Hirokazu Yasuhara revealing all kinds of Sonic development stuff

Mind you, if Desert Level is Sand Shower, which I personally agree with ICEKnight on, then I wonder why they decided to make the level swap between Sand and Ice.

 

So that means the photo of Sonic running in a desert area is actually "Sand Shower Zone". For once in my miserable existence I agree with ICEKnight.

 

Never really saw Mystic Cave as a hill though. Now maybe Dusty Cave or Dust Cavern zone might have been fitting.

 

Well considering Cyber City was called Genocide City I think we can chalk the name down to an awkward name (which is why it was changed).

Yasahura must have been misremembering in that quot

 

I'm entering dangerous speculation territory here but I'd say that when you palette swap a "Sand Shower" you can get falling snow.

 

That makes sense to me, I think you are probably right. Especially when you consider that Brenda clearly had no idea what the level was called aside from its internal 'Desert' nickname.

It also makes sense that Mystic Cave would be in the past, with the overgrown vegetation (not affected by man) and the prehistoric looking badnik designs (at least in my opinion).

Mystic Cave being a past Green Hill is really cool - imagine if it is actually the caves seen in Green Hills background but in the past!

 

...But Dust Hill is not in the past, it's in "Now 2", AKA the alternate (bad) present of Green Hill.

Maybe it even has to do with Mystic Cave being a green cave?

 

Maybe they briefly toyed with the idea of the desert zone "freezing over" in the bad future/ruined present timeline and got to work on making a palette edit (implemented in the second half of the level for ease of access while testing) as a start, but decided not to take it into actual consideration (explaining why it doesn't show up on the map sketches)? Either that, or "rock world" was to evolve into some sort of frozen wasteland rather than forming a desert due to (unexplained) environmental changes, if I'm understanding the past variation of Sand Shower correctly. The second alternative seems like it has too much thought put into it for a silly idea that was never put into actual design sketches, though.

Speculation is fun. :v:

 

One thing I've learned from this is that Sonic 2 was epic, before, during, and after development. Reminds me of how many other games, television shows, and movies end up with lots of originally conceived concepts left on the floor. However, Sonic 2 was supposed to be way more epic than we ever could have imagined. It almost makes Sonic 3 & Knuckles seem like a joke.....and they ran out of time with that one too. Sonic 2 is definitely the product of limited timelines. They wanted to stay on top of something hot, but ran out of steam in the late 90s.

 

The relevance is that these documents are the original plan, but they didn't follow it. When the time travel was going to be implemented a Rock World Zone and a desert level called Sandy Shower were planned? Sure. But we don't know if when the art and mockup was made the plan was still the same. Brenda Ross didn't know about the Sandy Shower name either.

Hidden Palace isn't even in the map when it was one of the first levels implemented. Who knows when these document ideas were scrapped and became old.

It's like calling Aquatic Ruin Olympus or Blue Lake. It has water and ancient Greek structures, but we can't assume it is one of these for sure.

 

You seem to keep missing the part where we now know that Dust Hill was a separate level from the desert and rock zones.

It looks like you're focusing on theorising about what we don't know while disregarding the actual development documents that this topic is about.

 

I'm gonna have to side with ICEknight here, there's a lot of evidence suggesting Sand Shower was the name of the desert zone and Dust Hill was simply a proto name for Mystic Cave.

First off, the map. Rock World and Sand Shower are the past and present versions of each other. This is also supported by the previous docs stating "Rock Zone" was the past of "Desert Zone". The only desert zone we know of is that mockup.

Second, the internal level slots. In both the Wai and final build, 03 is presumably the slot leftover from the desert zone since it plays Oil Ocean's BGM (the song likely meant for the desert zone originally, since Oil Ocean uses 2P Casino Night's BGM in the Wai proto). This is interesting because Mystic Cave has its own level slot (0B) in both the Wai and final builds. Why would Mystic Cave be called Dust Hill if it not only isn't replacing the leftover desert stage's slot, but also exists alongside it? It makes more sense IMO, that the desert level (Sandy Shower) was already scrapped at this point and Dust Hill was Mystic Cave's proto name.

