That's the bridge from Red Mountain Act 1. I don't think it's Windy Valley. EDIT: Well, Dude confirmed its WV, so never mind me.
This just confirms what I knew already - the bridges in the final Windy Valley are shorter than the ones in the autodemo and face the opposite direction. I know exactly where that screenshot is from. Also, evilhamwizard: I am reasonably certain that this image has been retouched in a photo editing program. The dark brown mountains in the background are completely different from the actual level layout in that area, and the gear and box objects are not part of the SET layout. I also think that the box's scale is wrong for where it would be in the level. In fact it is placed directly on top of one of the floor pads. As for the 'blue' bridge, I think that is just a placeholder. It's the kind of placeholder I make in my levels when I haven't added detail to an are yet but I know what the layout needs to be.
So I finally got a video of this up after working on having all of them split out of the AutoDemo itself. Looks like Knuckles was a whole hell of a lot more combat oriented initially than what we got in the final.
I'd of been fine with that, they probably scrapped it though since basically all the levels were designed around Sonic, so they turned them into hunting levels instead. I'd like to see some Knuckles' prototype layouts.
Neat! Those actually look cool for Knuckles. I wonder if there are any other unused animations for other characters that we don't know about. I do wonder if there were levels or parts of existing levels made specifically for Knuckles that would have had you utilize these melee attacks.
I'd say it's more likely the fact that since every enemy dies in one hit, fancy combos and the like become a bit... pointless (particularly in a 3D context where there's no way of locking onto enemies). Even bosses have a recall time. The old promotional shots have Knuckles hanging around in Sonic's levels (or in Station Square). I think it's unlikely they ever made more fighting-orientated stages. p.s.
Holy crap, someone just told me about these on my Windy Valley video, they're even more amazing than described. I really, really like the move where Knuckles extends his arm and then sort of reverses his hand, I could just imagine the knuckle spikes being brutal like that. The autodemo is still yielding results over a year on from its release. All of you are seriously amazing.
Yeah I don't think that Knuckles was ever meant to be as combat focused as the Werehog was. That said, I do think it's interesting that he was planned, at least at some point, to have had more combat moves. They probably figured it was a bit overkill to have so many similar moves :v:
All of this is just amazing! Keep it up guys. For all the crazy stuff that's happened in my life the last 8 years, coming here and reading up on this stuff has been the constant, it's really quite comforting, and never ceases to lose my interest.
Though I don't know if it would've been more combat focused, I could definitely see Knuckles using those in SA1 as varied animations; like they go through a sort of cycle to make the gameplay feel more fresh. On the subject of having too many one-hit kill enemies.. maybe that's why rooms like the one filled with those pink robots in Final Egg exists? Maybe Knuckles played more like Sonic and co regularly, but had more swarms of enemies to knock out.
As do I. Not too long ago, I managed to get a copy of one of these. Originally was sold at the Tokyo International Forum Unveiling (1998-08-22). Apart from the leaked early screenshots of Sonic Adventure, this book contains the earliest screenshots of Sonic Adventure during it's development (some of which I've never seen before). This is as good as it gets so far. At the very least, I'll be able to take crisp photo shots of each page. My scanner unfortunately isn't big enough to scan each page (though I can scan sharp crisp images of whatever screenshots you folks would like to see). And while I'm at it... From what I can gather, it's a Taikenban disc that was released around the same time as the final copy. Which means it might not be all that interesting apart from how it was put together (in other words, there's some unique things there, just nothing prototype-ish). It's another thing we didn't know existed and one for the wiki. I plan to post both these up at some point in the next couple of weeks.
Never seen those Knuckles combos. Him being a brawler is possibly the best thing they could do and, given the right gameplay (read: sped-up Werehog), he could have been a much more potent character than just your ornery jewel hunter gimmick.
This is amazing. I've been hoping for high quality scans from this for a long time. There's actually a beta Windy Valley screenshot in there with Gamma, the same one Big was plastered onto, that was never released outside of that book. I'm really looking forward to seeing some scans and pics from this in high res. I've only ever seen horribly low quality scans of this pamphlet.
Whats the size of the book exactly? if someone has a scanner here that can fit it maybe Orengefox can send it to someone for scanning.
I'd love to volunteer, although I'm in the process of moving now. What I'd like to know are what the dimensions of the book are to see if it can fit on my scanner and how soon can it be sent to me.
Guys, I'll be getting a new bigger scanner at some point any way as my old one is on it's way out. At the very least, there will be decent pictures of each and every page the booklet has which you'll be able to download. With that mind, there's no real rush to have all this scanned and sorted