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

Guys, GUYS, I'm just trying to implement it. It's not 100% how it should've looking! I just wonder how can be implemented these weird colours, cuz it fits very well to iron tubes color line...
I wanna say that it's can be not true, just possible version of how it could be used. We even have a unused silver tubes in Simon Wai prototype, so why not?


(Palette recreation image presented by Lucaio Super/Caio ST)

 

I mean, I loosely translated the original drawings of chunks a long while back. It doesn't really specify which pipes to use so that part was all guess work/assumption. There's no way of saying that the silver pipes (maybe colored something different at some point) may have been used inbetween.



Here is that recreation. It's actually an interesting concept to think about. I still think they were background decoration, but who knows.

 

copper would match the old steampunk vibe, especially with all the gears the level has too, and the actual steam pistons the level ended up with (the small ones that lift up from the floor).

 

Wondering how they would look on a CRT...

 

The 2nd part of Judy Totoya's interview on Beep21 is out:
https://note.com/beep21/n/n98e2ac3214bd
This one is about the development of the stages.

PS: This is not exactly about GCZ, but the development lore post is locked referring to continue here.

 

Available part of article:
90% commercial
5% article
5% WHERE IS MONEY, LEBOVSKI?!

I know I'm too rude, but I'll better wait the leaking of article in English somewhere here

Also I not sure that it will reveal importaint details for us, probably just random memories.

 

https://note-com.translate.goog/bee...en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true

Here's a google translate link. It's pretty readable so far, actually.

Totoya discusses bringing in Jina Ishiwatari Tsukahara to the US to rejoin the team early in development, something which I've not seen discussed elsewhere, perhaps aside from this thread. https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...ely-unrecognized-contribution-to-sonic.41246/

We definitely need the full thing. In the last available paragraph, he speaks directly about working with the US artists and mentions them all by name. I suspect there's a lot more to be found in this that we'd like to know.

 

Here's all of it, really sloppily copy-pasted. Based on what I understood, the only cut zones he brings up are Wood, Sand Shower and Hidden Palace. There's barely any mentions of time travel either.

 

Remember kids, you need to live your life in such a way that Judy Totoya mentions your mod in an interview dedicated to the cut-out zones

It's really funny for me that he mentioned recent S2 mania mod, lel.

 

So we finally have a complete list of zone art credits!
Emerald Hill / Hill Top: Jini Ishiwatari
Chemical Plant / Death Egg: Yasushi Yamaguchi
Aquatic Run: Jini Ishiwatari
Casino Night: Rieko Kodama (initial), Yasushi Yamaguchi (revisions)
Mystic Cave: Jini Ishiwatari
Oil Ocean: Craig Stitt
Metropolis: Tom Payne
Sky Chase / Wing Fortress: Yasushi Yamaguchi
Special Stage: Tim Skelly, Peter Morawiec

Wood: Brenda Ross
Sand Shower / Winter: Brenda Ross
Hidden Palace: Craig Stitt
Cyber City: Tom Payne

Note that other than Casino Night, this list isn't taking into account any other modifications that Yasushi Yamaguchi might have done to other zones' art.

 

And confirmation that Jina Ishiwatari did Green Hill Zone in Sonic 1.

Which raises some interesting questions - did she do the 1990 Tokyo Toy Show version, or was she building on stuff from Naoto Oshima?

 

That is definitely a good question-
TTS had totally different level design that was obviously more basic and didn't account for the screen moving up and down, so it's not out of the question that someone else made it.
It could have also been Naka since the engine was in such an early state, he may have been the only one who knew how to work with the level format at the time, and just threw together a basic test map. Maybe we ask Ohshima directly?

 

So is Ishiwatari our next lead for information?

 

Yamaguchi just told us pretty comprehensive details about all the zones that she worked on - I doubt that she can provide much new perspective.

If we want information about each zone's conception and initial story purpose, Yasuhara is our best bet. That being said, we should probably prepare for disappointment, as it's starting to seem more and more likely that zones such as Ocean Wind and Tropical Sun were shelved extremely early on (much earlier than the level IDs suggest) and never made it past the concept art stage.

 

Jina Ishiwatari did more things than Sonic 1 and 2 - she's a character designer on Chaotix. No idea which character, but... she designed a character, apparently.

Which means you can play the "what's the story with Sonic Crackers" game. Although you might not get an answer to that.

And of course the marvel that is Pen Pen TriIceLon.

 

Either Espio, Bomb, or Heavy. Vector and Mighty were Ohshima, and Charmy originates from the 1992 manga either designed by Ohshima or the manga's author Sango Morimoto.

 

Sango Morimoto didn't design Charmy, or any of the manga series' key characters. Several artists worked on the series, in different magazines. Naoto Ohshima said that he designed Charmy. Espio was designed by Takumi Miyake. Mighty was designed by Manabu Kusunoki.

Chaotix's credits make a distinction between "Original Character Concept" (Naoto Ohshima, Takashi "Thomas" Yuda, Manabu Kusunoki, Kazuyoshi Hoshino, Takumi Miyake, Yasufumi Soejima) and "Character Designer" (Ryo Kudou, Takumi Miyake, Jina Ishiwatari, Kazuyuyoshi Hoshino, Yasufumi Soejima).

The "Original Character Concept" credits are the artists who created the main characters (Ohshima, Yuda and Kusunoki are credited, and they didn't work on Chaotix at all).

The "Character Designer" credits are most likely the artists responsible for the in-game character graphics. Chaotix uses the term "designer" for many of its credits, including all the art related roles: Chief Graphic Designer, Attraction Designer*, Enemy Designer, Boss Designer.

*In Chaotix the stages are called "Attractions".

 

Here's an interesting bit from a Sega Visions magazine I found relevant:



This is from August 1992, and it seems that Hidden Palace had already been turned into the 1 act secret level accessed after collecting all Emeralds by this point. Interestingly, the names "Chemical Factory Zone" and "New Green Hill Zone" are used. The former is a name that appears in Tom Payne's documentation, while the latter sounds a whole lot like "Neo Green Hill Zone".

 

I’m fairly positive this is ultimately a red herring, to be honest with you. The talk about the SEGA CD version, which we are fairly certain never existed, is what gives it away to me as probably not real.

 

Yeah, it's not "New Green Hill", it's "the new Green Hill", as in Emerald Hill when it was called Green Hill.

"A secret zone you have to work hard to find" does sound like HPZ, but...it's a western magazine ad from 1992. For all we know, they're just making it up.