The Ideal Garden?!

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ManifoldFacades
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The Ideal Garden?!

Post by ManifoldFacades »

Ello, ello. I don't comment much on here nowadays, do I? Or at all, really..Oh well!

Allow me to ask of you a question I once asked the Discord. If you were given full, creative liberties to make a Chao Garden. Either for a new Sonic game, or a remake, or just a standalone thing...What features would you have? Personally, I'd probably add a lot more variety in terms of what Chao Gardens look like. SA1 did them the best, in my opinion, and I'd love to have a Chao Garden set in Angel Island, on a space station, maybe even in areas inspired by other SEGA games. Heck, why stop there? Maybe there'd be a way to get decorations and furnishings that you could place and put wherever, allowing the Chao to interact with them.

I dunno. I'm sure there's been countless different posts like this, but I figured I'd throw my hat into the ring. What do you folks think? :thinking:
Knowledge will give you power, but character respect. - Bruce Lee
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by Tails Prower »

Personally, the ideal Chao Garden should have features taken from SA2: Kindergarten, Health Center, ect. The garden would be in some place, like Green Hill or Angel Island. There should be trees with delicious fruit in the neutral garden, and an entrance for races and built-in karate (Chao Race and Karate without downloading features).
Also, there should be 3 eggs in the garden, and a hero and dark garden. The hero garden could be in an ambiance like in the space or something related to the sky, maybe a space station, or in a big cloud. The fruits would be nuts or hero fruit. The dark garden would be ambiented like in an entrance of a cave (Inside cave there would be a big lake), and dark garden fruits, and adding a nigth theme, to make it spooky, but not too much.

That would be the ideal garden(s) for me.
Why we cannot have a Sonic Adventure 3? I mean... it could be cool...stop saying werid things, SEGA, and make the freaking sequel!!
:thinking: :herosurprise: :darkblink:
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by ManifoldFacades »

Yoooooo...Gonna be honest, that's pretty dang neat. Never thought of stuff like that.

I will admit, I kinda liked the Hero Garden from SA2. The Dark Garden....not so much. It was a bit boring, as far as I'm concerned.
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by Jeffery Mewtamer »

Some things I'd want:

Base system built upon SA2B GC.

Addition of Luck and Intelligence types.

Small animal roster including everything from both SA2B and SADX and then some.

Color heterogeny can result in blended, striped, or splotchy coats in addition to the solid(monotone) and evolution dependant markings(two-tone. E.g. a chao with alleles for black and orange and stripes might have tigger striping, a chao with alleles for white, pink, and blended would look monotone, but be of a paler pink than a pink monotone, and a chao with alleles for red, blue, and splotchy might have a red coat withh blue splotches(think cowhide, but different colors) This also means you can have things like a purple/yellow two-tone who's base coat is purple and always has yellow markings regardless of evolution(green/normal two-tone would produce the classic green two-tone). And perhaps other combinations(like maybe splotches requires two splotchy alleles, but one splotchy with monotone/no markings produces smaller, more consistently shaped spots.

A wider variety of fruit that provide different stat boosts/decreases.

More Chao Race courses that aren't just short segments of the full course, perhaps with the occasional off shoot.

Various team modes for Karate, both for multiple team mates in the ring at once and for stagging out. Perhaps a gauntlet mode where a Chao fights until defeated with the number of oppoenents per round increasing every few rounds. Perhaps some additional rings or alternate win conditions(Such as a boxing ring with no ring outs, Kendo-style points for various kinds of hits, having to knockdown or pin an opponent for a given count, etc.

Other Chao competitions, perhaps drawing some inspiration from HGSS Ppokeathlon or just adapting common team sports to 3-chao teams on small fields.

More gardens with a wider array of themes(possible themes include Plaze, beach, mountain spring, meadow, ancient shrine, graveyard, lakeside, forest, underground, space station, just to name a few)... I'm thinking at least 12 gardens in total.

More Chao per garden.

Chao Transporter upgrade to allow you to move Chao between gardens, a la the PC Storage in Pokemon. Perhaps have more boxes than gardens or the option to swap out the residents of a garden in one fell swoop or assign multiple boxes to each garden(like the box backgrounds in Some pokemon games, but you can enter the box and it'll have that garden as the environment, sorry if I'm not making sense).

Garden Customization/Custom Gardens. A simple example of such is, for the Plaza garden(based on Station square Garden), instead of being stuck with the one patch of grass on one side and the fountain on the other, perhaps you expand it greatly, have grass beds with trees all around the perimeter with a large fountain in the middle, or maybe you have a large fountain at either end and a grass path through the middle, or maby a small fountain in each corner with a large central grass bed, just to give a few examples. The customization tool might consist of a 24*24 square grid on which you can define a few basic boundaries(such as circles/elipses bound by grid lines or straight lines or quartercircles/elipses connecting gird points) and within each boundary, you can specify height, tile type, or place a set piece).

For an example of using the tool for a custom plaza garden:

1. You set the garden boundaries to the full 24*24, and set them to plaza walls.s

2. You mark off a 20*20 square in the center of the garden, adding diagonals splitting 2*2 squares at each corner, forming an Octogon whose vertical and horizontal sides are 16 and whose diagonal sides are 2sqrt(2).

