TSSZ Interviews Stealth (Part 1)

In Part 1 of our interview with Simon “Stealth” Thomley, we discuss his first encounter with the Sonic franchise and E02, his 2D game engine.

TSSZ: So I think a good place to start is your beginnings with the franchise. When did you first start playing Sonic games, and what attracted you to them?

Stealth: I started with the first game in 1991. The first time I saw it was on display at a Sam’s Club, and it just looked awesome, but I never actually got to try it until my parents actually bought a Genesis a while later. I was already interested in game development and it had initially struck me as being complicated, which interested me, but it was also just plain fun to play.

TSSZ: Do you feel that those games inspired you to further explore game development in any way?

Stealth: Well, at the time, I had already started trying to develop on the Apple II, though I was still using BASIC and the 40×40 low-res graphics mode, and was nowhere near the level I’m at now. The latest thing I had been going for was something vaguely Mario 3-ish, but as soon as Sonic came around, I switched straight over. Given the impression I had gotten from it, it seemed like that would be the real challenge, so that’s what I wanted to do. This was still based strictly on play experience at the time.

TSSZ: So you’ve clearly had a lot of experience going under the hood of games, and your wealth of contributions in the Sonic community is proof enough of that. Have you done any big commercial work in the same vein as the recent Sonic 1 port before, or did your work stay within the confines of personal and community projects?

Stealth: Well, my goal had long been to go commercial. Early on, I had already developed the desire to work directly with Sonic Team or SEGA in general, even though I didn’t yet have the proper talent, contacts, understanding of the industry, etc. I was having fun doing the things I did, but I was also hoping to build a career from it. I’ve branched out a bit since then, having been developing E02 as a general game engine with the intent to use it for future commercial games and licensing it out to other individuals/groups for the same purpose.

To further answer your question, though, I have had a hand in a commercial release once before. It was the 2011 Sonic CD re-release, actually. Before the project was actually taken on by SEGA, Taxman had come to me for some reverse-engineering work to get some information on how a couple of things worked. You’ll notice I was given a “Special Thanks” credit for that.

TSSZ: Interesting. Before I get into the port itself, how is E02 doing? Have you or others found it to have viable commercial application and, to that end, where do you expect to see the engine months or years down the road?

Stealth: The last release was made last November, so, naturally I haven’t had a whole lot of time to do very much more with it lately, given the work on Sonic 1. What I have done with E02 since then isn’t much, but it’s in line with some plans I’ve had for a while now. Aside from a few engine enhancements I want to look into, such as a few graphics-related things, I’d like to give it a complete IDE (integrated development environment) and more powerful debugging features, all of which I can put more focus into now that the gameplay engine has been developed to the point at which it is now. This would include enhanced editor interfaces, things like live variable watching, and other editing features such as a built-in context-highlighting function editor developed specially for E02 scripts, which is one of the things I’ve already started on. The function editor, in specific, can recognize both global and function-local Alias Names as well as labels, which will not only be a major help in keeping things straight, but will also allow for things like click-navigation and documentation.

Discounting development of E02 itself, I haven’t begun working toward using it commercially, myself, and I have a feeling that something larger in scale will need to be done with it before anyone else really feels inclined to try. There are some ideas, but they’re sort of on the back-burner for the moment since other things have come up. I am, however, going to E3 next month, so I do plan to bring it to the attention of some other major developers and find out what possibilities exist for other projects and platform support.

I believe that as it is now, it could stand up well for developing well-built and enjoyable commercial games, but there also still ways in which it can be enriched feature-wise and made even more accessible/useful in terms of the development process. I’m not sure you can ever really consider something like this to be “finished” so much as sufficiently meeting the needs of any particular project on a case-by-case basis.

As it stands right now, I still plan on allowing everyone to download and use it for free for hobby use, so, hopefully we’ll see some people trying it out and taking advantage of its performance and multiplatform benefits for their projects. On that note, I’ve forgotten to mention that I’ve also been working on an Android version, so, platform support is already in the process of expanding.