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

Oh that’s right, Cyber City and Launch Base both have water, and DEZ and Launch Base also have the elevators. I imagine the concepts were spread between both.

 

Is this recreation accurate? Because some of those clouds are from Green Hill almost certainly. I notice you're missing the moon so maybe it was your creative decision to use those as the source image from the captured video is a bit too blurry, right?



Also, those pillars are uncomfortably reminiscent of the ones in the Sonic 3 version of Hidden Palace. Not to mention that the composition is similar: with distant mountains in the background and entering an indoor zone.

 

Well damn that's a good Sand Shower recreation. :D

I will say I did notice the recycled tiles in that night mockup, but wasn't sure what of the composition was designed for the original, less of it feels like an extension the same way that extra pillar element did in the Spinball map, especially since it looks more like ancient ruins than the western desert SSZ is in the mockup.


I'd started making a revised SSZ art set based on the new cleaner references as well, though I admit it's a more basic effort than yours right now. (Did try to recreate that cave interior accurately though, I don't think any recreation ever done that.) May just have to steal your's instead. :P

But yeah, the fans and implied anti gravity with CCZ's maps definitely give a vibe of S3K Death Egg.

 

Something that occurred to me: Sand Shower seems to reuse/edit some tiles from S1's Labyrinth. It's also the only seeming outlier in the "reflects 8-bit S1 campaign" hypothesis. What if Sand Shower is the ground-level of that location of South Island, with Labyrinth being a construct inside underground caverns full of groundwater.

But given that its mockup also uses GHZ clouds, I'm just talking out of my ass and there is probably no actual significance to it. :P

 

You mean those ornate tiles next to the pillar in the mockup?

Because while they do look quite similar to certain tiles from Labyrinth, they are ultimately different.

 

Honestly it's been months since I've looked at it. My guess is I used GHZ clouds since she seemed to borrow a lot from Sonic 1. I probably just didn't get to the moon or opted to not include it until I figured out how the scrolling would have looked. The background mountain is the only thing 100 percent accurate if we're being nit-picky. It's straight from one of the other games she worked on previously bar a different palette. Otherwise, you truly aren't going to get 100 percent accurate with the quality of a VHS recording, no matter how well its converted.

 

Where do the chunk and layout information come from?

 

Yes, those and some of the 16x8 brick patterns seemingly either from the S1 proto or very similar to it. For the ornate design, I did mention it could have been edited. We already know they recycled other S1 art such as GHZ clouds, as seen not only in Sand Shower’s mockup, but also Emerald/Green Hill’s mockup as well.

 

Are you talking about the Sand Shower stuff I posted? Those are strictly from a recreation I was working on.

The layout information is also from my brain mostly, if that was the question. I had Aquatic Ruins, Launch Base, and Sandopolis pulled up for referencing sections to try and get an accurate layout to how the other Sonic 2 layouts were.

 

Yeah, I was wondering whether the Sand Shower stuff came from some documents I haven't seen yet.

 

The background mountains are 100% from Kid Chameleon, correct, including the dithering gradient over them. And indeed not the clouds.


My intention was not to be nitpicky with your recreation (sorry if I sounded like that), but rather figure out the accuracy of those being the clouds from Green Hill, which after further inspection/reading indeed seems to be the case (this was known but I missed it).
As DefinitiveDubs and HEDGESMFG commented in the past, I find it unlikely that this is not from a Sonic game given it uses assets from Sonic 1.

Now regarding the thing with the moon (and maybe the stars) and the scrolling mentioned, I think it was not made to work, it's just a mockup. The clouds in the desert/winter zone mockup are placed randomly, not respecting the different horizontal pseudo-layers that allow the fake parallax in Green Hill. I think she did the same for this mockup.


And now just point out something indeed nitpicky: I noticed that one cloud (marked in orange) seems to be mirrored in the mockup and not in the recreation which is particularly interesting because in Green Hill that one is the only cloud that is never mirrored in the background.

 

It's all good. I didn't mean that nitpicky comment in malice. I was just trying to bring reason to some of the choices I made in case anyone called it out as I couldn't find the original anywhere quickly and had the recreation I was working on on hand. I'm almost 100 percent certain I was attempting to get the background ready for paralaxing, as none of the mockup backgrounds are setup for that (as they are mockups, so I understand why). Basically how I work, is I get the mockup done in pixel art to my satisfaction, then start manipulating it to be ROM/game ready. I think wherever I was at with the mountain esq level, I was at some point after I got the art restored and was starting on getting it ready for that. I think I had saved the moon off somewhere else to do something similar with it like what was done in Oil Ocean.

Ranting aside: I DO think all of the mock-ups would have been heavily redone by Japanese artists. Think on the level of Casino Night. I think the layouts would have remained mostly the same, but the art would have gone a different direction. What we see of Sand Shower likely would have looked very different had it made it to its final stages. Same with Wood Zone.

 

A shame really. I think Brenda Ross' level art is unique but admitedly does deviate a fair bit from the consistent look of Sonic 2.

I think the foreground of Sand Shower is pretty conventional for the most part, all the geometry and 3D effects are quite in style with that classic Sonic look, though the background is admitedly INCREDIBLY simplistic.

 

Same could be said for Wood Zone and the winter level.

Now that I'm thinking of it, did a single background drawn by any of the American artists make it into the final game? Oil Ocean's original background was obviously replaced with a new one from Yamaguchi, while Hidden Palace was cut altogether. And don't quote me on this, as it could've been just a mistranslation or a misunderstanding, but I'm pretty sure that Yamaguchi said something about Metropolis' background being altered in one of the Beep21 interviews. I can see that being the case, as the Zone's final background doesn't have anything in common with the original one full of boilers, pipes and furnaces.

 

Hidden Palace had a completely different and much cruder background in the mockup. Are we sure Yamaguchi didn't also do the one we see in-game?

 

Stitt did the later background too, as we know from interviews.

Regardless, my point is that the level didn't make it into the final game at all, so neither did either background.

 

Are you sure? I recall him mentioning that he didn't. I could be miss-remembering too. I was under the impression all backgrounds were basically either redone completely or touched up significantly by Japanese artists.

Also semi-related. I rearranged some of my files for the Genocide City stuff. If you are looking for any resources, they are at the link below now. I am also including my Sand Shower progress if anyone wants to fork off of it or utilize it as well.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1r29lezWDgVsg5YohhrupoYGXiFvyPSay?usp=drive_link

 

He mentioned it in an interview. He said he did several versions of the background, and struggled with the far background in the final design. He wasn't happy with how it turned out, but kept it because of time constraints.

https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...-the-mind-behind-sonic-2s-hidden-palac.32947/

Also, slightly off topic but this has just been something that’s been nagging at me for a while, did they ever give a reason as to why they converted Madness Mountain into Mystic Cave? Was it a spur-of-the-moment decision or did someone on the team convince them to make the change? If it’s the latter, then who?

 

We've actually done a fair amount of debating on this thread regarding if Madness Mountain and Mystic Cave are even connected. The shared drawbridge gimmick and Naka's quote regarding Mystic Cave's "haunted house feel" are seen by some as proof of a connection, but I remain skeptical.

Because if the two Zones are indeed one and the same, then that would mean that it started development as a ruined version of Green Hill, was then completely changed into a dungeon built from stone bricks, and then completely changed again into an underground cave. And to be frank, I just find that very hard to believe.

 

This could be another case of level mechanics from cut levels being migrated to levels that wound-up being used. That wouldn't mean the levels were directly related.