Sonic Origins Studio
Celebrating the classic legacy of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise!
Summary
Sonic Origins Studio was a community project built in anticipation of Sonic Origins back in 2022. It served as a resource library for designers and developers who were interested in modifying Sonic Origins and making content for it or about it. Resources include promotional assets, music files, file system guides, and more. Several design demos were built to showcase the applications of the resource library and what the community was made to inspire. The project ran for a total of five months before being shelved due to the mixed reception of Sonic Origins upon release. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Sonic Origins Studio YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
The project began development as a Discord community where designers and developers of various backgrounds could come together to study, modify, and celebrate Sonic Origins and other Sonic the Hedgehog game collection titles. The community would serve as a resource library and forum for collaboration or creative inspiration where members could bring together their different avenues of expertise to break down the game, play around with it, and make new content for it or from it. This process was incredibly long and took months of research and development since materials for Sonic Origins prior to its release were only more widely available closer to its day of release. Despite that, the framework of the community was built with functioning command lists, bots, channel directories, custom emotes, graphical illustrations, and even some early ripped content from pieces of official Sonic Origins media. This process most likely would have been twice as long if I did not already have an extensive history with building Discord servers and other web based communities due to the fact that many of the components I was re-encountering had changed in different regards since the last time that I made use of them. But building the infrastructure of the community and creating demonstrations of its use case was just one step. The second step required a lot of promotion, advertising, and social media management to assemble a crowd who would want to experience the product. This saw me collaborating with a number of other digital community engineers, web developers, and social media managers who were interested in the gaming space, and in particular, Sonic Origins.
Reflection
Sonic Origins Studio ran for several months after being opened to the public but was soon closed down due to the mixed reception that Sonic Origins received on its release. Due to highly questionable advertising, unfriendly pricing strategies, under-developed content, poor quality control, and internal frustrations between development teams, Sonic Origins landed with a very modest arrival. This unfortunately lead to Sonic Origins Studio becoming stagnant as many of the players and fans that it was expecting never showed up. The bulk of content produced in association with the project were playthrough days done by me where I would showcase the vanilla content of the game or community mods such as Sonic Origins Ultra Fix (which was showcased far later as a remake of the original palythrough series). Not to mention that the presentation of Sonic Origins was not all too interesting or new since it ran on an engine and libraries that had already been tinkered with for years by those with far more experience and documentation. There also was little to no interest in previous Sonic game collections such as Sonic Jam or Sonic Mega Collection, so for most individuals Sonic Origins was sort of just a “nice pack of old games” in essence. This made it hard to keep the speedrunning leaderboards active, find new projects to put in the weekly showcase, add new content to the resource libraries, or gain a wider audience.