Hirokazu Yasuhara revealing all kinds of Sonic development stuff

I'd assume Mushroom Hill is the cluster of rounded trees behind the pyramid. Sonic then goes to Flying Battery which isn't on the map, falls back down to Sandopolis, then from there enters straight underground to Lava Reef, which is below the Death Egg, which I was always under the impression crashed down back to where it was, only face first and with a worse impact (hence why you see it above you in Lava Reef).

 

That makes sense, thanks!

 

I'd put Lava Reef right below the Death Egg, in the mountainside. I'd say that Sky Sanctuary would be roughly where you'd put 'Lava Reef', as Sky Sanctuary are mystical ruins that were once part of the mainland, but somehow stayed in place when the rest of the island fell to earth. As there are low-level ruins right where you've put 'Lava Reef', it would be a safe assumption to assume that's where they were.

 

No it doesn't.

What it definitively says is that there is a desert level in the present and a rock level in the past. There is nothing on that page that suggests the two levels are connected, only that they both had the same enemy.

Enemies were recycled across stages in Sonic 1. Enemies are recycled in the 8-bit version of Sonic 2.



Anyway in real news

https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalDragonsKrakow


The Digital Dragons YouTube channel has started to upload 2017 talks. Watch out!

 

That makes sense, so I ran with that. The map was surely meant to depict Angel Island prior to the chain of events Eggman set off.



Also, I don't mean to derail the Sonic 2 discussions, so this seems like a fitting time to stop updating the map. (Unless this is worthy of its own topic or something.)

 

New Sonic 1 sketch.



Isn't there a similar mechanic from Sonic 2 onwards (including Advance, not sure about CD) that makes the bounce angle from diagonal springs depend on whether the player was holding a direction when Sonic collides with them, or something like that? Maybe somebody familiar with the disassemblies can describe this behavior better...


I think this was missing from the remakes, by the way. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Disregard, what I thought was related was just due to the speed cap (see below)

 

No.

What happens is that when you press the direction in which you're travelling, the speed cap kicks in. In Sonic 1, if your speed is higher than the maximum, it gets set to the maximum speed, even if you were going faster.

Sonic 2 and Sonic CD fixed this while on the ground (pressing the direction in which you're travelling doesn't accelerate you if your speed is higher than the maximum, but it doesn't reduce your speed either); however, the air speed cap is still as Sonic 1.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles fixed this for the air too; as did Advance, and the remakes.

The reason you travel a different trajectory coming off a diagonal spring when you hold a direction is because the speed cap kicks in.

 

Oh, I see. So what's with that certain spring in Sonic Advance's Egg Rocket that sometimes doesn't send you high enough and makes you hit a column of spikes?

 

Your trajectory is the same however you hit the spring, but your starting position isn't. When you approach it from the left, you're closer and lower when you start your journey. When you stand on top of the spring and move onto it, you're slightly further back and higher when it launches you. It's a small difference, but it's enough.

 

Incidentally, it's much easier to track the path of progress if we assume Flying Battery would still come between Carnival Night and Ice Cap Zones.

Makes me wonder how they would've intended to transition from the damp and dank Mushroom Hill to the dry and hot Sandopolis though.

 

That cliff at the end of Mushroom Hill might be a good place to jump off. Then again, they might have had a zone inbetween. the "grabber" eggmobile from Knuckles' Sky Sanctuary might be a good bet also, grab sonic and dump him in the desert.

 

Indeed, it is much easier to plot the route with Carnival Night launching Sonic into Flying Battery and then dropping him off at Ice Cap. Good to know that they initially intended that logical sequence.

I don't have a hard time pairing Mushroom Hill with Sandopolis though, especially being a fan of Dragon Ball where there is a Mushroom Forest within a desert. And of course because Sandopolis followed Mushroom Hill in the original configuration.

[Edit] Fixed syntax error.

 

I've never seen or heard of any indication of this before. What's the source for this? Flying Battery is the only out of sequence level in the internal numbering (aside from Hidden Palace and sundry boss acts).

 

I think it was a syntax error and they meant "Mushroom Hill is followed by Sandopolis".

 

It may not mean anything, but it's curious how the label for Rock World Zone seems to be at least partially written in lowercase, especially in the ruined present, unlike every other label. Maybe they did it to hint that it was a placeholder name? It may explain why there are two Rock World Zones; one in the past and one in the ruined present. Perhaps they reused the label to denote that the levels are counterparts, but were planning to give a different name to at least one of them, which would have been consistent with the other levels (ie: Green Hill's past counterpart having a different name from it). It would also explain why the past version is labeled as Rock World despite seemingly being a jungle.

