Hirokazu Yasuhara revealing all kinds of Sonic development stuff

Beautifully colored map there! So last night I was doing a thought experiment attempting to place Badniks within each era. Basing locations off of where they were intended to place via known sketches/notes, beta placements, and final placements. To better visualise outside of flipping through my notes and the wiki, and decided to make some crappy maps:

_Ancient
http://imgur.com/MQE1ges

_Present
http://imgur.com/1kMY2eG

_{Bad Present}
http://imgur.com/0REEr9q

By no means conclusive, but I figured it could help with determing the intended level sequences, by solidly placing badniks within eras.

 

Do the others please, this is amazing. Brings the whole thing to life.

 

For those on Team "Death-Egg-Is-In-Water", here's an updated version:



I can probably do all of them except for "Future" (quality is a bit iffy on that one). Hopefully clean scans get released someday, then I'll spend some time and do high-quality ones.

 

At least in the ruined present without the vegetation it looks like it was. And in this one:

http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=36719&view=findpost&p=892812

 

I'd say that it actually may be both... We can see the water falling from there but there also seem to be some rounded walls surrounding the pool, in the present maps.

 

Hmm. I know this is just baseless conjecture, but you might actually be onto something there. There's no other name in these maps that would fit a snow level. That is, if a snow level was planned at that early stage.

I get the feeling that they were going to do palette swapped zones to a much greater extent than in the finished game (they implied as much, anyway). Obviously, they'd only reuse the foreground (background reuse would be too obvious to players), and even then they'd swap some elements out in the foreground (like how final Hill Top has pinetrees and lava but is otherwise identical).

 

I'm really letting my imagination go wild here but what if, for the ruined present, they were going for something similar to Ghost Busters, where a portal would be opened on the roof of a modern building/construction?

Metropolis could in such case be a modernized/robotized version of Hidden Palace, go figure.


EDIT: Just noticed that there's something on top of the present pyramid that's not in the past version... which may actually be the "warp point".

 

Good call on the Olympus label being circular! Hadn't noticed that until you pointed it out.

I suppose that if Hidden Palace is analogous to Olympus, that it would make sense - with Olympus being a place where gods live, and Super Sonic's powers being god-like.

 

Idle thought, but consider the in-game level order for the Simon Wai Prototype:
1. Neo Green Hill
2. Chemical Plant
3. Hill Top
4. Green Hill

Now, obviously, these levels were chosen because they had the most work put into them -- everything but Neo Green Hill was being worked on as early as the Nick Arcade prototype -- but it's still a little interesting given what we now know about Chemical Plant and Hill Top.

 

Hmm the Death Egg sorrounded by metallic estructures, water and mountains. That reminds me Launch Base Zone. The last level listed in the ruined present is Death Egg, then it says Eggman "escape" to ??? and a Neo Death Egg listed much later.

There is also a teleporting device in the S3&K version of Hidden Palace, that one that sends you to Sky Sanctuary.

 

I am not saying that Dust Hill Zone is the snow level, but it might be beause a snow level called Diamond Dust Zone already exists. Anyway, the point was that the argument "Dust is strongly associated to a cave" doesn't stand because the only time they ever used "Dust" in a Sonic game is to describe a snow level. However, I do think that Dust Hill Zone is Mystic Cave Zone, because we have no other reliable proof than Sonic 2 Beta right now on this subject.

On baseless statements, Rock World Zone (past) might be the snow level, as a palette swap of Sand Shower Zone at the very same location. And as I posted earlier, the label "Rock World Zone" on the map may describe this top right rock instead of the forest that is under it. It makes sense to put a label next to something instead of right onto it to avoid covering it entirely. This is the case for all other labels too.

Additionally, this rock is nowhere to be seen on other maps. And we are not sure this isn't snow on the top of it.

 

Okay, two versions of the "Past":

 

That actually makes allot of sense, dust being the word to describe both sand & snow, fits in with that level theme perfectly - what with the palette change n all.

 

To add to the dust argument, I think saying Dust is associated with caves is just a little off. But if we use Mine in place of cave, then the argument becomes stronger as any mining equipment would kick up a lot of dust.

 

Yeah, you could say that, in a way, they goofed up when renaming it to Mystic Cave instead of Mystic Mine, but it may just sound a bit better that way since Sonic 2 wasn't doing alliteration.

 

That's what Brenda Ross said she was doing with her desert level, a swap of color and theme to change it into a snow level with christmas trees. She was one of the last to join the project so all his work and levels assigned to her had to be scrapped.

The dust from a mine and sand are both rocks reduced to fine particles, to me the real problem is that they used the word hill. All Hill levels as far as I can recall are outside and based in the nature (except for Mecha Green Hill).

 

I think you people may be too hung up on that word. This is Sonic Team we're talking about, the guys who named a stage Genocide City despite not knowing what 'genocide' word means. The choice of the word Dust may be just another case of Japanese devs using English words they aren't familiar with.

In addition to that, it has been pointed out that the Katakana for Dust may also mean garbage or rubbish. That may as well be the definition ST was going for. In fact, I think it sounds somewhat more feasible in a way. From looking at the area labeled as Dust Hill on the map, you can see what looks like a lot of rubble that wasn't in the past or the regular present, likely a result of Hill Top getting ravaged in that timeline. In fact, that's the only feature present in that part of the map; there aren't even trees. So the "rubbish" part may be referring to the place being nothing but rubble in the ruined present. In which case, the level was likely not intended to be a desert or a cave.

 

I think it's pretty safe to say that they weren't mixing up the concepts of sand and dust, since there's one level with each of them in their title and they wrote both "???" (Sand) and "???" (Dust) in the timeline chart.


EDIT: You guys really sure about Japanese people commonly using "dust" instead of "garbage"? That sounds really odd to me.

 

Sand shower zone may have been a beach zone lol jk jk jk.