The Hotdog Laserhouse

Generally speaking, I walked away from FNAF. I only really had a passing interest in that franchise anyway; it was mostly something I watched Markiplier play, because Mark was good at digging in and figuring out sound cues and kind of showing every inch of those games.

Then Mark was a little too aggressive at defending Pewdiepie, after Pewdiepie caused like his sixth or seventh controversy, so I stopped watching Markiplier and stopped ingesting new FNAF games. On top of that, Scott Cawthon got really weird when people found out he was a Trump donor, so it became even easier to just write that entire series off and never think about it again, especially since it signaled a major change in the look and feel of those games.

(And like, Scott still gets money from new games, kids. He gets writing credits on the movies. He’s still active. So where do you think he’s putting some of that money?)

Similarly, Harry Potter was easy for me to drop. I never finished the movies – my mom and I got up to the next-to-last one, and never got around to watching it. At some point we ordered the wrong movie, saw one of them out of order, and it ruined the whole thing (I think we skipped Half-Blood Prince by accident and watched Deathly Hallows Part 1).

Then people started getting increasingly loud about J.K. Rowling. First, just that she was a hack and there were better alternatives (Earthsea, Disc World, etc.). Then, that some of her books contained toxic representations of stereotypes. Then, Rowling herself started getting kind of weird. Now she openly brags about funding hateful legislation against LGBTQ people. So that’s a hard nope from me.. I’ll never get to see Harry fulfill his dreams of joining The Wizard FBI.

There may be more, but those are the two big ones that jump out at me now.

Whoa! They let you write asks this long now? That’s awesome. Because it’s so long, I’m gonna have to break my reply down to address specific parts.

…my experiences have strongly indicated to me that a lot of these fan projects (in less than charitable words) seem to mostly be hype-fueled grifts?

As someone who was once behind a hype-fueled grift… yeah, kind of. It’s sort of like wanting to be a movie star. At least at first, you’re doing this to prove yourself to someone.

Because when you’re new to making video games, what do you see video games as from the outside? You see the pageantry. You get hype for trailers at industry events, the beta tests, and developer names that are spoken like celebrities. It’s a lot of glitz, glamour, and presentation. It is incredibly easy to get lost in that idea, of one day going out on stage in front of a thousand people, and demonstrating your game for a captive audience.

A good wake-up call, even for me, was the post mortem on the failure of Anthem from one of the lead developers. Because even at the scale of indie development I’m used to, hearing him talk about working at Bioware and EA sounds completely alien to me. Like the idea you get your game greenlit on a storytelling concept but nobody even knows what that game looks or plays like yet. Like you don’t have characters, you don’t have a world, you don’t have mechanics, you just have the vague promise of “the future of storytelling” and you hire a bunch of people after the fact to fill in everything else around that.

(I understand that’s still probably uncommon, and probably a signifier of the problems with Anthem, but there’s still a lot of nuts-and-bolts business he talks about that is completely strange to hear. Teams and sub-teams and committees and investors, that kind of stuff)

And that’s me, at 42 years old. Imagine you’re dealing with some kid that’s under 25. Fresh out of high school. Maybe still in high school, in some cases. They have no idea.

Going by what I’ve experienced, the people who put themselves in the position of project leadership/organization know next to nothing about game development to the point its actually destructive.

Well, yeah. Anyone can pick up a copy of Godot or Unity or Unreal and just start making games. Maybe they’ve taken a course to show them the ropes of how the software works, which is geared towards them working alone. They’ve probably had little to no experience working in a team, or delegating, or anything like that.

To some degree it’s a case of learning by doing, but you also have to think about how even on Steam, something like 40-80 games get released every day, and almost all of them are failures. Probably less than 1% of the total games released on Steam actually become successes, and that’s because they’re built by people who actually know what they’re doing.

Or, to put it another way: most people who open their own restaurant fail and have to close down their business within less than two years. A lot of people aren’t very good at running their own business, because they are poor managers.

The people who are both interested in and actually selected to take on more responsibilities (especially leadership responsibilities) tend to be motivated by the power they’re granted within a social heirarchy, and I’ve witnessed these types of people lie about their own capabilities, neglect their own responsibilities, constantly clash with and talk down to those below them on the pecking order, take credit for other people’s work, attempt to upheave established concepts and direction to suit their own preferences, and generally fuck shit up by making bad decisions.

People like this exist in real jobs too, sadly.

You’ve been around this community for a while, is this a “Same as it ever was.” situation?

