New Tom Payne interview

The lobster, squid, dragonfly, and penguin are awesome! :D

I'm glad we finally got all of this really cool information!

 

Wow, this is all fantastic stuff.

 

I mentioned this in #retro, but I figured I should throw it here for discussion.

This sketch, more specifically the boilers and general use of pipes, made me think of the Boiler Room level in Sonic Spinball, a game that already has quite a bit of recycled art from Sonic 2 (the crystal formations in the Toxic Sewers and allegedly a shoot on Cyber City's original look in The Machine.) It certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility that this early sketch at least inspired that stage a little. It even has some minor industrial-age steam uses in it.

 

If you guys have questions, you can definitely ask them and I'll forward them to him to answer them, but something tells me that he may not have time to idly spend on message boards replying to questions. I've been proven wrong before, though.

 

Ask him if he's seen this before:

 

Wow, those design sheets are absolutely awesome! = D Though the Bee badnik one's been scanned by him before, the rest is all new, and very interesting! Some really creative ideas for badniks there, including a more detailed sketch of the Frog badnik from the concept sheets on ICEknight's site. shame a lot of them went unused. Alternate Metropolis foreground and background concepts are also interesting - particularly the presence of things like windows and lamp-posts in one sketch, suggesting the idea of more of an actual "Metropolis" feel was played with at one point.

The content of the disks is potentially awesome - I know that Digitizer images from some of the enemies listed were recovered a while ago; notably the "Gator", "Dinosaur", "Wasp" and "Snail" enemies. It'd be fantastic if any of the other stuff on the disks is recoverable - any of the other enemies would be brilliant, as while we believe we've matched the names to unused graphics in the prototype we still don't have the original colour pallets they were intended to use. The disk of Yamaguchi's enemies and the Metropolis Zone disk could also hold a lot of potentially intriguing things.

All in all, brilliant stuff - I hope someone's archiving all of these! Look forward to seeing if anything else surfaces. = )

 

...

*mind blown*

I'd go with that though to organize the questions :P

What the hell is that from? Looks more like part of the background of a generic shooter to me o_O

 

IT was from some lost sprites inside the Sonic 2 Nick Arcade Proto, seen here at Sonic Cult.

I'm more interested in those level pieces.

 

I remember someone saying it looked like it was from Jungle Strike or something.

 

God knows. I think I made that palette up when I found it inside the ROM, so don't pay too much attention to those colors (for all we know, that could be a lava river).

Whatever it is, it seems to be designed to be used as a repeated pattern.

 

Maybe the Tornado was meant to be used more than once in the game, like in Sonic Adventure and Unleashed. If this was the case, it would probably be a top-down shooter, or maybe you had to get rings and dodge spikeballs, like in the Special Stages. Maybe it was going to be the special stages.


EDIT: Forgot what happens if you try to link directly to a Sonic CULT image.

 

The graphic is definitely not from a Sonic game. Please don't pull baseless assumptions out of your ass.

 

Definitely looks like graphics to me. I don't think level layout data would make up graphics that don't look like a random mess.

 

y'all got trolled hard
(btw, all this information is fantastic!)

 

Interesting how it explicitly says Sonic's blue(s) should be avoided, while it's well known that many Sonic 1 badniks use Sonic's palette, including the blue shades. Super Sonic was probably thought of quite early, even if it got implemented "relatively late."

 

More materials:

Palette Data Sheet
Badnik Concepts - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Ball Enemy Concept
Ball Enemy Sprite Frames
Sonic Enemy Sheet
Sonic the Sludgehog
Guide to Sonic the Hedgehog - 1, 2
Rhombus DS (coming soon to Nintendo DSi)

 

Holy fucking huge dinosaur badniks, Tweakerman.

 

I like the all the different Dinosaurs, but the early versions of Redz the most! :D