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

I highly doubt there was any consideration of what was past/present/future by the time the Cyber City we’re getting here was being designed.

 

I mean, honestly the way I see it is: Finish what you could get in at the time, and if there was time to put the proper story telling elements in there then do that too. Honestly they didn't get a chance to do any of that so at the 11th hour they took what they had and made it usable. By the time the Beta phase was reached they had a solid idea of what was left to work with and they halted trying to push for any new ideas to be pushed in. This is how you prevent Scope Creep in any sort of planning and production projects and I'm sure it was no different here. What may and could have been is all the more fun to speculate because we're not constrained by those time limits.

 

It's honestly hard to say one way or the other. Cyber City was plotted between finishing Metropolis Zone art/maps, and the the addition of act 3. We believe the Simon Wai prototype was probably built in June. As far as we know, Sky Chase and Wing Fortress had not yet been conceptualized. My song ordering observational conclusions that I talked about earlier, which may or may not be correct, would suggest they knew they had too much work and had to scale things back by this point in development (that's why the level select isn't longer than it is), but there's arguably still enough meat there to make a time travel story work. So it would suggest to me that they might still have been on the time travel story by this point.

What makes it a little confusing is the inclusion of Neo Green Hill, which is *not* part of the original plan. And it's between Genocide City and Death Egg. So we're they in the process of altering the story? And by altering it, does that mean ditching time travel, or revising it? Perhaps the Death Egg is stopped in Genocide City (like in Launch Base), and it crashes in Neo Green Hill. Or maybe Neo Green Hill (i.e. NEW Green Hill) is an alternate version of Green Hill you would come to via time travel.

Or maybe by June, they had the level select ordered that way because a final level order had not yet been decided.

Lots of possibilities here.

 

The problem with this is, we are waiting for maps, and we're waiting for graphics.

We are not waiting for maps with graphics. I wouldn't want to see fan projects being mistaken for official material.


Not too long ago there was a reveal of early Pokémon designs, which was supplemented with fan work trying to suggest what could have been. It took ages to separate the truth from fiction... assuming it's actually been separated by now - it was such an annoying read at the time it put me off revisiting the topic. Documention 101: write about what's "actually there", not "what you think should be there", otherwise you get Kremling-Kong wars attempting to justify why Funky Kong owns an armoury in Donkey Kong 64.

 

Maybe not really do the time travel story idea, but the game gets darker and darker as Sonic and Tails get closer to Eggman? You start out in the peaceful Green Hills, and then you head into a casino and then a chemicals and oil plant and then the final bases of Metropolis, Cyber City/ Genocide City and then the final showdown in space. But the game is just too same-y at the beginning, so they mixed up the levels to give more variety. It could be possibly why Cyber got the cut and changed to Sky Chase and Wing Fortress. Too much of the same and a tribulation between the ending Zones.

In the Simon Wai the Zone order goes at the end: Casino Night, Chemical, Genocide City, Neo Green Hill, and then Death Egg.

In the beginning it's: Green Hill, Wood Zone, Metropolis, Hill Top, Hidden Palace, Oil Ocean, Dust Hill ( which later became Mystic Cave)

So maybe?

 

Wasn't "Neo Death Egg/Genocide City 2" what was supposed to be there according to the documents? Aquatic Ruin isn't even part of the Documents for the Maps and Zone Order IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if that was made up of leftovers from the other scrapped levels. And since they had already decided Genocide City/Cyber City was being cut down "Just stick it in that slot for now" and quickly made up the name on the spot.

Actually I'm kind of curious yknow: Aquatic Ruin's level design is quite intricate for a level where most of it is underwater. Is the level still beatable if the water was drained out? Also Don't we now have proof of one of the Cyber City Zone Levels having water in it? What if the code for the water and everything was already done for that level slot and all they had to do was stick in a new palette, Graphics, Layout, and Background?

There's lots of possibilities and I may just be 100% speculating here but I feel like it being called "Neo Green Hill" is just a Red Herring is all, like it's just a joke the programmers did.

 

I also find it a bit unfair to other members who have been waiting patiently to take a stab at their own interpretation, maybe I’m just assuming that but I’d rather all the docs be dumped first before promoting fan works of the zone.

 

I think it could be released with a disclaimer stating what is what. I don't see a problem with that. We know Hez is using a degree of interpretation. I think when the time comes, he should be able to detail out the process he used to recreate the level.

