New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

Sure there is, we have numerous enemies which moved zones in Sonic 1, like Ball hog going from GHZ to SBZ, or Yadorin moving from Marble Zone to Spring Yard Zone.

 

Maybe is a stupid question but... if the pallete found is mostly purple, why the recreations are orange? There is no orange at the pallete found?

 

Hez's recreation was created before we had discovered the actual palette and digitized artwork, so he made interpretations.

 

Go back to Page 5. He's working on an updated version that's based on what we know now.

 

That's not level art - enemies and common objects were handled by someone else (maybe Naoto Oshima? It's hard to tell with Sonic 1).

There seems to have been a push in Sonic 2 (and 3) for enemies to level-specific. The fully coded Hidden Palace enemies weren't relocated (even though the bats would have been perfect for Mystic Cave).

 

I wasn't aware of SSZ re-using tiles (which ones?), but I would take the rare re-usages of tiles to be the exception rather than the rule; Esp. in the case of HPZSK, because, as we now know, that zone was straight up not meant to exist at first.

The only other instance I can think of with recycled tiles at all is the rotating cylinders over in FBZ, which do indeed re-use tiles from MTZ.

 

Excellent point, originally HPZSK was meant to be in LRZ Act 2 according to storyboards, while SSZ was always present.

 

Unless HPZ was meant to be one of the two Knuckles-exclusive zones (most likely the one replacing LRZ).

 

According to a Twitter post, Judy Totoya redid Casino Night Zone's art from what Phoenix Rie made, so at least that zone had multiple artists. Similarly, Totoya is also said to have redone Craig Stitt's art in Oil Ocean Zone, according to an issue of Retro Gamer.

 

We know nothing about the planned Knuckles-exclusive Zones, or even if they made it very far in the concept stage - the only evidence we've seen of a storyboard being drawn for one only has a start point and nothing else before being abandoned, with the rest of the sheet used for character concept designs instead.

Also, Hidden Palace is pretty categorically accounted for. First, remember that in at least one available prototype, Hidden Palace is "Sky Sanctuary Zone Act 1", with the final Sky Sanctuary as Act 2 - this accounts for any reused or similar tiles between the two, as they were literally considered two parts of the same stage at one point in development.

If you look back at the concept storyboards, you can see how this originated - though the stuff with the Emerald and Knuckles was indeed supposed to be part of Lava Reef, everything after Sonic falls through the floor was supposed to be the start of Sky Sanctuary, with the teleporter then taking the player above the clouds for the majority of the stage as per the final. All the major events in Hidden Palace Zone are accounted for in the concepts too, so it's hard to see what ideas if any could have been cribbed from unseen concepts for the second Knuckles exclusive stage.

Presumably at some point in development they realised that having all the events in the underground Emerald temple take place within one stage made things easier - especially as the temple graphics wouldn't be used anywhere else in Lava Reef Act 2. This then also allowed them to start the sky portion of the stage without having to use any graphical trickery to achieve the transition from underground to above the clouds within a single stage.

 

It's worth noting that 3K's development was likely managed differently than S2's. 3K had an (almost) all-Japanese team with a much clearer focus and likely a more directly collaborative approach, while S2 was essentially a loosey-goosey hodge-podge with certain artists tasked for certain zones without much communication going on. I don't think we should be assuming that the way one game was managed and organized is necessarily the way the other was.

That would require retrofitting the sprites into the other zone's palette. Could be done, but I suspect they didn't want to bother.

 

Hence why we can't say for certain that HPZ "was straight up not meant to exist at first". We don't know all the zones that were planned for the game.

 

As I said later in my post, though, pretty much everything actually in the final Hidden Palace Zone is literally accounted for in the early Lava Reef/Sky Sanctuary sketches - there's not really any room for it to have cribbed additional concepts from a planned Knuckles exclusive stage, and if Knuckles was supposed to make his way through the temple it's reasonable to assume it's be on the same storyboard as Sonic's route as with every other shared stage.

From the available evidence, it seems like they realised the end of Lava Reef and start of Sky Sanctuary took place in an otherwise unique underground temple section, and decided it made sense to consolidate all that into one stage confined to that setting. This became Sky Sanctuary Act 1, later renamed Hidden Palace Zone (possibly as they realised that calling the underground temple Act Sky Sanctuary rather have the game away as to what was coming up next).

The soundtrack does at least suggest the idea that the underground temple sections of both stages only become consolidated into a new single Act after the songs were already composed, as otherwise I can't imagine they wouldn't have given it it's own music per every other stage. As-is, there's no extra track between Lava Reef 2 and Sky Sanctuary, as you'd expect since we know the idea of the stage having its own unique name came later. Likewise, Sky Sanctuary only has a single theme rather than an Act 1 and Act 2 mix, which you'd otherwise expect from how the stage is presented in the prototype as Sky Sanctuary Act 1. Indeed, there seems to have been some back and forth on what music to assign to the stage, as at that point in development it actually used Sky Sanctuary's music, too!

Literally the only thing I can see that may possibly have been borrowed from a Knuckles-exclusive level is the name, though that already originates from Sonic 2. But at the storyboard stage the Zones didn't even have proper names yet, and the only evidence we have - the barely started storyboard for the Knuckles-exclisive alternate Zone 5 - seems to suggest they may have been dropped before they were even storyboarded properly.

Unless, of course, they had another crack at it on a different sheet of paper - from the way the Death Egg sheet ends, we can reasonably assume there may be at least one more existing sheet we haven't seen, storyboarding whatever the original concept for The Doomsday Zone was. So I suppose it could be possible the Knuckles-exclusive Zones got further than the currently-available evidence would suggest, and that storyboards could still exist for them somewhere.

 

I'm aware of all that. But it doesn't matter. Until we have proof or official word, we cannot speak in absolutes.

At most we can say that "there is no concrete evidence HPZ was going to be its own zone at first".

 

Agreed! As you say, at the end of the day the only hard facts we have are what's been presented to us, which sadly paints a rather incomplete picture at present.

 

an aside, in the prototype(s) Hidden Palace uses Sky Sanctuary's music, possibly hinting that the final Sky Sanctuary track was moved over to "act 2" at some point. IMO no matter how that theme was arranged, it would've sounded a bit too triumphant for the more gloomy, mystical Sonic 3 Hidden Palace...

 

Here it is purple and some added more accurate fans (soyKuriN did the side facing ones, and I figured I wouldn't reinvent the wheel)

 

Gotta admit, I was NOT expecting the Bear Traps to be that giant!

 

I mean, judging from the graph lines, it is 16 tiles wide, which would be 128px, which is the size of a chunk in Sonic 2. Hell, in the graphic, groups of 4 tiles are even highlighted, which corresponds with how chunks are made up of 16x16 blocks that are made up of 4 tiles, grouped exactly like that. It's also 4 tiles tall, which is a quarter of a chunk (32px), and the pencil drawing fits in that exact space.