I have this vision of a mod which would be going for sort of a minimal approach. Unlike the mini form in Metallic Madness, I would like Sonic in this form have, say, only 50% of their jump height (vertical speed?) and running speed. With those changes I would then completely overhaul the levels to accommodate these changes as obviously the current levels wouldn't even be playable with those adjustments to Sonic's attributes.
This also touches upon other ideas I have had about Sonic 2d gameplay in general, where it seems a bit too hard to react to anything that you face in your initial playthroughs, especially at high speeds. This has made me think about how if I could zoom-out the game screen, I think that even wholly new levels would be a lot easier to "react to" and not have playing be so much about memorization and such. I know that you can sort of do this in PC versions of 2d Sonic games which I might be interested to test but it wouldn't really offer more than to certify my touch on the subject which isn't what I'm actually looking for. Another thing that I really don't care about is how Sonic is perceived is how it's all about speed. Rather, to me 2d Sonic games, Sonic 1 most of all, is about maintaining and controlling momentum.
Now, with the Mini-Sonic that has like halved speed, I think I might be able to address both of those "issues" as it were. When combined with his small stature and lower speeds, this might sort of emulate being zoomed out expect everything else is larger. That everything else, such as ramps and hills, are larger means that you would need to very carefully control your momentum to overcome that would highlight that specific design area. That might make traversal through even simpler obstacles be quite of a challenge which could be very interesting in itself. Keeping in line with the "minimalistic" theme, I would prolly go for sort of "minilevels" (at least in the beginning) and ideally I would like there to be maybe 2 act structure where the 1st one is a relatively short level followed by 2nd act which would be strictly a boss fight. However, I'm not too concerned about this boss modification as it's prolly the most taxing change. Given it was all possible, I would actually be interested in borrowing some of the bosses developed by Painto in "Robotnik's Plan B" mod although given the new limited Sonic attributes, I think even some of the current bosses might end up being quite interesting experiences. All the potential boss modifications aside, the mini-approach to levels would help keep the scope of the mod in check and get it more quickly to the point where it's "releasable" but where I might still keep honing and bettering it which is ideal to me.
Anyways, given you have the sprite work done with Mini-Sonic, I had hoped to use it as a base for this idea - obviously you would be credited if I ever got into finishing this. My guess had been that changing the Sonic's attributes would be merely a matter of changing few bytes with a hex editor, which seemed to be generally true, but it seems that these bytes don't match their current locations with your mod. I would wager this is because they have shifted with all the other changes you have done. Similarly, I tried editing the rom file with a regular Sonic 1 level editor, but it seemed to crash pretty much immediately. Given you have the new functionality of enemies taking 2 hits and so on, I think you have used a deassembly of Sonic 1 to create that Mini-Sonic 1 mod and with all those changes the structure of the rom has switched around, making it impossible to use these other methods that likely rely on using a "vanilla" Sonic 1 rom with very specific byte locations for where level data start and so on.
Do you still have that deassembly (the "source code" as it were) of Mini-Sonic 1 at hand? Might you even be able to help me implement some of these changes easily - specifically the changes to Sonic's attributes? Supposing I had that deassembly, is it still possible to easily edit the level layouts with some sort of an editor (given the problem I had with the editor is caused by what I think) ?