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

The implication is that the sun/light source would be hitting the sides of the level from the same angle your eyes look at the screen.

 

Yet the shadow is on different corners of different blocks. It's a bit weird.

 

I think the sections where the shading is flipped are actually supposed to be concave sections in the ground.

Green Hill does basically the same thing:

 

Honestly, Sand Shower’s terrain structure has a lot of those general similarities to Green Hill in regards to convex and concave structuring.

Perhaps that’s where the Dust Hill mixup originated?

 

No, just people in the early 00s being really stupid.

 

I wonder how we get Desert=Dust Hill. Like.. all proto hacks were made a long time after prototype leak, why people started to think that dust hill is desert instead of Mystic Cave?

 

From what I recall from the time, the argument was that the name "Dust Hill" made no sense for a cave stage, so the name on the level select must be a leftover from the mysterious desert stage (the thinking being that "Dust" could have been a slightly off-piste way of describing sand, I think?), and that Mystic Cave must have later taken its slot after it had been scrapped and the developers simply forgot to update the level select text. There was also a completely unsubstantiated rumour someone put about that an anonymous person had a different prototype where Mystic Cave was called "Deep Caves", which probably also fuelled the idea that "Dust Hill" couldn't possibly be its intended name.

None of it holds up to any scrutiny now, of course. But remember, back then we had no idea about Sand Shower as the name for the stage, as none of the associated documents had surfaced. Plus, the "Dust Hill" name only appears on the level select in the Simon Wai build, which was all we had at the time, so there was no corresponding title card text to corroborate that it really was just an earlier name for Mystic Cave. We also knew waaaaay less about the development of the game, and about good research practice in general - the community as a whole was lot more prone to baseless theorising without worrying about whether much actual evidence existed to support our hypotheses.

 

I’m fairly certain that the name “Dust Hill” appeared on the level select all the way up until Beta 7, when the level select menu was re-done. Perhaps we really were just ignorant…

 

That evidence didn't become available until much later, though - around the time the "Dust Hill"=desert was firmly established in the community's minds, all we had was the Simon Wai build. By the time we actually had access to Betas 4-7, we already had scans of some of Tom Payne's documents referring to the stage simply as "Desert Zone", so there'd been a bit of a shift in the community to referring to the desert stage simply by that description by that point. However, the older arguments about "Dust Hill" not making sense for Mystic Cave were so ingrained by that point that they continued to persist and cause a bit of argument as to which stage the name was originally intended for. If memory serves, though, I seem to recall that quite a few folks were starting to voice the idea that it may really just have been an early name for Mystic Cave even then.

 

Lmao, once I saw the message on these forums that drx "missed prototype that close to NA, and has Mystic Cave", or smth. I wonder if it was this.
Also weird that I can't find this message, it's definitely was somewhere here in archives..

 

There was also the interview with Yasuhara, who pointed to the desert mockup when asked whether Mystic Cave or the Desert zone were "Dust Hill". Although it was a very leading question.

 

The creation of Mystic Cave is yet another mystery that we still don't have a proper explanation for. Dust Hill obviously isn't the desert level's name, but it really does not fit Mystic Cave either, no matter how much mental gymnastics you pull to explain it(And believe me, I've seen ridiculous amounts of that regarding this subject).

Despite the name suggesting a strong connection to EHZ and HTZ, there's literally zero assets or gameplay mechanics taken from the aforementioned zones. However, there's two zones that it does share gimmicks with; Genocide City and Wing Fortress. As we can see from the level maps, GCZ was supposed to have those moving spiky stairs and ferris wheel platforms, and MCZ has both. Similarly, the vines are pretty much identical to the hooks of WFZ, which has interesting implications if you believe that WFZ reused GCZ assets. And this is just my theory, but I think that the pulley-activated drawbridges could have a connection to the hinged door platform thingies you see in GCZ's concept art and level maps.

But what about Madness Mountain? This piece of concept art has a drawbridge that's very similar to the ones from MCZ, and it also matches the "haunted house" -idea that Naka spoke about (Especially since this piece was repurposed as concept art for S3&K's actual "haunted house" level). But this concept has even less to do with Emerald Hill than Mystic Cave. Besides, if this is a level for the "ruined present" then why would a building like this be built over what used to be Hill Top? It couldn't have been Robotnik, since it's an old-looking dungeon with no advanced technology.

That being said, individual Sonic levels going through wildly different themes isn't unheard of. Before Star Light became a modern city, it used to be a roller coaster on top of a mountain with giant pearls as well as a literal moonscape level.

 

In early 1998, SSNTails showed me three mockups that had been recently been put out there on the internet. The pictures were EHZ, HPZ, and SSZ. I knew the EHZ picture from advertisements, but I had never seen the other two before. We knew next to nothing about Sonic 2's development. People take the Retro wiki, the massive fanbase with their massive collective knowledge, prototype ROMs, and decades of exploration into these matters for granted. We had absolutely none of that.