The version of the community I’m most familiar with was one where everybody was basically solo. Teams were uncommon. You might have two friends team up, but a traditionally structured team, where you have a level designer, a programmer, an artist, etc. as separate roles? That’s very far removed from what I’m used to. Even now, almost all of my game development is by myself.

But, well, consider SRB2. A large number of people have touched that project, including me, and three entire development teams have gone through there for various reasons. People grow up, people want to move on, people are discovered to be toxic and get booted out, and so on. Honestly, toxic people being dealt with and the truly passionate taking over is probably the exception rather than the rule in most of these scenarios.

Is there any way to better equip the fangaming community at large with the ability to identify and avoid these kind of exploitative environments?

That kind of feels beyond my pay grade, sadly. I do not have much experience with larger teams. SRB2 was the largest team I’ve ever been a part of, and I kind of drifted into and out of it pretty carelessly. Another one of those things I beat myself up about because I didn’t take it as seriously as I should.

Which is the other thing, I guess: fangaming is not a job. It’s a hobby. A lot of people aren’t taking it that seriously. It can be a job, sure, but I do think there’s kind of a fun and carefree element that’s a draw, too. Some people don’t want to take it seriously. Some people want to make a game, they complete a single playable demo, and that’s good enough for them. They got their taste. As I get older, I’m starting to think that’s fine. It’s okay to just mess around.

And that’s sort of the point, as I see it. You want to make a game, so you try, and either you learn from your mistakes and soldier on, or you flame out and quit. Some people can thread the needle. Most can’t.

Getting people to identify and avoid these kind of scenarios falls in the realm of like… I dunno, finding a unionization flyer in the break room. It has its place, certainly, but it’s more of a groundswell common knowledge thing. A different category than game creation tutorials or asset packs. It would have to be a, like, workshop or something. But some of these things are going to still be problems all the way up the ladder, at every professional level, in every industry. It’s just with fangames there’s less reputation to judge the quality of a given team on.

Advance 3 is the bottom for me. For as bad as Advance 2 is, Advance 3 is worse:

Instead of needing to find SP rings to enter the special stage, you have to find all the chao in every act of that particular zone. So that’s nine chao per zone, times seven zones. 63 chao total.

And even just collecting all the chao in a zone isn’t enough. Once all the chao are collected, you have to replay the levels a second time because now keys spawn that can be used to unlock an attempt at the special stage. There’s a three step process to this dumb garbage. AND IT’S NOT EVEN A VERY GOOD SPECIAL STAGE

S3&K’s warp rings are the top for sure, but I have a soft spot for Sonic Chaos. That game has super short levels where you have to collect 100 rings in order to access the special stage. So every ring matters, every enemy encounter feels threatening, and you often find secret bonus rooms with huge caches of rings in them (30-50+). It really takes advantage of the bite size nature of a portable game and uses it to its favor. Very fun little gimmick twist. If you are playing Sonic Chaos and you aren’t constantly aiming for 100 rings, you’re not playing the game right.

Also toward the bottom would be the special stages in Sonic Lost World 3DS. It’s the opposite problem: you gain access to those special stages so easily I’m not even sure what triggers it. You just seem to get a “Do you want to do a special stage?” menu prompt after every level, and I’m not even sure there’s a penalty for failing them. It’s the saddest thing.

No, not really. Largely because none of them have! The list of characters that have not returned is basically

• Heavy, from Knuckles Chaotix
• Bomb, from Knuckles Chaotix
• Eggman Nega, even though he was in three games? Four?
• Captain Whisker, from Sonic Rush Adventure
• Johnny, from Sonic Rush Adventure
• Marine, from Sonic Rush Adventure
• Sticks the Badger, who never made it out of Sonic Boom
• And since its been nine years since Sonic Mania, maybe Bean, Bark, Ray and Mighty count

Whisker and Johnny are kind of fun. But only kind of. And I can’t see them being a regular threat.

Marine is also kind of fun, but only in small doses, I feel. Same with Sticks. I never fell in love with Sticks like everybody else did. She doesn’t, like, make me upset or anything, but I’m not pining for her return.

A soft “no” on Heavy, Bomb, but a double triple hard “no” on Eggman Nega. NEVER bring that guy back. Not even as a joke!

I like how Ian Flynn writes Bean, where he’s this super manic Daffy Duck adjacent kind of character.

But sort of like with Sticks I’m not exactly aching to have these guys back. We don’t need everyone always having a role. It’s like, when Ian Flynn complained that he hated having to “make up an excuse” to have Blaze the Cat crossover dimensions and come to Sonic’s world.

It’s okay to retire characters or make them “sometimes” appearances.