Third, Mystic Cave is fairly complete (art and objects) compared to other stages in the Wai proto. Which implies that it was a zone conceived early on in the development process and not a last minute addition. It's very possible that originally Mystic Cave (Dust Hill) was a cavern below Emerald HIll (Green HIll) in the bad present.

 

I wonder what's the deal with the dome structure in the mountains. It's present in all or nearly all timezones, even the past and the unaltered present...

On the subject of HPZ, I just thought that the reason it's not in the maps (assuming it's not Olympus) may be that it was accessible at any point in the game, given that you would be teleported to it after collecting all Emeralds. So they didn't draw it in any of the maps because it doesn't exist in a specific time zone, but in all of them.
Of course, that brings up the question of whether the level would have changed depending on the current timezone. I'm guessing it would probably have been the same regardless of it, possibly justified in-universe by the place being so well hidden and preserved that it was completely isolated from the influence of outside events, so it didn't get significantly altered by time alterations or the passing of time. Though the fact that it has badniks inside seems to go against this /> Possibly just a case of gameplay and story segregation, though.

Another possible reason is that Hidden Palace isn't supposed to be located in the island the game takes place at, but somewhere else, so it wouldn't have made sense to draw it in the island's maps. After all, it doesn't need to be close to the other Zones for Sonic to access it, given that he would be teleported to it by the Emeralds.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's supposed to be located inside the mountains in the map, and the aforementioned dome was its roof, going by its original concept as a palace. So they drew the dome as a visual cue to Hidden Palace's location, but didn't bother labeling it, possibly to avoid the redundancy of putting the same label in nearly all maps.

 

Complete speculation, but Hidden Palace's crystal-centric art always made the level appear to be some variant of Mystic Cave. It also has pre-historic badniks. Hidden Palace (past), Green Hill (present), Dust Hill / Mystic Cave (bad present?).

Or is Hidden Palance simply not in the picture at all at this point?

 

Strange how Yasuhara himself confirmed a decade ago that Dust Hill was the "desert level" shown in mockups and yet his sketches seem contradictory.

 

His reply was a pic and a video of Esrael's hack that you get as first results when googling the "Dust Hill Zone" he was being asked for on a real-time chat.

Which, yes, contradicts the real info that he was now able to dig.

 

It's probably because level names aren't that important to the developers.

During development they need a name to tell the levels a part and in many cases the names they pick are just descriptions (e.g. Rock Zone). Sometimes these names will stick other times they will be revised.

Also it wouldn't surprise me if the final names have to be signed off by someone who wasn't the original level designer (e.g. like the marketing department, localisation team, a writer or someone else. Maybe even the dev team come to consensus on another name that the original designer didn't think off).

I really doubt the devs put as much importance on names as we fans do.

 

According to Sik, they sent two images while asking, one of Mystic Cave, and one of the desert level, to avoid any confusion. Still... between "Dust Hill Zone" and "Sand Shower Zone", is more than obvious that the desert level was called Sand Shower Zone. It's all very contradictory.

 

Why do the 2-player levels in Sonic 3 not overwrite the unused broken Sonic & Knuckles levels and instead, exist alongside them three slots after Mushroom Hill? Sure, Sonic 3 is bad example due to all the lock-on crap but it gets the point across. Another thing to remember is that there is more than one name inconsistency; why would Emerald Hill be called Green Hill if Emerald Hill already overwrote Green Hill? ID 01 isn't Green Hill either, it's the remains of Labyrinth zone from the NA proto. A lot of this is too much on the speculative side of things too, there is no evidence of time travel in the simon wai prototype and it is possible it was already dropped by this point. Another thing is that the desert level could have been dropped before the Nick arcade prototype as it presumably comes from a time when Hidden Palace still had it's old background.

Also, don't forget:

 

Exactly! That's why I'm trying to stick to the facts that you're trying to debunk with full-on speculation.

Yeah, about that... Let's take a look at the last attempt at an "interview" with Brenda Ross, which happened after that quote you've image captured:

First she admits that she had never called it Dust Hill and I don't know about you, but her very last reply sounds to me like a "Sure, whatever, where did you get my AIM" kind of response.