I'll just add this: what he's doing looks promising, and I look forward to it being released. If this is what sells the document dump and helps drive traffic to the foundation, then I think it will probably be effective at that. Much more interesting to have something hands-on (in color!!) than simply some old documents to look at.

 

What interests me is that Frank himself is working on this interpretation. It leaves me wondering how much is Hez improvising, or if Frank has discovered more of the level design via the documents than he believed he had earlier.

If anything, it's all the more reason to check the documents really, cause I wanna see how this was concieved.

 

I wholeheartedly agree and I considered suggesting a similar thing. Nothing is foolproof but I'd imagine a disclaimer which emphasizes that this is in fact a fan interpretation based on actual maps and using actual artwork, should keep a significant amount of confusion at bay. I think too that there's such a large fan creation community for Sonic that many would take such things with a grain of salt anyway instead of jumping to the assumption that it's all official. Like I said though, it's not foolproof.

 

I kind of wish we just had the docs by now, but honestly? What Hez has been doing in this thread so far was actually a very, very reasonable interpretation based on all the info we've had so far.

My end goal for this is a playable level inspired by the real documents, even if it won't be 100% accurate (after all, the original was literally never built. There literally may not be any more assets to it beyond what they have).

 

I would still wait before releasing fan-made recreations. I remember posting some not-so-great pixel art years ago of some interpretation of the Sonic CD R2 level, and I see it's wound up floating around the internet. Things go around without attribution.

 

The intent is basically to have a nice clean map of each act. I had done a lot of work prior to these docs recreating the tiles for GCZ per the documents already released before. The efforts just happened to line up and it made sense. I'm in no way claiming the stuff I am creating to fill in the gaps is legit. There's a lot of moving parts.

 

I appreciate what you're doing, and as I've tried to reiterate to others here repeatedly... the info we have will absolutely have limits, but that's partially because the level was never finished. I can only speculate, but if you've seen some bits we haven't, I'm sure that's obvious. At best, some digitizer assets existed in a database somewhere, but I suspect even then there wasn't much beyond what we're getting. This is different from our current understanding of say, R2, where assets we've never seen before probably still exist... at least on paper.

It is impossible to 100% accurately recreate a level that was never completed. Any attempt to do so will have at least some interpretation and guess work, as well as influence from modern tools that didn't exist 31 years ago. 2013 S2 Hidden Palace is nothing like the beta version whatsoever beyond shared visual assets. And incomplete dropped concepts can often be questionable/sub-par designs that don't reflect the final product, so a modern critical eye using info we know now after the fact would also be expected in any recreation.

I'm sure the real documents will drop when the "fan mapped" version of it does too. We can then spend the next 5 years arguing about what may or may not be true.

 

Well we can avoid the main problem you have if we told people that it's just a fan recreation/interpretation and not the real product, of which we'll never have because obviously the level was never finished.

Unfortunately there will be a point where someone will just share it saying it's "The REAL Genocide City Zone!!" without any explanation, in which continues the many confusions the fan-base has about the development of Sonic 2 (desert level/Sand Showers=Dust Hill)...

 

People are allowed to be excited about things. Fake? Real? I just love that there's something tangible in front of us that we can now latch onto and say "Yeah! Cyber City!" I mean, maybe we should only worry further if some youtubers try to make some clickbait about this....

FWIW given the tons upon tons of youtubers like "did you know gaming" videos I've watched: Typically when something is reconstructed they'll usually say "This is a fan interpretation of..." at least I'm pretty sure they do...

Maybe once the dust settles we can just take all the information from here and host it on a page somewhere with clarification. (Combing through forums isn't everyone's strong suit)

 

So it's starting to seem like it was supposed to have more of a story like S3&K had.

 

Well I never said that people shouldn't be excited, just that some may spread misinformation, but seems to not be too much of a worry with what you pointed out.
I guess it stems from the fact that in the twitter post of the map recreation, they just say 'look at this!' without further context, and it seemed that a lot of people thought they found the genuine assets made for CCZ instead of it being a reinterpretation.

 

I literally saw a lot of videos on YT that shows you a REAL UNUSED BETAH ZONES FROM SONIC 2!!11 with footages from lost worlds/long version, lmao




P.S.: on YT too much videos about "genocide city" creepypasta. And this videos by Spanish people. Is Spanish men likes this creepypasta?

 

You're never going to stop people from misinforming others about what they're looking at. We can try and keep people straight the moment things get released (and we should), but there are always going to be people getting information wrong, deliberately or otherwise. That's a fact of life. So I'm not overly worried about it in the grand scheme of things.