture screenshots and videos.  Let me switch gears for a second and not speak as a marketer, but as a gamer…  Sonic Chronicles is great!  For example: Burning around the map as Sonic while being chased by monsters, only to escape by flying across chasms as Rouge the bat is a blast.  Also, exploring the maps to collect all the Chao eggs is pretty rewarding.  Especially once the eggs hatch and you get to bring those Chao into battle with you and use their powers against your enemies.  The combat is also really engaging since you can unlock devastating power moves by having the right combination of characters in your party.  I also enjoy customizing the characters in my party so they fit my play style. 

4. Its much less serious than our past work - Our past titles at BioWare have been fairly serious and had a more adult oriented theme, so it is refreshing to work within a world with a lighter tone.  It brings back the raw enjoyment of gaming with all the bright colors, punchy sounds, and tongue in cheek dialogue.  This makes you feel like a kid again; which we often have to do since to design a game for a kid, you need to think like one (What could be more fun?) 

5. Small enthusiastic development team - One thing that I am not used to from my past marketing roles is working with people who are my age.  Fortunately, many of the people who are developing Sonic Chronicles are around the same age as me.  This means that the office culture is enthusiastic, innovative, fresh thinking, and very inspired to work with Sonic since the developers grew up playing these games.  However, even though some of the members on the team may be younger, every member has a wealth of experience and are among the most talented in the industry.  So we have a lot of fun, and board room meetings are not of the traditional type.  It is not uncommon to start a meeting by talking about the latest games we have played, then be interrupted by a Nerf gun attack while we are drawing concept pictures of Sonic and his friends on a whiteboard.  Also, the development team is fairly small, so everybody knows each other well.  This makes work more like hanging out with your friends while creating something really cool.  

Those in a nutshell are the five main reasons why working on Sonic Chronicles has been so enjoyable thus far.  There are numerous other reasons, but if I was to list them all this would no longer be a blog – it would be a full website!  Fortunately for our fans, I believe that the amount of pleasure we have had making the game will be dwarfed by the amount of fun they will have playing Sonic Chronicles.

You can check them out at:  http://flickr.com/photos/segaeurope/sets/72157605086471726/ 

Have a good weekend!

AAUK

Hi guys, following my victory at last over Sonic 1 I’ve had to update my profile “facts” if you’re interested - but what I’m on here today about is that I’ve just uploaded over 60 photos to our Flickr account of various bits of merchandise (mostly Sonic related).

This all comes from a massive box of items that were owed me from the main SEGA HQ which was dragged into SEGAAUK HQ last Friday. I never realised there were so many Sonic X t-shirts created, o_0* now naturally most of you will be too big to actually wear such but at least you can see all these Japanese/US designs. There are also some real oddments that might interest you.

Take this one for instance - it’s a T-shirt emblazoned with the Sonic 06 logo - but clearly shows artwork for Sonic & The Secret Rings. FEEL THE HEAVENS TREMBLE!

And look at this, it’s a DREAM KEY - 3.0 even - we’ve still got loads of these at SEGAAUK HQ, they belong to the Customer Support boys. So if for some reason you ever need one… (we’ve got 3.1 as well).

There are other things too though Sonic related, I recently bought Sonic Jam on the Saturn solely for the “museum”.

Then there’s mini finger skateboard - remember those? Well it was actually a give away for Sonic Riders and it’s travelled a long way to get here.

Clearly the best though, ignoring my Shadow plushie OBVIOUSLY, is this sketch we received in the post as a thankyou to the Community Team (*cough*me*cough*) for the work done with NiGHTS and NiGHTSintoDreams.com.

Great isn’t it? You can check out all 101 (crumbs)  items of “SEGA Merchandise”on our Flickr account at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/segaeurope/sets/72157604344751201/

AAUK