Sonic Advance New Horizons
Advancing the Game Boy Advance Sonic games with new content customizations!
Summary
Sonic Advance New Horizons is a multimedia modding toolbox built for the Game Boy Advance Sonic games that uses a combination of Game Boy Advance hacking tools, rom modifications, and real-time processing software to create brand new experiences. Two of the primary projects are standalone level modifications and Sonic Frontiers Advanced. The former takes individual zones from various Sonic Advance titles and transforms their visual atmospheres while the latter is a complete re-imagining of Sonic Frontiers on the Game Boy Advance by using multiple GBA Sonic games in tandem with extensive modifications. This includes custom menu animations, transitions, UI blends, sound effects, soundtrack packs, and plenty more. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Sonic Advance New Horizons YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
The development of Sonic Advance New Horizons started with Sonic Advance 1 as a visual modification demo to see what was possible with altering the palettes of the game. Documentation about modding the Game Boy Advance Sonic games has been incredibly slim-to-none for years with the only exception being Sonic Battle where community members figured out how to import custom character sprites. The only tools that I had to work with were general use Game Boy Advance modding tools and Sonic Advance Editor, a level editor built for the Sonic Advance games. Unfortunately it only supports Sonic Advance 1 and is admittedly challenging to use. So, I stuck with modding the visuals of Sonic Advance 1 until I eventually became curious about modifying its audio or controlling the sound mapping. Once I had modified the palette of the game and the audio, I became curious about what else could be done. That’s when I created a tone modification of Chaos Angel from Sonic Advance 3 as I was learning more about emulation and emulators such mGBA. Seeking the highest fidelity video and audio that could be rendered from a Game Boy Advance game, I created “Riot of the Relics”, a 4K visual modification of Chaos Angel that captured the game audio in the highest sampling possible and preserved in WAV 32 Float format.
With both of these projects on the table, I wanted to officialize the set of tools that I was curating for the specific use case of modifying Game Boy Advance Sonic games. That is when Sonic Advance New Horizons was born and the scope of project work went from simple audio or visual modifications to building out an entire playable proof-of-concept experience. This came in the form of Sonic Frontiers Advanced, a project that aimed to take every Sonic title of the Game Boy Advance and crotchet a Sonic Frontiers experience with them. This saw an introduction of weather effects, times of day, interconnected level areas, super forms, brand new animated VFX, stage transitions, custom SFX, music from Sonic Frontiers, and plenty more. The Sonic Advance trilogy games were used for regular levels while Sonic Battle and Sonic Pinball Party were used for the battle system and special stages. This worked well in mimicking the systems of Sonic Frontiers' gameplay.
With both of these projects on the table, I wanted to officialize the set of tools that I was curating for the specific use case of modifying Game Boy Advance Sonic games. That is when Sonic Advance New Horizons was born and the scope of project work went from simple audio or visual modifications to building out an entire playable proof-of-concept experience. This came in the form of Sonic Frontiers Advanced, a project that aimed to take every Sonic title of the Game Boy Advance and crotchet a Sonic Frontiers experience with them. This saw an introduction of weather effects, times of day, interconnected level areas, super forms, brand new animated VFX, stage transitions, custom SFX, music from Sonic Frontiers, and plenty more. The Sonic Advance trilogy games were used for regular levels while Sonic Battle and Sonic Pinball Party were used for the battle system and special stages. This worked well in mimicking the systems of Sonic Frontiers' gameplay.
Reflection
Sonic Advance New Horizons is one of the most extensive modding projects that I have ever done along with Luigi’s Mansion Nightmare. Using hacking tools in tandem with hex editing and real time processing mods allowed me to simulate an approximation of what Sonic Frontiers would have functioned like if it was a Game Boy Advance game instead of a ninth generation game title. Being able to engage with UI design, motion graphics, video editing, audio engineering, graphics illustration, and so many other aspects all within the same project was simply exhilarating. Not only was I able to finally breathe new experiences into game titles that for the longest have seen next to no new content, but I figured out that it was indeed possible to use a combination of traditional hacking tools and real-time processing software to achieve transformative results.