Year 3 in Review

As Sonic TTH enters its fourth year, let's take a trip down memory lane to appreciate all that's happened in the last twelve months.

Game Changers

A substantial amount of blogging on this site has been devoted to the development of 1.4.x, so I won't go into too much detail here. I'll just say that response for opening up the game to more player options was very positive.

A lesser documented undertaking was the revamp of the logo and cover art, which could very well be a blog post of its own. I'll just share that the logo text color went through several iterations before landing on a color that I liked. It wasn't until a while after I finalized the design that I realized I'd subconsciously reinvented the wheel and rediscovered that pink is a natural compliment to the primary colors of Team Sonic. Where have we seen that before...?

I also had the slightly nerve wracking experience of adding Max to the existing cover art. My art style is much different from Eric's, the original commissioned artist, and I didn't want to detract from the awesomeness of the original image. But I daresay I did a decent job of slipping the character into the background like he'd always been there.

Has he always been there...?

A Growing Community

After a quiet first two years, word of mouth began to coalesce around Sonic TTH and resulted in increased attention from some unexpected places in 2024.

During 2023, one of the most consistently submitted questions I'd received about the project was if it had a dedicated Discord server. For a time, my answer was simply no. Partly because I did not feel that community engagement was substantial enough at the time to warrant a dedicated server, but also because managing such an endeavor by myself was daunting. Truth be told, community building and management is not my strong suit, and coupled with the amount of bandwidth I was spending just developing the game, I was in no hurry to build a Discord community from the ground up.

Enter ChozoLord, a nice guy who saw the need for a community hub and, with my blessing, put together the whole server by himself. Thanks to his hard work, the server launched in March of 2024 and has become an indispensable asset in growing the game's community, which currently has over 100 members, so thanks again Chozo!

You can find a link to join the Discord on the footer of this website!

Signal Boost

Perhaps the most surreal part of year three was seeing the game get shout-outs and documentation from various places.

The first of these (as far as I'm aware) was a modest shout-out in a Spring Community Showcase from the fine people at Chaos Creators. While on stream, the presenter showed off the website and sparked interest in the future of Sonic TTH alongside many other promising fan projects.

This video helped the game's reputation SPRING forward! (I'll see myself out).

The next shout out was probably the strangest. It came from 4chan. Yes, that place. But also not, as it was technically on their tabletop wiki, 1d6chan, rather than their boards. The excerpt, taken from the entry on the Sonic series, is provided here in full:

Apparently people associate this game with being "crunchy." I'm partial to "crispy" myself.

Despite the infamous nature of the source, seeing the game called out in a self referential wiki with links to tertiary articles brings a certain satisfaction. It calls to mind the long hours I used to spend on similarly meta-textual wikis such as TV Tropes, wondering what it would be like for something I made to end up there one day. Plus, being indirectly called autistic is possibly the highest praise I could ever receive from such a place, so I wear it as a badge of honor.

But the most unexpected and most significant call-out was from none other than (checks notes) Polygon?! I think there's a few steps missing here. Shouldn't there be coverage on smaller sites first? No? Ok! It seems that a Polygon staffer was inspired by the release of Sonic Movie 3 in December and gave Sonic TTH a shout-out alongside the equally excellent fan RPG Rings and Running Shoes.

NO WAY! NO WAY?

In the days following the publication of the article, there was a substantial uptick in traffic on this site, far more than I expected this game to receive in the foreseeable future. Although that surge has tapered off to more typical levels of activity, the effect it had on word of mouth publicity surrounding the game will surely be felt for some time!

What's Next?

Rest assured, more content is coming. Super forms are still the proverbial white whale of the rules that I've been pursuing, but it will require rigorous playtesting before I'm satisfied with sharing it with the world.

I've also been exploring rules for structured combat encounters within vehicles, similar to the "Sky Chase" segments throughout the series. That, along with codifying vehicles in general is a pet project that will probably constitute a feature update of its own.

No telling which of these will constitute 1.5, or even if 1.5 will release this year. But stay tuned, same Sonic time, same Sonic channel!