I don’t know if it would have had much long term impact. The thing about Shadow is he sort of slotted into the same place as Knuckles. He gets introduced in SA2, reintroduced in Sonic Heroes, they muddy up his origin in Shadow, he gets one game where we see him as a mercenary (Sonic 06) and then he kind of drops off the face of the planet. He got relegated to sports game cameos and one appearance in Sonic Generations. He did not meaningfully reappear until 2017, eleven years after his final spotlight game.

Obviously, I think Sonic Heroes is kind of a different game. We don’t get Team Dark. Their original plan was a team of Metal Sonic, Ray and Mighty, wasn’t it? So I think we see that. They become the “hard mode.” Rouge doesn’t come back, Omega never gets introduced. If you get to play as Metal Sonic, then that changes the story of Sonic Heroes. No more Neo Metal Sonic (unless we do a double fake-out and Team Metal has a heel turn at the end of Heroes).

So who gets the 2005 game… I think we need to look at several factors. Sonic Team kind of saw things shifting towards darker themes. So if we can’t do Shadow, who can we do? I guess maybe this is where we bring Rouge back. She gets her own game. Instead of the whiplash of “Who wants a Sonic game full of guns?” we get “Who wants a Sonic game about the sexy bat lady?”

They were already experimenting around this time with giving her bombs and mines and stuff. I think we see an extension of that. Maybe very lite stealth gameplay. Some levels bring back the hot/cold search mechanic from SA2.

I think that puts Rouge into Sonic 06 where Shadow would go. She’s probably looking into Princess Elise and why Eggman is after her. I don’t think we get Mephiles. Iblis/Solaris becomes something else.

Rouge then disappears from the narrative and I don’t think she ever comes back.

In places around the fringes where Shadow was a major player (the comics, etc.) I think we see them lean more into pushing Knuckles even more as Sonic’s “friendly rival” and Metal Sonic gets a much larger spotlight. They identify the people like Sonic having rivals, but without Shadow, they turn to other sources for that juice.

Alternatively, Sonic X proves Shadow’s popularity and Shadow stays on the cast there up through the Metarex Saga and eventually comes back to the games, just like two or three years later. So he skips Sonic Heroes, probably doesn’t get a solo game, but maybe turns back up in Sonic 06, where his rebirth is tied to Mephiles somehow.

I think it’s because they’re everywhere and nothing about those islands feels organic. It’s very clear they made the island landmass first and then put everything else in around it after the fact.

The thing about open world design is that you are still technically guiding the player. There are roads they can follow. Marked pathways. Zelda, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout… you get this sense of being on a road vs. going offroad. You get the sense you are visiting places, and those places have a purpose. Dungeons full of culture, cities for housing, farms with crops…

Starfall Island is like the most basic, under-developed open world I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever. It has stuff in it because it needs to have stuff in it. So it’s full of trees and rocks and its dotted with settlements that have little to no visible purpose. They’re just there to be there.

And all the rails, platforms, and all that other junk is because somebody said “There needs to be something here.” Instead of making a world that was both interesting to traverse and interesting to look at, they just cluttered it up with junk until they were confident players wouldn’t be bored anymore. It’s a mess.

You are talking about Professor Victoria.

What happened with her is that:

• In one of the very first “TailsTube” videos, the one where they retcon the timeline and dispel the so-called “two worlds” theory, Tails is talking about humans in Sonic’s world and it shows an image of GuriHiru’s Sonic Unleashed NPC artwork with a new character inserted among them. She’s a different art style from everyone else and stands out like a sore thumb. This was right after the first teaser for Sonic Frontiers, back when it was still under the codename of “Sonic Rangers.”

• In the second trailer for the Sonic 3 movie, a shot of Akihabara is digitally altered so that one of the billboards is replaced with an image of this purple haired woman. This billboard was seen in the first trailer and had a different image on it originally. In the second trailer, it not only has her, but has text saying “12.30.24 START!!” written next to her.

• Though nothing happens on December 30th, a day later (December 31st), a new episode of TailsTube is released where we can see a book sitting in Tails workshop sporting the character. The book is “The Mystery of History by Professor Victoria.”

• And then finally, in March of 2025, they had her on in the same kind of vtuber rig that everyone else shares in TailsTube videos. They officially revealed her as Professor Victoria, or “Tori” for short. I guess she knows Professor Pickle from Sonic Unleashed, or something.