 

After reading so much speculation and controversy, I have a lot to say, now that I have the chance:

So many people's theorising here about those maps, but I think many people are ignoring how quick and how many changes are made in these early stages of development, and, it's also true that creative frenzy could create foggy memories or get them mixed. I mean, this stuff is the very root of the game we played, but also the one furthest from the final product, and while I could be wrong, since you probably know and remember more about this than me, I think there could still be enough space (and time) for any contradictory affirmations to all be true at some point. I'm putting here my ideas, in case someone thinks they're valid and help understand the whole question.

First of all, we can find three early stages of the project that became our Sonic 2:
Stage 1) Brainstorming, sketches... Basically, quick thinking.
Stage 2) Code and art tryouts to check what deserves further work.
Stage 3) The beginning of the actual game development, using anything that survived those first two stages.

How does this apply to our actual topic? Well, speculating about the words "Dust Hill"...
Stage 1) Dust Hill would be a scorched hill, Sand Shower would be the desert level.
Stage 2) Scorched hill is discarded, and Dust Hill sounds better as a name for the desert level, so they change it.
Stage 3) Since both Rock World and Sand Shower (now Dust Hill) were meant to be time zones for the same place, they chose to use "Dust Hill" as a placeholder and reminder of the level that previously was meant to be the ruined Rock World, the one we know as Mystic Cave, thinking a new name and changing it later, once the ghost of the deadline got less scary.

Also, I think "Rock World" sounds almost as provisional as "rock level", so "Hidden Palace" and "Mystic Cave" could anyway have been the final names for the zones labeled as Rock World, should the original time-travel plot had been there in the final game.

Now, about the map notation, and zones sharing the same location on different time zones:
· It looks like most of the zone names are located near the referred zones, with maybe just a few with the name over the zones themselves.
· "Warp point" and "Olympus" have unique encasings that are different both from the ones for the zones and from each other's one.
· We know that Green Hill and Hill Top were linked, and so were the rock and the desert level.
· I would add the missing zones from the first game and the whole 8-bit map to the mix, since the newly revealed maps are also South Island and the old material gives us a hint on where to find each zone.

Well, things get interesting at this point, now that the mix is boiling like a Neo Death Egg, so I'll throw my big guesses now, zone by zone:

Star Light + Scrap Brain + Sky Base -> Death Egg -> Neo Death Egg:
We know Scrap Brain was located on the mountain peaks, and so it is the metallic egg. Probably, Eggman changed the place's name after revamping. I have no explanation for the stone egg in the past, sorry. Star Light seemed like the city around Scrap Brain, still under construction, and a similar thing goes for Sky Base.

Labyrinth:
Not present in this time-travel trip, unless appearing again as in Scrap Brain Act 3. We know about an entrance in Jungle, so it could be somewhat related to Olympus or Hidden Palace.

Green Hill -> Hill Top -> Dust Hill (Ashes) -> Chemical Plant:
No need for explanation about these ones, I think, though, Chemical Plant's name would have fitted better as another time zone for Tropical Plant.

Bridge -> Ocean Wind -> Blue Lake (+ Olympus) -> Oil Ocean:
Despite how they put the zone names, Blue Lake and Wood(s) don't seem to fit together, it's more likely they moved names to leave space for Olympus. I think Blue Lake became Neo Green Hill on phase 2 (see above), and they changed it to Aquatic Ruin when they moved the game to West Side island. Olympus looks more like a place for a cutscene at the middle or the end of the level.

Marble -> Metropolis -> Tropical Plant -> Genocide City 1:
Yes, this needs lots of explanation. For starters, the Metropolis we know has lava and steam inside, a bit like a power plant. A power plant of that size would probably have been necessary to make a time machine work, and that pyramid had the warp point, so it's quite a logical conclusion. Probably, the pyramid was already in the past as an ancient device attached to a volcano to supply energy to the whole civilization of the island (hence the name of Tropical Plant), but Eggman improved it and made it focus its power on a single thing, the time machine. About Marble zone, it had lava, and it's nowhere to be seen in the map, so it could be next to metropolis in the outer area, a bit nearer the hills and the lake, since it shares that greek architecture with Olympus and Aquatic Ruins.

Jungle -> Wood(s) -> Casino Night:
Quite obvious, given their locations in their respective maps. While Wood has no past counterpart in this theory, this zone could be appearing in the background of Aquatic Ruins, thus giving it a place in that time zone if I guessed right about its link with Blue Lake.

