New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

Those thumbnail maps were the result of me working very briefly during a hectic live stream. They're "accurate" to the blocks written on the maps, but there were multiple mistakes that were corrected when Hez and I worked together on fixing them.

I've attached a pretty simple Photoshop job where I overlaid the level layouts Hez provided in this thread over the Yasuhara-drawn maps I provided on the Internet Archive. I averaged the colors on Hez's overlays and deleted all of the objects so it's JUST geometry, and on the maps I eliminated the red pen and messed with the black and white levels to make details easier to read. IMO this is about as good as it gets in the compromise between "accurate" and "readable." I'd encourage anyone to check my work or even do their own before adding this to the wiki.

 

Ah, I misunderstood then in regards to the Neo Death Egg. In that case, the only thing that would make sense is if Genocide City took place in the Neo Death Egg (iirc the future map shows a Death Egg for each Genocide City act, which are destroyed as the player progresses) and slot 10 was once "the last battle in space". That or there's a later story draft/level order we haven't seen.

Is there a full translation for the second level order/story doc?

 

Honestly, these just makes me realize how... janky the chunk placement is. There's a lot of unaesthetic jagged edges, along with slopes and ramps being seemingly placed incorrectly.

That being said, weren't a lot of other early stage layouts from prototypes and such just as unpolished? The level design would've most likely become more refined with time, all of which was obviously spent on other zones instead.

 

I imagine if you took Metropolis (or maybe Scrap Brain Zone) and removed all the objects, you'd get similar results.

But yeah they'll have been refined over time. Hell the Metropolis maps, which might be of a similar vintage, are missing all the vertical scrolling gubbins - that's a pretty radical change.

 

absolutely! I've done my own and am ecstatic to have a second opinion on it. Some of it was absolutely insane to guess what it was. I'm guessing you also threw spinball and bbomb tiles on it and hoped? I'll post my progression too and see if any of our guesses line up.

actually I think I converted metropolis act 1 too with the real chunks and got similar results. Although it was nearly identical, they used a lot of basic chunks and repeated ones. It kind if gave really good insight on how one was drafted and then refined while being put in game.

 

If you look carefully, it looks like the end section of map 2 is meant to have rising water. Notice the bubbles besides the fans there, the bars to hang on, and the arrow suggesting rising water. You swim up with the fans blowing you away along the corridor (similar to what exists in Labyrinth zone / Hydrocity zone).



The beginning of map 3 is already underwater (notice the bubbles there too), and just like the end of map 2, you swim down through the corridor. This ends at the left of the bear trap before the conveyor belt, where water finally drops down as pointed by the arrow and water surface.



I wonder if map 2 and map 3 are really 2 full GCZ acts. Maybe it is only one act, but separated on 2 different level slots because of its length ($5000).

 

I tried not using b-bomb's tiles. I feel there so heavily changed there just throwing people off. The only connection I find is if you line the pipe tile you first found in Bob over the center of the b-bomb tiles they line up pretty well. But that's the only thing I can find. My goal was to keep to the colors you translated from Bob, most likely the light and dark colors are bleeding together loosing some shading.

I've been thinking about it. But I think you all have unintentionally proved that the "temple" concept from Brenda's video is sonic related.

If she did work on kid chamillion, and it wrapped production end of 91, and sonic 2 began real production around may. We know they proposed sonic 2 a couple months before sega approved the project. Then the concept most likely comes from after she was done from kid chamillion and before they brought her on the sonic 2 team, possibly something to convince the higher-ups she had what it takes.

You've got art from her previous game
Art from sonic 1
And art she created for the concept she would later use for sonic 2.

 

Are these fans sucking Sonic upward? These arrows seem to suggest that.

 

Sorry about the confusion.

Basically Neo Death Egg is visited in the future, but after the player clears it it warps to the past and there is a cutscene of it being knocked down, likely shown after "the last battle in space" (which is in the past).

You can find the translation here:
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?posts/1056149/

And I posted analysis and comparisons of the translations and maps here:
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?posts/1058549/
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?posts/1058559/
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?posts/1058682/

 

A lot of interesting information! Thank you both for sharing all of that.

The thing that confuses me about the idea is that Emerald Hill already had it's own Past/Future variants planned out with Hill Top/Dust Hill? So it seems really weird to me they would ditch the 'Emerald Isle' name in the concept art, give it a name that suggests it's tied into 'Green Hill', and then not tie that level into Emerald/'Green' Hill at all with the time travel shenanigans about.

Unless there's another story draft layout, that greatly confuses me.

I do really like your proposed draft of the story beats though. The Death Egg being destroyed through time travel is actually a pretty interesting approach that Sonic 2's story would've had over 3's.

 

sorry if I'm posting a lot, but if anyone is interested here's a breakdown of the b-bomb tech world tiles we have. there's only 7 unique tiles, the rest are chopped up constructions from the 7 main ones. (there's also some scaled down tiles from when I thought tom just up scaled his tiles from 16x16 to 24x24, I was wrong.) also of note I overlayed the one bob tile I was talking about.

 

I'm pretty sure your theory about the black squares is right. One of the timeline documents has "warp discovery ⬛ HIDDEN PALACE" written under the ruined present diagram. Then there's an arrow under it that points to the 2nd past diagram with text that reads "go to the past." So it seems like the first warp point couldn't be used anymore in the ruined present for whatever reason, and the player would have to find the Hidden Palace to go back to the past.

 

Dust Hill is Aquatic Ruin.
Case is solved.

 

Maybe this was already obvious to the rest of you, but



There's a correlation here, right?

 

it wasn't obvious actually, and helps explain a spot or two now to me.

 

I wonder if those were meant to open when Sonic pushed against them and he could only move in one direction, or if they open and close automatically like the platforms in Scrap Brain.

 

My baseless guess is that it would affect the gravity as seen in death egg zone in sonic 3. Death egg also has the electric floor tiles which seem to have a counterpart present in cyber city too.

 

Neo Green Hill/Aquatic Ruin remains one of the most mysterious zones in my eyes. Was it Olympus? Why the Green Hill name? It feels like this is one of the bigger pieces of the puzzle we're still missing. We do have an answer for Emerald Isle though, as that concept art actually came after the Neo Green Hill name (before they ultimately went with Aquatic Ruin).


The first levels that the artists worked on were Green Hill, Hill Top, Hidden Palace, Sand Shower, and Oil Ocean. Yamaguchi only supplied rough maps and theme ideas for these zones and did not create concept art for them. From Craig Stitt's interviews:

The loose art direction is likely what caused the issue of Brenda's desert art having a western influence while Masa's track had an eastern influence and led Yamaguchi to create concept arts to go alongside his maps as reference material for the remaining zones. This is why Genocide City's concept art has its later name, Cyber City, since the concept arts were drawn sometime after the level maps.

Unrelated, but there was also this interesting tidbit in Craig's interview with ICEknight:

Seems to be referring to that water level concept (likely Blue Ocean) seen in Tom Payne's scans.

 

I've been thinking about this quote for a while, too. It's such a big revelation, yet nobody ever talks about it.

I don't think that he's talking about Payne's water level, though. "Atlantis" is a very specific theme, and there's zero elements associated with it in Payne's sketch.



And speaking of the devil, here's new doodles of it that I found. Seems like Tom was unsure over what kinds of palm leaves to use.

 

I edited TheRedEye's map to add objects and what I think they would do in the stage: