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

Just a fun thing to point out, the 3D Models of the animals in the Brenda Cook (Ross) portfolio tape is from Dogz and Catz, an old virtual pet program for Windows 95, which released in like 1995 or 1996. One of the comments on the video pointed it out so I double checked and sure enough she was credited on the first Dogz game as one of the Assistant Animators. Not sure if this was common knowledge or not.

I had one of the later ones so as soon as I read that comment I thought "oh duh of course it is".

 

Ahhhhhh, I knew those animations reminded me of those games but it being 3D threw me off. Good catch!

 

Thank you, Frank! Just finished watching the stream video. 25 years ago, this stuff was unimaginable. I'm very happy about the release, and I hope your group benefits enormously from it. You should feel very good about the results that you helped realize.

 

Holy fuck lmao, not a connection I was expecting. An inside look at two childhood classics in one fell swoop

 

It's funny you mention that and no one else has jumped on it. I don't have it on me right now, but the recovered tiles behind "bob" are a 1:1 match to 8x8 tiles in "The Machine" from Sonic Spinball. It's almost a smoking gun that "The Machine" is basically Cyber City.

 

So I got the playable version of CCZ finally working.

It should be emphasized that not all features in the map as it is now are fully functional or complete, and Hez's engine is not currently a full recreation of the classic physics.

But the level is interesting to play, and the interpretive artwork is very, very good for a recreation.

Given that the level can't currently be finished without debug tricks, it actually feels a bit like finding another prototype and playing a new stage in the simon wai beta again after (nearly) 25 years.

For whatever reason, it looks like Hez took down the playable demo download links for now, but I do want to at least compliment the team on doing a good job of faithfully interpreting an unfinished design. It's a very good looking level with some interesting ideas that has real potential if it mechanically can get fleshed out 'just' a bit further. I hope to see a more complete take on the stage eventually.

And for those who want to video gameplay of all 3 acts, you can currently see video files in the "interpretation" folder on the google drive download links.

 

Everything should still be up here.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rAC0ZkAgkFJZUNcu5EB0jMvZXYo6iwOZ?usp=drive_link

There are palette conversions too if anyone is interested in seeing them taken from numbers to actual colors.

EDIT: Nevermind, it was marked as violating something in googles terms. I'll try and find out why.

EDIT2: for now, S0nc15b.zip seems to be sticking.

EDIT3: apparently anything that is an exe and isn't created by big corp is violating google. I'll have to find another way around it.

 

I think everything(?) in "Binder Clip 2 (Mostly Non-Sonic STI Work) (Original Order)" is related to B-Bomb. It aligns really nicely with the pixel art we got in 2019.

"STI Notepad 1 (Bound, Original Order)" also looks like B-Bomb. B-Bomb designs also seem to turn up towards the end of some of these pads, although it can be hard to tell because it's the same style of 16x16 mechanical graphics.

One point of note is Tom Payne's resignation letter that's included here. Looks like he jumped ship to LucasArts in the summer of 1993, but the fact that it's here means this collection presumably covers the first half of 1993. But here's the thing - there's no Sonic Spinball (unless I'm missing something). Was it really all just B-Bomb until he left?

Obviously Spinball wouldn't ship until late 1993, but it was shown at Summer CES - you'd expect some evidence of his work on it, if indeed he actually worked on it. The assumption was that he was responsible for The Machine stage, but now I'm thinking... perhaps someone else spinball-ified his earlier work? Maybe there's not as much Genocide/Cyber City stuff in there as we might have assumed (though I guess if the sprites exist, you wouldn't need to sketch them out on paper).


Tom Payne gets the credit because his old art is used, but maybe he didn't draw any new art?

 

Some of the palettes translated into colors. There are BINs too



with filler colors grabbed and overlapped from their prototype equivalents.

 

How does one get to Act 2 and 3 in the recreation? All the level select options take me to Act 1

 

Any of those look reminiscent of the prototype level pallettes?

All these discoveries are amazing. I expected some cool Cyber City stuff, but more tidbits on Sand Shower and Wood AND an unused Spinball level???

It's amusing that Cyber City has went from practically a blank slate to now probably having the most complete image of how it would play out of the beta levels, even the original version of Hidden Palace remains half complete.

 

Does uploading it here as an attachment work?

 

Does password protecting it work? I feel like we tried that once before, but I can't remember if it worked or not.

 

It might be more than that.

When I ran your game, Avast warned me about suspicious behavior and sent the exe for analysis.

Something about your exe might similarly be triggering Google's malware check.

Yeah, that should work.

 

Similarly, I also had the exe disappear the first time I tried to unload it from a rar. It worked fine after that, eventually, but I had to unload it once or twice.

 

This is because of the way Clickteam tacks on extensions to the end of the core executable. It makes the virus program suspicious of it, because that's *exactly* the kind of thing that is sometimes done with viruses in practice. Just have to make an exception for it, or turn the virus scanner off. I can't stand the things personally.

 

I've had it happen to a lot more applications lately that are usually editing tools of sorts.

At any rate, I've re-uploaded it as Sonic_1.5b.zip. The password is 'googlesucks'. I am mature. I've also 7-zipped the zip file to see if that works too. So there should be a 7z file as well with the same stuff.

 

We need better emojies, because that password is way more hilarious to me than that little icon conveys!

 

VGHF's release today really deserves its own topic IMO. We've got two threads discussing the same thing, plus its all being conflated with 50 pages of posts from the past year.

On topic, is this first time the desert level has been 100% confirmed to have the name Sand Shower? After Dust Hill was confirmed to be Mystic Cave, the community seemed to just be settled on referring to it as the Desert level I think until today, unless I'm more out of touch than I thought with this stuff.

Can anyone also summarize how we have guessed Sky Chase to be the intended music for the Winter level?

Also, I really hope this release taught people a thing or two. I swear sometimes it seems like the community hasn't evolved from being impatient kiddies the way they talk about other people's discoveries. Anyone at the VGHF has always been on the same page as this community and wants the same things. I can get if people felt teased by a total rando who showed up and vanished without fully sharing everything, but let's not be so disrespectful to people that literally make uncovering this stuff their actual job? Still laughable to me people wanted to pin down one-day early access on Patreon as being "paywalling." Let's try to at last pretend we've grown up now?

And I only hark on about this because I honestly see my past self in some of the attitudes people were displaying just a few days ago and wonder why we aren't evolving past this.

 

Sorry for double post but just wanted to add - can we be sure they were only ever 100% a mockup? Since the same video contains a short display of her Wood Zone art, and we know that ended up actually getting used to construct a partial level in the Simon Wai build.

What I mean is for all we know there may have been more artwork for the level that was made, at least. I suppose maybe you meant that screenshot itself was never actual gameplay, but I just wanted to extrapolate a bit