Hirokazu Yasuhara revealing all kinds of Sonic development stuff

That's actually a stegosaurus.

It may have been designed as a possible "past" version of the crab... or perhaps it was just some practice/brainstorming for additional unrelated enemies.

 

In that event, the evolution of the Stego/Stegway badnik abandoned the spring/bumper concept by then, unless i just interpreted those as springs. I do see the facial similarities though.

 

No not really, you've assumed "Sand Shower" is the desert level... which is exactly what people have done for years in asuming "Dust Hill" is the desert level.

But you're not the only one - there's a lot of assumptions in this topic, mainly around this idea that Sonic travels to the exact same locations on a map across multiple timezones - there's an exceedingly high chance that no levels are connected. That there are in fact no parallels with Sonic CD's time travel mechanic, because hey, playing the same stage with minor differences isn't much fun and that unlike Sonic CD, there doesn't seem to be a reason to revisit places more than once. That there's no evidence for past and present versions of badniks, or even that those four map slides correspond to that timeline slide!



Though can I make this truly frightening suggestion to Retro as a whole?

Maybe you should, like, contact Hirokazu Yasuhara and get him to definitively prove what that mockup represents.

Clearly he's more open to Sonic 2 development discussion than most - he's gone out of his way to travel to Poland to talk about game development and brought up Sonic 2 completely unprompted. He's also posted thing(s) on Twitter, i.e. this is all somewhat fresh in his mind. And again, as the lead designer of the project there is no reason to doubt his answers. Nominate someone who knows what they're talking about to speak on behalf of the board - it's been yeaaaars since a proper interview has taken place and it's so much easier now.



Alternatively,



and you could do something more productive. Like hey, find a higher quality version of this mockup because we've been sitting on this scan for 15 years or more. I'm sure there was a version which showed the two blocks in the top right were recycled from Labyrinth Zone, but damned if I can find it.

 

Mass contacting a developer led to bad results before.

 

That's where the "nominate someone who knows what they're talking about to speak on behalf of the board" bit comes in.

 

I'd personally wait a little more to let him keep releasing these things at his own pace, but if you want I can even start preparing an interview like I used to in the old days.

Of course, I'd try to make it as neutral as possible regarding level names that may or may not have been assigned to the prototype concepts.

 

I got you fam, with bonus reference to time travel

 

Yeah, I know that scan exists, though it's still fairly low quality in the grand scheme of things.

Thing is, there are a whole heap of gaming magazines from around this period that could conceivably have printed those three mock-ups, but aren't scanned. On the UK gaming mag front (where you're most likely to find thing at this point) there's Sega Power, MegaTech, Sega Zone (UK) and a few multi-format mags that could have something of value.

And that's discounting magazines that may have printed these screenshots later than they probably should have.

 

Ahh, my bad, I thought you were trying to find an existing scan that included a bit more visibility of the two blocks in the top right (and that scan shows a bit more than most of the others currently out there). It would be nice to get our hands on the press kit source files from which the mockups inevitably originally came.

I'm fine with this, if you want to be the representative. It would be nostalgic.

 

So lets work with what we can!

I color-corrected Hidden Palace and Green Hill to get an Idea of what the sand zone would have looked like and used different sharpening techniques to get most of the detail from the scan.

Here are the results:




Interstingly, the cacti have green stripes, instead of the yellow they're usually rendered with.

 

Well, I asked the friend I mentioned before about the use of the word Dust as a Japanese. I tried to be as impartial as possible asking him about the word first before moving to the level idea and:

-"???" is used for garbage when written alone. Dasuto comes from the English word dust.
-It could be used for ashes.
-Dirt and sand can be called dust when moved by air.
-It's not used for the kind of dust produced in mines.
-When showed him pics of the desert level and a screenshot of MCZ he asked for ice to be called Dust Hill.


I asked him if he could translate into Japanese some questions if I wanted to ask that developer something and he is ok with it.

Edit: Resumed. I tought the way of asking could be relevant but whatever.

 

Just want to chip in that I asked a friend the same question, and yes, indeed dasuto means dust, but it also means garbage. Not big chunks of garbage, though, she told me it means small bits of stuff that together makes garbage.

 

So what we'd call "fluff"?

 

Immediately made me think of this quote from the Craig Stitt interview:
"I can remember trying to work out the details of what a forest would look like when it was greeen and healthy, then what it would look like after it had been ravaged by Robotnic. I can remember trying to come up with a good way of doing burning trees"

In relation to ??? as Dust being ashes.

 

Honestly, my biggest takeaway from this is that we're lucky to have Sonic 2 at all, and to have it as good as it was. Giant conceptual changes like these usually show up in games that are either never released or in games that end up being absolute garbage. It's kind of a miracle that we have Sonic 2.

Everyone is talking like these maps and time travel made it into dev at some point before being axed, but...I dunno, I get the feeling that a lot of this was scrapped before there was even a build. The Nick Arcade prototype is practically as early as you can get without the game just being a Sonic 1 ROMhack, and it doesn't have anything like the concepts mentioned here - no leftover world map code/assets, MAYBE level slots - but these level slots already correspond to Sonic 1 stages (...right?), so it's likely that they emptied out the slot contents in preparation for the new stages.

While it does seem like vestiges of the concept made it into actual builds, it seems to me that this was super, "storyboarding ideas for the next game" early and these parallels happened due to creative osmosis - they had these ideas in the back of their mind while making the game, perhaps.

 

Please do ICEKnight!

 

You know, thinking about how many unused ideas got recycled later, I'm kinda glad Sonic 2 got butchered. It still ended up really good, and 3&K may not have been as amazing without it.

 

We actually have a slightly better scan of Mega #1 which might have been a slightly better starting point:

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:Mega_UK_01.pdf&page=29

I had a bit of a go:

My colours aren't quite as accurate as yours but it definitely looks as if there's more of an orange hue than a yellow one.

 

For those that have experience editing images, do you think that the particles at the bottom can be stuff exagerated by noise from the image compression? Could it be that what we all tought to be sand from the yellow tint was in reality a mix of soil and stones?

Also around it has a different, intermittent pattern. I wonder if it was animated like a conveyor belt.

 

It's sand.

But I suppose it's difficult to confirm or deny how textured it is. There's a lot of noise in the image, and any texturing would probably be subtle because it's... sand.