Spring Yard -> Rock World (Hidden Palace) -> Sand Shower -> Rock World (Mystic Cave) -> Genocide City 2
Honestly, I've put Spring Yard here because it shares some colors with Metropolis, and it has a forest (Woods?) and a city (Star Light?) in the background. It would have been north of Sand Shower, by the time there was no rock (world) there. This way, both the 16-bit and the 8-bit level sequences of Sonic 1 make sense as alternative routes to reach Labyrinth. The relationship of the rest was already explained above, so no more to say about this.

Well, that was all about the maps, but there's a final thing to talk about: Scrap Brain's name. IMHO it's a great name for the zone as a metaphor: it's the place where Eggman, that evil brain, puts his plot into action, and a CPU works like a brain for a computer, so it's quite appropiate to refer to that place as a "brain made of scrap", since it's a metal machine with a genius in charge.

 

The whole Dust Hill was actually the planned name for Mystic Cave still seems too farfetched for me, but I do not believe the desert stage in the mock-ups is Dust Hill zone. The Evidence seems to be in favor of the desert zone being called Sand Shower; I'll accept that, but Mystic Cave doesn't seem like it should be related to Green Hill, Emerald Hill, and Hill Top zones. Also there is no cave entrance on the map. It's makes more sense to me that Dust Hill zone is a stage we haven't seen yet.

It could be either the ruins of Emerald Hill as Robotnik burned it to the ground (dust=ashes). Or it could be (and I'm leaning toward this idea) the snow level that Brenda Ross Mentioned as a palette swap of Sand Shower (dust=snow). That would make sense seeing that Hill Top zone is actually the top of a mountain. Or (terrible speculation) maybe Robotnik caused an ice age in "Now 2" with his pollution of stuff in the past. This way both Sand Shower and Dust Hill would use the same tiles but palette swapped. (Unimportant, but it would also solve the problem of Brenda Ross calling the desert level dust hill, but that's just me wanting everything we know to make sense)

This would make Mystic Cave and possibly Hidden Palace the two Rock World zones. Which could be the case if Hidden Palace was in the past and Mystic Cave was the mine set up to mine out Hidden Palace. In the past the cave was full of gemstones and by the time the game starts Robotnik had already ravaged it of it's worth. I also believe that Rock World zone is a descriptive yet lame name for two different zones so they were both changed later on in development.

On the subject of Olympus, I doubt it ever became a stage because in ICE's interview Craig Stitt said, "I can remember a variation on the Atlantis theme that got as far as a map and some rough art, but that's all I can remember (Mark Cerny designed that one)." Some of the ideas may have been used in Aquatic Ruin, but it doesn't sound like the stage went anywhere so I doubt Olympus became Hidden Palace as some people here have theorized.

That's my guess at least.

 

First off, clearly a lot of thought was put into that theory, and it mostly makes sense to me. We do know that prior to its rebranding to West Side Island, Sonic 2 was supposed to be on South Island.

I understand the sentiment about Chemical Plant; I tend to equate it with both Green Hill and Ocean Wind, though I could see it spanning to Tropical (Sun) Plant as well.

Very sound, especially with the link of Bridge Zone to Ocean Wind from Green Hill. I hadn't gone the extra mile of fitting in the GG games into the mix, but it does fit imo.

I already felt the connection between Tropical Plant and Metropolis/Genocide, though you put the name Tropical Plant into better perspective. Marble might be stretching a bit however. I see the lava connection, so perhaps Marble Zone is near the location of Tropical Plant/Metropolis, but what era would that fit in?

Jungle - Woods - Casino Night makes sense, especially with Jungle as the past variant. Spring Yard in that placement really poses an issue though; if Hidden Palace is the past, Sand Shower is the present, and Mystic Cave is the ruined present, then where does Spring Yard fit? I personally only reluctantly associate Genocide City 2 with the Rock Worlds/Sand Shower, so perhaps in that event Spring Yard is a future? or better yet, the surface level of Mystic Cave or Rock World's ruined present?

 

Except that Mystic Cave isn't in a possible level slot for either Rock World; it's in the level slot after Oil Ocean, which in both the concept art and the beta is "Dust Hill Zone".

I'm with you on Dust Hill != Mystic Cave, but there's no way that Mystic Cave was anywhere else - your two options are either "Mystic Cave is Dust Hill" or "Mystic Cave replaced Dust Hill"; my reasoning for the latter is that none of the developers associated Mystic Cave with the "Dust Hill" name.

 

That sounds like a lot of coincidences against how we can actually see the name "Dust Hill" belonging to Mystic Cave in every prototype with the old names.