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

Those kind of look like resistors next to the clock. Seems like the kind of thing I could envision being in Cyber City.

 

IIRC those pistons exist in about the same area as they do in Simon Wai

 

This graphic comes from the same set of papers that were in the OP, the Cyber City ones just went unscanned.

The specified palette data there is, in fact, for Metropolis Zone, as it matches Simon Wai's palette data:




There is also the lesser known LAVABUB.DS, an earlier graphic for the lava bubbles in Metropolis:

Spoiler: Massive scan

They accidentally use a reserved palette entry for palette cycling (Much like the final!), but otherwise match the MTZ background palette data just fine:




EDIT: By the way, and this might just be parroting what's been said before, but I guess I should also note that Cyber City was likely scrapped before the Simon Wai build, as evidenced by leftover zone data from an earlier compile in Wai not having having any data in that region, but having data for Casino Night, Chemical Plant, and Neo Green Hill in order.

The compile gap is from around when they made the switch from uncompressed chunk data to compressed versions. Considering how close Simon Wai and August 21st are to each other (They literally have some of the same Pre-Wai leftovers) and the point development was in, I think it's safe to say there's no hope for Cyber City/Genocide City ever having compiled data.

 

It's possible I simply don't fully understand the explanation you're giving and could be persuaded with more specific details. But otherwise, I don't believe we have enough proof to say for certain it was never compiled into the game at any point. I'll agree it would have been a brief inclusion if at all, but they didn't include it on the level select menu for no reason at all. They would have likely still been planning for it when that menu was created. Of course, the interesting thing is the list also has three acts for Metropolis, so it may have been *updated* for that purpose since it would have been inaccessible otherwise.

 

I'll echo what I've said before. I think they likely had a lot of development teams and a lot of forked builds that never saw the public view. It'd explain why some builds have pieces of code that appear super early on, then dissapear, only to be seen again either revised or even what would appear to be older than what we originaly found. There very well could have been different flavors of builds internally all over the place. But, those proto boards were expensive and reused constantly so we will likely never see them.

 

And polar lights. Ice Cap does not have them, but Ristar level has.
I wonder where this artwork is now? It was not shown at Tokyo Joypolis, unlike Temple in the Sky, for example.
There is hope both of them will be included in Sonic Origins Plus.

 

I'm sure others have started doing this. But I've been trying (the best I can do) to translate the notes of the zone, along with the newly found information. I crudely put a block in each 128 chunk I think would have been replaced/notused in Cyber City. I just started, but it may have been a worthy "hill top swap" level.

EDIT: What's also interesting (and could also be complete coincidence) is that there appears to be two different backgrounds planned looking at the way the chunks were layed out. Which at some point they just merged them. Most levels don't use that many chunks for a background, so it seems fairly obvious this level at some point intended to have two as a swap type of level.

 

The leftovers in Simon Wai specifically that exclude the data point to them being close to Nick Arcade on our theoretical timeline here (if there is one, lol)

Around Wai/August 21st, there was some kind of intervention or "jumpstart" where they started to clean up their work and get into the final stages of development. Tom Payne's enemy graphics were getting cleaned up, Hidden Palace and Wood Zone had zero work done, and other zones had their bosses implemented. That's completely disregarding the sound driver work around that period too.

Maybe it's not right of me to say that "it was never compiled into any build", but I really believe that the state that Wood Zone and Hidden Palace are in around that time kind of puts the likeliness that it was ever implemented or tested into question, because if it were implemented before Wai, we'd have some data to show for it because they clearly didn't bother touching the other scrapped zones until weeks later.

 

That looks very good so far, though I still think you should at least be open to implementing 'some' of the B-Bomb assets as there still remains a decent chance they were once part of the stage in some form.

 

I've been mixing Spinball, and those as well. Funny enough, those assets from what were released and reused for B-Bomb are 1:1 on some of the spinball art. Bar the palette.

EDIT: These are the two backgrounds displayed when exporting the 128s. I've doubled them for the sake of visibility.

(Higher up BG tiles)



(BG tiles near the end of the 128s)



Mod can merge this because for some reason it's not letting me post this image in an edit.



This looks like the background chunks that are red may have been intended to be replaced in either of those two backgrounds.

 

I want to venture back to something mentioned a few times prior: Has there been any indication that these documents will get scanned? I know Tom Payne has delivered before, but I'd really like to see them. Cyber City deserves some love.

 

As far as I'm aware, no.

I personally don't expect them to.

 

Even if they don't get scanned, that image actually reveals quite a bit (Object, palette, object names, and detailed layouts). Would anyone here be a good enough sprite artist to try to replicate these objects and do a guestimation of their animation? You can see the 3 types of fans in near perfect detail, along with the bear trap, and the Cyber City versions of the pistons.

Don't know if you're up for it, Hez, but if it can be done, adding those to the level chunks from the grid we have from page 2 gets us yet one step closer to something official again.

 

Maybe he's just unaware these have never been seen before? What would happen if he were informed (once, and respectfully) that those are things we have never actually seen before, and are interested in having them preserved digitally?

 

From the Hidden Palace Discord:



So Tom Payne doesn't have them anymore, but they might still get scanned at some point down the road.

 

GameHistoryOrg? Is that Tom Payne speaking there?

 

Would be really cool, supposing he's interested, to have Tom potentially advise on whatever gaps are left to fill for a recreation; badniks, background(s), the boss, anything else crucial that may or may not start with the letter B...

Thanks for starting to pick away at it Hez, I appreciate it and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's so, so fantastic and satisfying to see the answer to this decades old mystery beginning to emerge.

 

How sure can we be that Cyber City's BG was meant to look like this? Hill Top used a completely different BG than Emerald Hill, and utterly replacing the BG is a great way to trick less observant players into thinking it's a unique set of art. This looks far too similar to the existing Metropolis BG in my view.