AWAKENING NEWSLETTER (08/17/2026)

INTRODUCTION

Apologies for the wait! We've got a lot to address in this newsletter, so let's quickly get into it.

First things first, we have an official strawpage now!

STRAWPAGE LINK: https://srcawakening.straw.page/

Moving forward, this will be the go-to spot for (almost) everything SONIC AWAKENING-related, including newsletter publishing, content releases, and Q&A's, the latter of which I'll only be responding to from time to time. This newsletter, alongside the last two, have already been put up on the site, so I hope that this will serve as a convenient resource for fans now that it's all in one place.

As such, I will also no longer be directly posting newsletters onto my platforms: I will simply make a notification post whenever a new newsletter is published, and you will go to the website to access it. The same applies to Q&A's: I will no longer respond to questions directly on socials, but rather have people submit questions on the strawpage, and I'll occasionally make a thread where I choose a select few to respond to.

Let's also address the elephant in the room with the frequency of these newsletters.

Newsletter 3 was not supposed to take this long to come out; in fact, Newsletter 3 was concepted around the START of this year... so what happened? Unfortunately, some circumstances made publishing this newsletter difficult as we deemed it wasn't the right time, and when it started feeling like the right time, every one of us got busy with life and such. But I want to thank all of you for being respectfully patient and for believing in what we have in store. I've been enjoying the fanart.

OKAY!
With all of that out of the way...

15 YEARS OF SONIC.EXE

Sonic.exe.

15 years of Sonic.exe.

Honestly, 15 years is too much for this stupid character. But everyone understands the interest in what this character COULD be. So... what does SONIC AWAKENING intend to do with Sonic.exe? What is its relation to the creepypasta? Are we throwing out everything relating to Sonic.exe!?

Well, the answer is quite complicated, but to put it briefly, yes, SONIC AWAKENING IS going to be a Sonic.exe take. It will not be a Sonic horror project trying to avoid being an exe. This is important information because it will give you a sense of what to expect. We have changed things up and taken liberties with the source material, but it will still feel subtly familiar to those who know the original pastas. Although we're mainly writing off the original 2017X concepts and what fans knew, I cannot consider this to be a "true" or "faithful" remake of said iteration, as we are expanding upon the original source material to form something that's more akin to a "hybrid take" of Sonic.exe in general.

So, what can you expect?

SONIC AWAKENING will primarily be a thriller project rather than horror-focused; there will still be horror elements, but a lot of it will overarch a mystery. This, in turn, means we can't really share much about the project without spoiling the fun of actually experiencing it blind. This is one reason why we haven't been able to share content regarding the project, and yes, it is that serious; people are too smart, they will figure stuff out. I mean, have you SEEN the Backrooms movie!? A lot of the aspects of that film are fairly similar to what we have in Sonic Awakening, and that's a complete coincidence. Us and Kane were inspired by similar things and came up with similar ideas. For example, Backrooms is focused around the idea of misremembrance, while SONIC AWAKENING is more inspired by generative AI poorly recreating imagery (WE DO NOT USE ACTUAL GENAI TOOLS IN ANY WAY!!!), which Kane DID use as the visual style for the Backrooms generation like we did; we just ended up on very similar roads.

Anyway, tangent aside, yes, it's serious that we do keep most of the content secret because the media literacy of the average exe fan just shot up because of that film, and they might start guessing things CORRECTLY this time.

I am only half-joking.

THAT being said, I do appreciate people being very patient and, I feel too guilty to not at least give the respectful, patient people something. BUT ONLY IF EVERYONE IS PATIENT... So here's something that hopefully makes this wait somewhat worth it.

ON THE VESSELS

I think it's about time to finally share some more about the contents of this world, so that will be the main focus of this newsletter. First, I'd like to talk about the nature of the vessels themselves. Like Sonic, their malformed bodies result from poor generation by the game's world, although certain features of Sonic's own mutations are unique to him. Sonic's "friends" and "rivals" are actual people who one day woke up in this world without knowledge of how they got here. Unlike other Sonic.exe stories, SONIC AWAKENING starts with the vessels not knowing the cause of their current circumstances, which in turn has the conflict of the story be around the vessels themselves. Below is an image of one of these vessels, "Tails".

Now I won't say too much on Tails' character right now other than the fact that he's not intended to be characterized like the typical Tails victim in exe stories; in fact, I'd say he's quite different from them.

