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

There are several elements that resemble the B-Bomb art, though that's the thing.

Remember that Toxic Caves used Hidden Palace level art, but so heavily modified that many people didn't notice it, a far cry from Segapede's use. What's visible there might not at all represent what was in the original.

 

So I tried putting the new palette we got onto The Machine's map shared by HEDGESMFG, and it actually has much smoother shading! See for yourself:



Left is the Spinball palette, right is the Cyber City palette. Now, this doesn't prove anything, let alone that this particular piece of art ever came from Cyber City, but if nothing else it strongly suggests that The Machine may have first been developed using Cyber City's original palette before the colors were adjusted. Note how the luma levels in the gradient are much more consistent using the Cyber City palette rather than the final The Machine palette.

And here is the whole map with the Cyber City colors.

 

Attaching some pictures...


First picture is using the block numbers of the horizontal fan.

Left side is interpreting the block numbers as decimal.
Right side is interpreting the block numbers as hexadecimal.




Second picture is using a portion of the level layout.

Using chunks as follows:

Row 1: 00, 05
Row 2: 0C, 76
Row 3: 0F, 0F




The results are hit and miss. There may very well have been quite a number of alterations to Metropolis chunk data to make Cyber City what it was intended to be.

 

We can't make any definitive guesses one way or another until we have better scans of those documents, so chasing that should be the top priority.

But once we do, this is exactly the type of thing we should be taking a look for. There may be tiny elements hidden in The Machine, some from B-Bomb, lots of reused Metropolis assets, and the original ones seen in the design docs. Putting all that together might get us fairly close to the real thing, and all should at least be considered

 

Regarding mine, I think those are pretty good guesses. Some of it is too hard to be sure about, but the parts I focused on are pretty easy to read. And what it shows is this isn't as simple as EHZ -> HTZ. There are fundamental changes to the chunks that don't make these directly compatible. Which makes the Cyber City to Metropolis 3 conversion more interesting.

 

Also Metropolis' tiles might have been switched around at times during development.

Even we get a full picture of what Cyber City was meant to look like though, I wonder what comes next. The decade long mystery of Rock World? :P

 

This is indeed a possibility. Other levels' chunks have changed between the builds we have, CPZ and OOZ come to mind.

Besides, it's not as though HTZ's chunks were all identical to EHZ either. The trees being a good example of stuff getting patched over.

 

Super neat to see more of Cyber City, but is it just me or are those fan objects fairly huge? It'd be interesting where they'd fit properly into the level without serving as a huge barrier, unless it was something like the object doesn't have any collision besides the fan part at the top.

 

Personally, I feel that there's enough evidence to suggest that Rock World was the "winter zone" Brenda spoke of. We know that winter shared tiles with desert alongside a pallete change, in the same vein as Emerald Hill/Hill Top and as we know now, Metropolis/Cyber City. Additionally there's the Sonic 3 concept art of what's presumed to be Ice Cap. Knowing that these zone concept arts were reused from Sonic 2, it's possible that this was Rock World's concept and that Ice Cap is 3's take on it.

 

That artwork reminds me of Planet Freon. There's probably no connection between the two levels beyond snow though.

 

This is way off topic I suppose, but I've always wondered how it would play if someone slapped The Machine (or any Spinball level really) to scale into Sonic 2 because the physics are quite different between the two games. It would be an interesting experiment.

 

I’ve always wanted a Spinball themed Sonic 2 hack. As a kid I thought spinball looked cool but played poorly. I remember reading some old fan site from the late 90s/early 2000s where the sitewriter said they never beat spinball. I misinterpreted that as them saying that it’s literally impossible for ANYONE to beat spinball… and as a kid I believed it lol

 

Good point on the level names.

Hill Top is the past version of Emerald Hill (which is the past version of Dust Hill)
Metro-polis is the past version of Cyber City
Rock World is the past version of Sand Shower
It makes perfect sense.

I wonder if these zones were all meant to be palette swaps and patches like EHZ and HTZ. While the other levels that were not so concerned about the time travel were all original designs. This is a way to add more game contents while reducing costs.

EDIT: A wild guess, but also:
Ocean Wind is the past version of Oil Ocean (which contains a lot of fans BTW. This matches the time travel concept maps too?)

 

Honestly the shared level art hypothesis makes a lot of sense. I remember reading they were going to have more time originally, but they still planned an IMO crazy amount of levels. It suddenly makes a lot more sense to me that they thought they could make that many levels if the time travel levels were to share assets. Easier on time and storage budgets. When I first saw the rundown of the time travel concept maps I was thinking to myself "they really thought they could make all that?", but again now it makes more sense.

 

Can you imagine how much Sonic history would've changed if we got the time travel version instead of our version?

I wonder if there's a parallel universe version of me discussing how a "Sonic 1" style Sonic 2 would've changed Sonic history.

 

I do wonder if part of the reason why the time travel concept was scrapped was because they found out that Sonic CD was already doing it. The two teams were working independently and on different continents...it wouldn't be that far of a stretch for them to find out later on, plus perhaps some development troubles ongoing that finally made them go "nah, CD has it handled".

 

Yes, Ocean Wind and Oil Ocean occupy the same spot. I think their connection is fairly obvious.

Plus there are the unused sprites of that meaner-looking Aquis with a jetpack on its back:


What could be the point, as regular Aquis are able to float on their own in the final game?

Well, this is just a theory, but maybe the regular Aquis was planned as an underwater badnik for one of the sea-themed levels (Ocean Wind? Topical Sun? Blue Lake?), while the jetpack one would have appeared in Oil Ocean, explaining its flying capabilities. Then when they scrapped the sea levels, they repurposed the regular version's sprite for Oil Ocean for some reason (They thought the regular sprite looked better? The jetpack version's sprites were unfinished? Or maybe they realized how dumb it would look for a badnik to roam an oil-themed zone with a fire-spouting jetpack?).

Personally, I've always found it weird how the final game's Aquis could float when nothing about their design implies they should be able to. This would explain that oddity.

 

I've also noticed that the giant pistons aren't a thing in Act 1 or 2 either (which I admit is odder since it ties more into Metropolis' steam powered motif over Cyber City's supposed mechanized one).

I'm tempted to believe they had had this change a fair way in by this point given it's completely optimised for MZ's art, even the Rhombus art is customized to look like that level, compared to this concept one that resembles some of the Cyber City art more.