Sonic Mania Plus Review Artwork

As I've said in the past, I tried to cut back on going nuts with the artwork in this review because I wanted to cut down on the time it would take me to produce it. I also figured it would be a shorter, easier video, too. (Which it kind of was, but not like I'd hoped)

Unfortunately, I have to post the 4x resolution versions of these I use in the video (to prevent blurry rescaling artifacts). Patreon, for a completely stupid reason, takes the 1x images and blows them up instead of leaving them at their original resolution.

These two guys were just traced over the official artwork. Somehow Ray ended up bigger than Mighty, even though I tried to make sure they were scaled the same resolution when I began outlining them. Mighty uses few enough colors (15) that he could actually be displayed on real 16-bit hardware, but I think Ray is somewhere in the realm of 20 colors.

The only piece of "animation" in this video. It wasn't until after the fact that I realized that if this was meant to represent me working on the original Mania review, Mighty and Ray shouldn't be turning up in speech bubbles. Whoops. (The speech bubble artwork was borrowed from SegaSonic the Hedgehog for Arcades)

Drawing guns is surprisingly difficult. I'm not very good at machinery, either. Too many straight lines and foreshortening, and I'm bad at those. I could not tell you what I modeled this gun after. A 1911? Maybe? I should've detailed the handle more.

I waffled on whether or not to animate this. I did draw this with the potential to be animated -- the muzzle flash is a separate layer so I can just pull it off and have the pistol underneath it, fully rendered. But, for the sake of time and simplicity, he's frozen like this, mid-shot. 

And finally, a high quality PNG of the recap title card. The background is a still from Sonic Mania Adventures, when Ray encounters Knuckles while looking for Mighty. The font, funnily enough, is the same one used for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's called "Bajoran." I don't know if Saban/Ocean actually used this exact font for it, but they used something very similar. One site I googled said this font was called "The Final Frontier." Pick your poison, I suppose.