All the vessels in SONIC AWAKENING have adapted differently to their new and bizarre circumstances, although it's safe to say that none of it is inherently good. As I implied earlier with how there is conflict amongst them, almost all the vessels hate each other (only a few relationships exist in the world), although it's understandable as barely anyone in there is pleasant to be around for varying reasons. The one thing tying everyone together is Sonic, as they're all forced to participate in adventures and thus have to put up with each other when required to ensure that things progress with harmony for their own sakes. Personally, I'm really excited to explore the characters and their relationships with both each other and their vessels since it's character work that is rarely seen in Sonic.exe media.

Also, since you guys ignored it previously, we thought we'd show off the Tornado's model.

Yes, the Tornado is alive.

Keep in mind that while considered (mostly) complete, the models aren't truly final and are still subject to change at any time, though their core designs will remain the same.

If there's one last important thing to note for now, it's that the characterizations of Sonic's main cast are meant to parody or twist the original mainline characters in some way, which can be seen as a deconstruction or jab at the common misconceptions and flanderizations that they receive.

EXPERIMENTING WITH MOCAP TECH

Yes! We have mocap. Not only should it speed up our workload, but it will also give that feel of certain Sonic games (mainly Sonic 06) that utilize mocap, giving off an uncanny feeling. Below you can see some brief test footage of us experimenting with the mocap tech we currently have on hand:

https://files.catbox.moe/s72h67.mp4

Starting next month, we'll have access to a professional motion capture recording setup (thanks to @smoothdedede_), which will help us with creating content faster.

ENVIRONMENT WORK

While we still don't have finalized assets for the city biomes (as we're still working on the environment's design) we DO have more concept art we made along the way that we can share:

Along with that, here is some footage of work-in-progress modeling, as well as a scattering system that is helping us create these environments (although the latter is very bare-bones right now).

https://files.catbox.moe/v988yc.mp4

This is still only a prototype that requires refining, but it is exciting that we're already at this phase in development. To develop this demonstration, we have ripped assets from 6th and 7th generation video games (primarily Sonic) to use as modeling, texturing, and lighting reference. For the record, the environments in SONIC AWAKENING are a lot more varied than just the city; it's just that the City is the environment we're currently focused on polishing to completion. Soon enough, there will be glimpses of some of the other environments featured in the project.

WRAP-UP

Yeah yeah, if it wasn't clear by now then I learned my lesson with saying that something will be coming out soon only for it not to. From now on it's simply ready when it's done, I can make rough estimates sure, but I'll never say anything with certainty unless it is genuinely in the finishing touches phase, otherwise I'm just setting false hopes up without any need to. That being said, I will also no longer be listening to people who complain about things taking too long because ultimately this is all just a hobby that no one is being paid for to work on, although this doesn't mean that I can't understand if things do indeed take an egregious amount of time.

My main goal with the project is to showcase how Sonic.exe retakes don't have to be as limiting as most people make the genre out to be, and that there's still plenty of ways to spin this creepypasta instead of just sticking with the same tired tropes and formulas. Of course, even past Sonic.exe, I want this to be a competent project in its own right in which no prior knowledge of Sonic.exe is required to be able to meaningfully engage with it, although whether it's truly great or not is something I'll leave for audiences to decide on once the project is complete.

Alright, we're getting to the end, so let's be transparent.

SONIC AWAKENING has been outlined for a while: said outline covers the idea of the start and end, as well as general events within the story. Now that this newsletter is published, we will fully focus on working on priority content. At this moment in time, I'm comfortable announcing that SONIC AWAKENING will be split into two phases. As this endeavor is planned as multi-media, you can expect both phases to vary in presentation, with the first phase focusing on a more traditional creepypasta-styled presentation and the second instead leaning into something more true-to-form to actual Sonic-like storytelling (considering it'd be a fumble on my part to waste this kind of presentation on a story centered around what's essentially Sonic roleplaying). I'm very much looking forward to showing off both phases of the project, although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little more excited for Phase 2 myself.

I KNOW I SAID I WON'T MAKE ANY PROMISES OR DATES, BUT THIS IS ONE I KNOW TO BE TRUE: SONIC AWAKENING will NOT release anytime in 2026 or 2027.

Well... it COULD release 2027, but we'll see how that goes.

Alright, this is it for now, so thank you!