What I think happened is she was probably planned to show up in an earlier version of Sonic Rangers – it probably seemed like she was a lock to carry over when it became Sonic Frontiers and then didn’t. But it was too late, and she showed up in the TailsTube video anyway. People were interested in what happened to her, and Sega tried to keep the ball in the air while they figured out what they could use her for.

I assume she’ll appear in future Sonic media, in either a future game or she’ll eventually turn up in the IDW comics. Sega never seems to throw anything away these days, and Sonic fans will latch on to just about anything you show them.

I mean, there’s no big fancy steampunk trains in Machine Labyrinth, but without hesitation I believe that Steampunk City is the same place, yeah. I sort of expect that might have been the point, too, sort of like how “Magma Planet” is from Galaxy Force 2 but they don’t refer to it by the planet’s actual name (Veletor) or say the game itself anywhere.

It’s even got that sort of generic name, too. Most of the other tracks in Crossworlds have fancier names but “Steampunk City” and “Magma Planet” feel kind of on the nose. Not cool or evocative or anything, just a plain statement about what they are.

Maybe it was a rights issue. Somehow.

And to some degree I’m just also partial to my version, where the Robotnik family is paid hush money over the accident at the ARK and Gerald’s subsequent execution, which leads a young Ivo Robotnik into becoming a spoiled, entitled brat who refuses to take “No” for an answer.

Like, part of what that “His History Revealed” video ignores is it never mentions that anyone knew Gerald was missing. Eggman finds Maria’s name in the declassified document, but it kind of sweeps Gerald’s disappearance and execution under the rug. If Eggman truly idolized Gerald, why wasn’t that a bigger deal? Why is it Maria’s death that seems to be a bigger force driving him towards radicalization? Was I just not paying close enough attention and missed something?

And like… a lot of people like to make Eggman into this big scary monster. But he’s more bumbling than that. And more willing to be a good guy when circumstances call for it.

It’s like… The Joker, right. Everybody wants to make The Joker into this mastermind serial killer because he has to be able to keep up with Batman, who is painted to be a human being at peak performance. Batman is the smartest man to ever live, with the most resources, AND he’s a super ripped body builder that could punch a hole through your chest. So he needs a rival that can match him on a lot of that, otherwise it’s “too easy” for Batman.

But being a scary mastermind serial killer takes a lot of the fun out of a guy historically named The Joker.

And I’d argue it’s even worse with Sonic, because some people grew up with an evil scary dictator version of Robotnik. I like that version, I wish they could bring him back some how, but even as a kid I always internalized that as a different version of the character. The guy in the games was not the same guy from the TV show. It’s the old Robotnik vs. Eggman argument again.

I like an Eggman that is more selfish than he is evil. Maybe that selfishness leads him to do things others perceive as evil, and maybe if the dominoes fall in the wrong direction, the fallout could be construed as an evil act, but Eggman’s desires themselves are not evil. He wants to defeat Sonic because Sonic frustrates him. He wants the Chaos Emeralds to help him establish control over the world, because he feels like he knows better than everyone else on the planet and the powers that be tried to stop him from going too far. Except Eggman refuses to acknowledge anything he could do would ever be “too far.” He believes, foolishly or otherwise, that everything he does will go perfectly.

Or, to put it another way, I always envision Sonic as someone who is so fast he knows it makes him invincible. There is no problem he cannot run circles around.

I think Eggman is the same way, except Eggman is so smart he knows thinks it makes him invincible. He believes that if there is any kind of unexpected problem he will instantly devise the solution and that there is nothing he can’t build, invent, or reason his way around. He is the smartest man on earth, armed with infinite resources, and a production pipeline that can build anything he wants. “No” is not a word that exists in his vocabulary. Anyone that tells him no is an obstacle to be removed.

But taking Eggman and making him into this free love burnout with Vietnam PTSD and generational trauma… making his dad into this heartless abuser… I’m not against giving Eggman depth, but it feels like so much.

So this ask was from two or three years ago, and I finally watched the one on Robotnik last night and… I dunno, it’s a little too dark for me.

It spins a version of Eggman that comes from a broken home and an abusive father, who gets thrust into the Vietnam war and comes out numb and disillusioned.

It tries to keep as grounded and realistic as it can, but there’s a few places that feel like it goes too far. In particular, the point where it’s revealed that Eggman’s father, Harold Robotnik, suddenly took inspiration from his son’s research into animal-powered energy and, uh, “conducted an experiment” on the family dog.

And, I dunno. Not only does that feel like a sudden turn for the father character, but I feel like there’s a pretty common trope to paint villains as the result of child abuse.

All around too much of a bummer and I couldn’t make it very far through the Metal Sonic one.