Sonic Mania2017
Lead Designer · levels and special stages
Six years after Sonic 2 HD, a Sonic game with SEGA's name on it.
I was Lead Designer on Sonic Mania, which meant leading level design and designing the special stages. PagodaWest Games made it with Christian Whitehead, the game's lead developer and lead programmer, and with Headcannon, for SEGA. It came out in August 2017. This page is my part of it. A game like this takes a whole team, and the artists, programmers, musicians and designers I worked with are in every level here.
Every act started on paper. I laid the levels out in pencil on graph paper, to scale, but never from a plan. I'd draw a stretch, play it in my head, and follow where the momentum wanted to go next.
Ideas came from wherever I happened to be. The boss arena at the end of Press Garden Zone is the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon, which I crossed most weeks while we were making the game. The towers went in more or less as they stand, in the zone's green and tile.
I did not want to be held to every rule the original games had set. The question I kept asking was what their designers would have done with 32-bit hardware. That question shaped my layouts: routes you miss the first time through, set pieces that would not have fit before.
The other half of the job was the special stages: chasing a UFO in 3D for the Chaos Emeralds, and the Blue Sphere bonus stages at the checkpoints.