So we both agrees the HPZ picture was in fact HPZ (total guess on my part, but he may have come across confirmation about that somewhere). Then he pondered if the desert level was the mysterious "Dust Hill". That was the very first time I had even *heard* that name. So I thought there must be two lost levels and not one as once believed. So I said something along the lines of "oh, that HAS to be Dust Hill Zone, because the sand is the dust obviously!"

Fast-forward to early 1999, when the Sonic 2 Hacking Guide, Secrets of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta pages were online. I made myself very active on forums. Having a good sized audience by that point, I had already been talking about the desert level a bunch as if it was in fact called "Dust Hill", despite not having proof. And the beta ROM didn't seem to disprove it, because why in the world is the cave named "Dust Hill"?!?

I have always taken the blame for starting the mix-up. It's possible others were doing it despite my role in that, but I was certainly one of the first to do that at a minimum.

 

There's also the fact that "dust" is a common word used to describe desert levels in platformers. Mario has Dusty Dune Galaxy. Sonic 06 has Dusty Desert. So when the community knew about a desert level but couldn't put a name to it, and all the OTHER cut zones we knew about at the time were present in the level select, and we saw the name "Dust Hill", the evidence was clear. Simple as that. It was a very, very easy assumption to make.

You gotta remember: this is back when we made radical assumptions based on the most random shit, like Hidden Palace originally being a secret level exclusive to Tails's playthrough that he'd go through after crashing the Tornado after Sky Chase...all because of a stupid 1up monitor. Assuming Dust Hill was the name of the desert stage was one of the most logical theories at the time.

 

Not to mention the fact that the more we know about its development, the more illogical it seems to have been. Many decisions look like creative non-sequiturs made because of the time constraints.

 

Lemme dig up this from the past:



"sand" and "dust" are effectively the same word in Japanese. 砂 means sand, but adding 金 (gold) to it creates 砂金 - gold dust (literally "gold sand"). For another example, see Asian Dust, which in Japanese is 黄砂, literally "yellow sand". It's more than plausible that "Dust Hill" could be the name of a desert level.

However, this level

is Sand Shower Zone. We can say that with certainty at this point.

We have no idea what Dust Hill was supposed to be. We know Mystic Cave was built in its level slot, and the name even made it to the title cards, suggesting either Mystic Cave is actually Dust Hill or it didn't have a name until very, very late. Yasuhara outright said that Dust Hill was not Mystic Cave, but also kinda suggested that Dust Hill was Sand Shower when we know it wasn't.

Since Yasuhara's maps were revealed, my theory has been that Dust Hill is an as-yet unseen level, probably one that never even made it to concept art stage. Did it even have a concept? Maybe it was literally just "Green Hill's looking a lot more like Dust Hill". It being a second desert level would explain a lot of incongruities (as well as being a great reason to replace it) but we'll probably never know.

 

Well, we know that DHZ/MCZ ended up being different from its original concept, and it was originally going to have the feel of a haunted house as you mentioned. For all we knew it might have been conceived as dark take on Green/Emerald Hill with a spooky feel, to go with the ruined present thing.

Or maybe it was going to be a underground structure or cave system built inside/under the hills (Madness Mountain?). That would be kinda fitting: one of GHZ/EHZ's counterparts take place above the hills on the mountains' peaks (Hill Top), while the other takes under the hills.

It was repurposed for one of S3K's zones? I don't think I've heard of that before. What zone is that? Sandopolis?

 

The zone that it was repurposed for is Sandopolis. Act 2 to be precise.
I dunno, could be wrong on that.

 

Remind me why - this "the mockup is Sand Shower Zone" thing seemed to come up very quickly after Yasuhara's maps, and this community is unusually certain about the connection. "It has sand" isn't much of a step beyond "it has dust".

I can't remember if there was some Tweet confirming it, but it's not linked up on the wiki, and I've still been calling it "desert level" or words to that effect, simply on the grounds that there might have been multiple levels with sand in them. Brenda Ross' winter zone doesn't feature in Yasuhara's plans, so why should her desert zone?


My theory is this level never progressed passed this original mockup and Brenda was made to work on something that mattered - Wood Zone. Until it stopped mattering. The interview suggests it was "completed" but you've got to question well... where is it then? I can't see these graphics we've just found getting past Yamaguchi's quality control (the "sand" bit is particularly rough, and one 16x16 tile is both background AND foreground) - it took months for Metropolis to be finalised.

 

People have suggested that the winter zone is Rock World. Which would strengthen the notion that Sand Shower is Brenda's desert zone, as Sand Shower and Rock World are counterparts, and we know the winter zone would have reused the desert zone's graphics.

But I don't think Rock World = winter was ever confirmed. So yeah, we don't know for sure.

Although like you, I seem to recall a tweet stating that Brenda's desert zone = Sand Shower, but don't quote me on that.

If by "Yasuhara's plans" you're referring to his maps, I'm under the impression that the maps are the earliest documents we know of, likely created before work went into the levels, as they use the earliest level names and have discrepancies with the later timeline documents (which use updated names).

If that's the case, they precede Brenda's art and mockup.