Great to see some Kid Chameleon art in there, would love to see or hear more about KC in addition to the other Sega projects, or any more art like the unused KC enemies in Craig's 1995 resume youtube video. One theory is that a possible Kid Chameleon prototype name was Kevin Kidd sometime before winter CES 1992. Uk magazine Mean Machines Feb 1992 page 12 lists Kevin Kidd under Sega in the CES show list. Also in a livechat interview Craig mentions that Mark was talking about the idea of sprucing up an Alex Kidd type of game (paraphrasing). Then there is the Kevin art on the hills theme title card.
There's also "Dylan Charles: A.K.A. The Chameleon" https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:GPSG_US_0301.pdf&page=17 I don't think STI were great at names. I mean... they're called STI.
We were actually just discussing the Dylan Charles blurb recently on the KC discord. While it could very well be another possible prototype name, I wasn’t able to find any other references to it anywhere. Plus every other magazine has the final name after winter CES. So imo I think its an error by Game Players magazine. On a side note though, it is a special screenshot as it shows a non-final hud from an earlier build of KC. Imo the Dylan Charles Photo is an earlier press release photo since it is also in Micom BASIC April 92 with the final name, Kid Chameleon under it.
But that's a good name, you read "Sega Technical Institute" and I also read "Sonic Team International".
Since everyone else is bouncing around the bush - "Sexually Transmitted Infections" tend to get referred to as STIs in English.
I'm gonna be honest, I don't think I've ever seen STI used as an acronym for "sexually transmitted infection" before. STD, sure, but not STI.
By this, you mean that Craig remembers playing a more completed HPZ with a layout that went all the way to the end back in the day?
Would be interesting to know the way he remembers Hidden Palace ending, if he doesn't already have fan input about the possibilities.
I recall people in the last S2 proto thread speculating that there might have been a further developed HPZ that was never implemented in the main build. Craig's account certainly strengthens that possibility.
The way modern development works, I wouldn't be shocked. It was probably a fork in development that was never implemented. It's not like they all worked on the exact same giant file.
I wonder if there's any possibility that we'd ever get more developed versions of the cut levels, either internal forked builds or just the data on some floppies. Thought I heard that even Sand Shower had a full layout, but I don't know if that'd be on-paper or actually implemented. It's unlikely, but it'd be a dream come true (pardon the pun). Imagine how cool it would be to give them the same kind of restorative treatment that beta Windy Valley received.
Didn't hidden palace have extra work done on it between builds even though the stage was never updated to accommodate for them? Like didn't they add the ability for enemies to vertically wrap in the stage in one build but literally nothing else changed? Maybe those behind the scenes changes were done in preparation to add in the full stage, but at the last second they pulled everything out instead :p
Correct, HPZ had a decent amount of background changes between the Nick Arcade proto and whenever it was fully scrapped. Namely: the underwater palette got updated, the debug list got overhauled (all the unused objects were removed by Simon Wai, while the August 21st build added the Stego badnik), a couple of collision bugs were fixed, and vertical wrapping was implemented for objects.
You could say that Hidden Palace only got fixes/polish to what was already there in the Nick Arcade prototype, rather than true changes.
Oddly, Stego also had its sprite updated in the 1992-08-21 build (according to the Betas 4 through 8 article). But yeah, not much else.
