Unused enemy sprites by Sonic 2 artist Tom Payne

Several posts about it after the fact, bleeding into a second page, about something happening publicly. Too late.


Aaaanyhow, in regard to the some of the content already visible here, this confirms a longstanding suspicion of mine, that the fabled "light palette" for Sonic during S1's development was retained and reused almost everywhere Sonic 1 sprites were used again. A few examples include the Mega CD SEGA splash screen, S2 8-bit autodemo "coming soon" screen, 8-bit S2 zone title cards, Eraser, Crackers, Sonic CD time travel sequence, and so on. All*** the art files here appear to use that very same set of blues.

***EDIT: Some of them appear to be using a mix of the final colors alongside the darkest shade of the lighter/more saturated blues, strangely. There are plenty that do use all of the Eraser/Crackers style blues, tending to be what are apparently earlier sprites (such as the front facing pig).

 

I checked and it's not the same set of blues. Most of those files aren't using actual Mega Drive colors.

 

There are some truths in this world which we were never meant to uncover, for we were ill-equipped to handle them

Prerelease content like this is far more valuable and interesting than most betas. This is the most complete development snapshot of any game I've seen to date. Really awesome to see the progression of an enemy design from start to finish. And man, those rhombus tiles for Metropolis 3 looked fun.

 

EDIT: I've added the links to the stuff to a previous post.

 

What about this? I levelled one of the newly leaked images to translate 255 to 240, which leads the 238 bright whites to be 224. And the colors are indeed identical. I overlayed an existing Eraser sprite to demonstrate.

 

Hey! This is Frank from The Video Game History Foundation. Please don't be mad at the Mega Bites author for posting this in the middle of our research, it was a total miscommunication. He already feels bad, let's not make him feel any worse.

Here's the raw disk rips: http://www.filedropper.com/tompaynerawdisks

There are a few LBMs but most images were proprietary. My friend (and VGHF volunteer) Rich Whitehouse reverse engineered them and converted them to PNGs, which you can get either at Mega Bites or in IceKnight's uploads.

The disk images are raw sector dumps, and we had no issues with any of them, miraculously. We already scraped through everything, and the only deleted files still on the disks appear to be duplicates.

Rich is very confident about the palettes on the images, even though the Yamaguchi stuff is "wrong." It looks like Digitizer used the exact same palette as Game Gear. On the disks you'll even find the EXE they used internally for converting to LBMs.

My assumptions, which are still unfounded:

- The Yamaguchi disk was provided as reference, i.e. "This is what Sonic enemies are supposed to look like."

- The "Bob" disk is probably Tom's first attempts at replicating the style. These strike me as the equivalent of doodles, I wouldn't take any of these seriously as concepts for the game.

- My favorite discovery: the Yamaguchi sprites for the front-facing Ball Hog are in here!

 

Ta-dah:



(Using Marble Zone's second palette)


Kinda rings a bell, doesn't it?

 

The sketches are cool and all but seeing that damn pig made me remember what this work's all about. I'm happy to have played some part in reviving that art.

 

HOT DAMN! A Sonic 1 prototype sprite. I'd be super interested to run those sprites against the finals too that are in there.

 

Quick correction: Rich did NOT comb through every disk for deleted data, so I'd suggest someone do that if they feel up to it.

 

Glad to hear it was just a miscommunication and he wasn't being douchy. S'all good.

I'd really like to see a Sonic 2 hack using all those concept enemies. That golden buzzbomber looks pretty neat.

Edit: This one :v:

 

For the absolute sketchiness of the enemy sprites, a good bunch of these seem to be straight from this specific sheet of concept art! You can find similar enemy sketches on thesame Wiki page here, including the pig enemy concept. Looks like Payne was trying to get an idea of how it could be animated?

With a little love and polish, these could be neat little enemies to put in a hack, fan game (or even Sonic Mania 2 :v: ) as a tribute to Payne or something. Shame these didn't surface during Manias development; might've been amusing to have these in the Flying Battery trash piles instead of things like Motobugs and sign posts.

 

Holy shit, this whole thing is an amazing discovery! All of those beta Sonic 2 badniks, and this beta Sonic 1 Ball Hog badnik is the super sweet cherry on top of this fantastic dessert! Major props to all involved with finding, ripping and uploading these online!

Furthermore, one of the beta Sonic 2 badniks here seriously reminds me of the Skorp badnik from Sonic 3 & Knuckles.

 

Yeah.


Also this:

 

Heh, I like how one of the S2 development documents in that image dump is an actual high-res scan of that CES "Sonic the Sludgehog" scan.

Also:



I'd bet some good money if this guy was drawn during the development of Sonic CD, he totally would had gotten in as one of the hidden images. He'd fit perfectly with BatmanSonic and MajinSonic.

 

What's the best way to mount these images? Linux preferred. cdemu isn't playing nice with them.

EDIT: nevermind, I was thinking about it too much. Just mount as type vfat, nothing special. Time to play with the Digitizer format!

 

It's amazing seeing this all come to fruition. The "Secret Palace-Oil Ocean" connection does make me think.

 

Obligatory reminder that the contents of those scans were already known and they've been in the wiki (albeit in lower quality) for some time now.

EDIT: By the way, it would be awesome to have these exported as indexed RGB, even if many of them are not using Mega Drive colors. There might be alternate palettes or remnants of other stuff, lurking inside.

 

Man... Here I hoped those Proto-Sonic2 Overworld Maps would be in that treasure trove...