Inspiration

Conceptually my inspiration was Bongo Cat. A popular widget found on the steam store that counts your clicks with a cute little animation. It's design is so unintrusive yet it so satisfying. Aesthetically, my inspiration was sonic, particularly my favorite Sonic game, Sonic Mania. That game has the most stunning pixel art ever and I always thought Sonic's 8-bit but also very 3-Dimensionally round style was so satisfying to look at.

What it does

You type, sonic runs! every button press is a tiny burst momentum that will deplete if you do not keep typing. It is made for when you know you will be doing a lot of typing and you need to get into the zone. The idea is that it encourages you to write because being in the zone with sonic dashing across the bottom of your screen is so satisfying. I've also found Sonic is nice company when I'm just browsing the web, playing a game, or doing whatever on my computer.

How we built it

After getting the sprites, I made it so each click increases velocity, and each tick (100 per second) moves sonic forward that velocity and slightly decreases velocity. with a horizontally moving window similar to how it would be dragged with the mouse. And based on velocity, his animations play, that way the legs actually move with the speed, ie legs slow to a stop when he is going at minimum speed and vice versa. Additionally, different velocity cut offs where used for the different running speed animations.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest issue was the first issue that needed to be handled. How do I get good looking sprites. For some reason, so many sprite sheets you find online are not in a grid, so actually finding the dimensions of each sprite would be hours of clicking. But, there was the website Sprite Cow that automatically found the pixel dimensions of sprites upon a single click.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The main thing I am proud of was seeing this through. Seeing passion projects through has always been a challenge for me, and while I do want to add more to Sonic Writer, I can proudly say I finished a working version 1.

What we learned

I learned when designing your own program it is absolutely necessary to write down a to-do list about what you intend to do. For as simple as this project was, there were dozens of small ideas that would come to mind as well as bugs I knew I needed to fix.

What's next for Sonic Writer

I do really want to play around with the numbers and see how user's like the acceleration and deceleration of Sonic. But, I think the most exciting feature that will come to V2 is character selection for tails and knuckles.