Why 1.8 Was Revolutionary

After yesterday's incident, I needed to find another post to make. Let's see when 1.8 released.

Oh. It released in August. I'm only a month late. I need to start to make why 1.8 was Revolutionary or 0 people are going to question what happened to the series. Anyways, 1.8 actually introduced quite a lot of very important features that you may not even realize we're so important at the time. Let's see those features.

Slopes

Slopes were probably the most memorable feature of the whole update. The terrain in levels no longer had to be all square and we could mix it up a bit with slopes. It also allowed for more gameplay gimmicks such as having to jump off the top of a slope to gain momentum. Soon afterwards, slopes would become widely used with the new wave game mode as well as in custom backgrounds. GD would not be what it is today without slopes. They are just far too important.

Rotation

Other than slopes, rotation was also a very important feature from 1.8.

Just like how slopes allowed for more unique terrain and gameplay options, rotation allowed more room for decoration possibilities. You could rotate portals to a position that'd be similar to yours or even paste spikes over each other for cool saw blade line decorations. Rotation was also necessary for decorating slopes as unrotated objects on slopes would just look odd. Rotation then became even more useful as the game progressed onward from rotation based effects in 1.9 to slightly slanted dash orbs in 2.1.

Shading

Look at these blocks without shading.

Now look at them with shading.

Shading obviously didn't have all that much use back then since there was only 1 color channel and no such thing as opacity. It had a bit more use back in 1.9 with 3 more color channels, but it soon became very useful in 2.0 when opacity and infinite color channels were added and you could shade blocks. Shading is a very important level component nowadays, and levels would look far worse if it was never in the game.

Outlines

Outlines are very important when it comes to making blocks nowadays and they got their origin all the way back in 1.8. You could use them to outline blocks and add in some secret entrances,

or you could start a layout for your next level ( either that or convince Sonic to do it for you. )

If outlines never existed, making layouts and certain blocks wouldn't be the same. 1.9 also added outlines for slopes so that you can use slopes in layouts and add secret entrances into slopes. 2.1 then introduced thick outlines which are mostly used to make circle blocks.

Playtesting

Imagine how difficult making decent sync used to be. There was no indication as to what part of the song the part you were at was and you couldn't see the lines of your player's movement to predict the next part of the gameplay.

Imagine if that was the case today. Gameplay would be even worse with even more bugs and there'd be even more criticism for awful sync even though you can't do anything about it.

It would have been nice to see this feature all the way back in the beginning of the game, but then again it may not have fit the art style back then.

Dual Portals

The dual portal is infamous for its difficult to predict controls and that is why most people don't like it. Despite this, it's quite an important feature when it comes to demons. If it wasn't for dual portals, we wouldn't have swing copter sections in levels, famous asymmetric duals in several extreme demons like the ones in black blizzard, or the entirety of Duelo Maestro, a level that literally means Dual Master. Hopefully Robtop decides to use the portal more in the future in his official levels and mix it up a little bit. I want dual sections but I want there to be more than just dual waves like in Blast Processing and Deadlocked.

Note

If this post has offended you in any way, you have every right to disable it. It can be after it gets featured or even a day after I it. I'm not asking for a disable post, but if you think you need to do what's right, disable it.