3. You set the inside of the octagon to a height of 0 and to plaza tiles and the outside to grass nad a height of 3". This gives you a perimeter of grass and a central floor, the octagon forming the boundary between the floor and the grass beds.

4. You draw a circle of diameter 12 in the center, set it's eight to minus 12" and set it to plaza pool, forming a circular pool of a reasonable depth for Chao.

5. You draw a circle of Diameter six in the middle of the pool, set the height to 12" and to plaza tile. This creates a raised platform in the middle ofthe pool.

6. You pick a set piece consisting of five Chao, a normal in the center, with Run, Power, Fly, and swim at the cardinal points with a circular base. You configure it to have water powering from the Chao's mouths and center it on the central platform and scale it to a diameter of 4, letting the edge of the platform form a wet bench surrounding the fountain.

7. You pick a setpiece with columns and a stone roof, which you cale to a diameter of 8 and center over the fountain.
8. Finally, you configure the ceiling to skylights.

Alternatively, a Beach garden config might be somthing like:

1. Set the garden boundaries to 24*24, the walls to invisible and the ceiling to open sky.

2. Use a combination of quarter circles and quarter elipses to draw out a representation of Sonic's head. Set the inside to sand and the outside to ocean, giving you a sandy island in the shape of Sonic's head.

2. add a couple of firepit set pieces to represent Sonic's eyes and a line of erosion smoothed rocks to outline his mouth.

3. Dot the land scape with other assorted beach stuff.

etc.

Of course, the game would allow blending of themes, defining different assets for different parts of the walls and ceiling(want a Garden in the crater of an extinct volcano? make most of the ceiling Cavern ceiling with an obsidian finish and then cut out a circle of open sky. Want a cliff-side vista? define a quarter circle from opposite corners, define one side as rocky gorund, the other as abyss with wooden fences for the boundary, and set the walls inside to cliffside and outside to open sky... and perhaps a way to share gardens. Oh, and I was thinking each square of the grid corresponds to something like 1 meter or 5 feet, the former taken from Sonic's height and being the meter base unit for area, the latter being a common scaling factor for D&D battle maps

Around each of the preset gardens, there's a region of thematically matching "wilds" into which the player can venture with one or more Chao to explore and gather items... Think Hey You, Pikachu. Possibly procedural generated and changing over time to keep things from getting too repetitive.

And of course, the thing I'd want most: For it to be blind playable. Admittedly, this might be the hardest to figure out. At the very least, would need a system for describing a Chao's appearance that isn't just listing breed and evolution, making all on-screen text voiced in some way, adding some means of navigating the gardens or describing what Chao are doing.

Oh, another: Give Chao some actual AI and awareness of each other. Nothing fancy(it should run locally without lag after all), but something morsophisticated than "pick random location in garden, go there, do random action from list of available actions" or "Player does x, Chao does y in response" and it would be nice if Chao actually interacted with each other instead of their interactions being limited to the "pick location, go there, do thing" algorithm leading to coincidences. Perhaps include some kind of praise/scold functionality and enough memory that if Sonic scolds a Chao for stealing food, but Shadow praises them, they might only try stealing food when the player is Sonic if Sonic is turned away, but might drop the sneakiness in front of Shadow, and for other characters, their behavior depends on whether the character reminds the food stealing Chao more of SOnic or more of Shadow.
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by Tails Prower »

Everybody is having good ideas
Why we cannot have a Sonic Adventure 3? I mean... it could be cool...stop saying werid things, SEGA, and make the freaking sequel!!
:thinking: :herosurprise: :darkblink:
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by AugustChao »

If we ever got a new Chao Garden, I would want it to have all the base mechanics and features from SA2B but with some additions like new minigames, new animals and items, the addition of Luck and Intelligence as viewable stats with their own types of Chao, and maybe a new texture or two to make breeding a bit more interesting. I've also always really liked the idea of them making Gardens for each type (Run, Swim, Fly, and Power) to go along with the ones we already have in SA2, and I also think it would be cool if they also made Gardens for Luck and Intelligence as well as a special Garden for Chaos Chao.

One other feature I'd like to see come back from the Gamecube version of SA2B is connectivity with another game, and I think if they ever made a Chao mobile game, I would be most interested in it if it came out alongside and had connectivity with a console Chao Garden in the same way as the Tiny Chao Garden. I also think it would be neat if the Chao Garden was included as a side thing in a Sonic Adventure Duology thing with remastered versions of both SA1 and SA2 and you could bring items and stuff from both games.
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by ManifoldFacades »

Alright, so I think we need to have SEGA look at all of these and get some really good ideas.

We're practically doing all the work for them! Lol.
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Re: The Ideal Garden?!

Post by Jeffery Mewtamer »

^Not really. In the grand scheme of things, ideas are cheap and it takes quite a bit of effort to go from concept to fully realized and polished game... and quite frankly, Sega, or whoever they handed the porting job over to, didn't do that well with any version of the Chao Gardens after SADx GC... The PC versions might be considered the definitive way to play the Adventure games if you can't get hold of a Dreamcast, but that's largely due to hacks to fix things that were broken or went unfixed in the process of porting from Dreamcast to Gamecube and then to Windows... hacks we wouoldn't have the benefit of if Sega decided to port the adventure games to current gen consoles... and I would think expanding on the concept would be harder than simply porting it.
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