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

Damn, now I really want to play this map. Accurate or not, these look so good.

 

Weirder enough, going through MZ's tiles. There were always these ones that stuck out to me as weird. They had 7 16x16 tiles for those pully things that had the platforms go around them. These.


Well, piecing them together one on top of another gets you some weird results.



However, since Cyber City was intented to (I believe) have a four color rotating pallete, I believe these were modified from art that originally had expected a four color rotating palette. 7 16x16 tiles do not properly form a perfect unison line with three colors, but they DO with four.



Also, the circular spinning piece also looks far better with four (in my opinion).




EDIT: Also threw in a bit updated of tiles into MZ act 3 along with the updated palette (The background is a stand-in). I'm using an engine I made a while back, so that is why the sprites of sonic etc are different.





It's interesting stuff. I do want a full level of this pretty hard.

 

Someone did attempt to build a version of Metropolis 3 based on the unfinished proto map layout (with the gust of wind a the end). What's funny is, this hack got pretty close to the real palette just by chance. (Unless this info was somehow known last year...)

 

I don't think we knew GCZ would have had a purple palette before. But it was implied by the palette of The Machine.

 

Right. For the longest time we had thought it was purple due to The Machine. Then, the drawings came out which had brown in it and lead us for a short time to think it was brown (why my tiles were that initially). Then this pallete came to light showing how it was almost a 1:1 to The Machine.

 

I do wonder about the "two Genocide Citys" thing though. Someone earlier in the thread also mentioned it (sorry, I don't remember who it was). It's possible that GCZ and CCZ were two distinct levels that were similar. Why add act three to Metropolis but still keep GCZ on the level select? And why this brown and purple confusion? As we know already, the level is curiously split into two on the concept map drawing.

Also, we've been told the assumption that Cyber City was the intended name, but nobody has told us where the name came from. Most references we have say "Genocide City". Who came up with the name "Cyber City"? Was one *actually* intended to be a name replacement for the other? Nobody disputes "Genocide City" is perhaps not the best name, but I think we should get more information about these names if possible.

No concrete proof of anything, but there are some unexplained things happening here. Which makes those scans even more critical. Everytime I see a new post here, I keep hoping it's a posting indicating we have them. I can't help it, I'm a little impatient!

 

I talked about this, and it is one of the weirdest things about the early game timeline map. It's the only level that has the same name repeated twice, but one of those spots occupies the future timeline spot of Metropolis, so there's clearly a direct connection in lineage.

Then we have the early pre-beta map layout for Metropolis Act 3, the Simon Wai Act 3 design (which is similar, but ultimately different from the prior version), the FINAL Metropolis Act 3 map (which is very different), and photo evidence of brand new unseen layouts for Genocide/Cyber City which (probably?) predate the Metropolis 3 layouts, with real, detailed pixel art having been made that we had never seen until just recently. There's also evidence of the fans making it into one of the early Metropolis 3 map designs briefly, further connecting the 2 stages, but still adding confusion to the whole ordeal.

This level's tale is wild, weird, and confusing. About as much as Sonic CD's R2.

 

Hey- I still own the paper- I just don't have possession of it. I've been meaning to go pick them up for the last few years... I thought he had scanned everything & put it out, but I'll try & find out.

 

That would be awesome. I'm hoping some of the art being pumped out is close to what was intended. The background is a shot in the dark, but who knows if more info will come out.

On topic, I've been trying for the life of me to figure out what these may have been. I guessed convier belts, but I'm starting to doubt myself. Maybe they were the elecrical panels like in Death Egg Zone S3k? If anyone has any guesses, I'm welcome to them.



EDIT: Also curious how this would have functioned. I quickly did an animation to show my point. I'm wondering if it worked as a replacement for the pistons constantly animating -- or were static just like a set of spikes.

 

Oh hey man! I must have misunderstood our mutual friend, I thought he'd purchased them from you. I'm downloading the stuff he scanned literally right now, we'll sort this out. My guess is the 8.5x11 (and below) sheets are scanned but the large maps are not, I'd like to get them here to the office where I've got a big 11x17 bed for this kind of thing. We're just over in Emeryville, maybe we can make a day out of it, would be fun to see you again.

 

If it's part of the tileset as suggested, I'm not sure how it would have animated. I'd have expected something of that size to be an object (like the pistons).

Of course, this might be why it was scrapped.

 

I've never seen conveyor belts portrayed like that in any of the 2D Sonic games. They typically resembled a tank's wheels and treads as seen from a side profile.

My guess is either some sort of metal floor pattern, or perhaps 3K DEZ style electric floor traps like you said.

 

One other possibility is that it's meant to represent floor but with collision going inside, like a crevice with a wall covering it or maybe even a path with bridge handles (I believe the Machine has that as well).



The bear trap sprite looks cool, but it's possibly debunked by the fact that, like already stated, it appears to be level art, and BIG art at that. Would likely be a pain to animate that way compared to a smaller object sprite.

 

I feel like this big is worth reposting, as, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, these are the B-Bomb "Tech World" tiles that look to most directly to have been recycled from Cyber/Genocide City?

They're used in both Hez's art and the Secret Zones hack I posted earlier, though I guess it's more speculative than definitive?

(Reposting a video from this hack again for a more direct visual comparison of how they were used by one fan)

https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...my-sprites-by-sonic-2-artist-tom-payne.38559/

I'm currently reviewing info from this thread from 4 years ago where these were first sourced when the discs were preserved/digitized. It sounds like the scans we have in the OP are material from a similar batch that has simply never finished being shared from that time period, correct?

Again, I look forward to whatever is uncovered. Thank you Tom, Frank, and everyone else involved in getting these out to us. Speculating about this all has been fun, as has been discovering the kind of assets/design docs that went into actually building the original game.

 

It would seem so after all looking carefully at The Machine art, compare these parts here to the B-Bomb art sheet:


Definitely some tile work being referenced there which seems to leave SOME confirmation of Cyber City level art, though to what degree the rest of the level borrows from it is hard to say, since we know Toxic Caves heavily edited its HPZ references (not to mention the rather slapdash tile mixture in places here, seriously what's going on with that top right gear?).

I've seen the Secret Zones Cyber City, it was a nice try, though it kinda looks a bit like putting the right jigsaw pieces in the wrong places.

 

There were some pieces from The Machine that matched 1:1 in graphics for B-Bomb while comparing the two 8x8 tiles. I naturally assumed the same may be true for Cyber City, so I was comfortable reusing art from the digitizers b-bomb files. They were a brown/gray color though, which is why I assumed that Cyber City may have been brown. It was toss up I lost.

 

What about this concept art from Cyber City, is the color scheme wrong?

 

It's funny, that Metropolis uses for all his objects (platforms, etc) zone art, because dplc has too many stuff written. Probably, here might be the same.

I look at the gear on video preview, and I think; what if it would be transformated to that circles from Scrap Brain for this level? Cyber-punk instead setam-punk.

Possibly, it has earlier conception, when wasn't idea that it will be recolour of Metropolis. Probably, somewhere exists concept for hill top with another graphics

 

Since the dirty metal colour is still in Cyber City's original palette, I'm wondering if those graphics were meant to stay that colour, making them stick out from the purple recoloured Metropolis art in a similar way as they are in The Machine.

One thing I've just noticed about that concept art is how much the gimmicks in it are mirrored in The Machine, look at the screenshot above and there's a similar striped barrier. It even has a similar lazer. It also has a lot of the same neon arrows, though given they're ALL OVER spinball for obvious reasons, that may be more likely a coincidence.

 

Honestly looking at this art, has there been anything that's come up regarding tunnels that could change direction or electrical barriers since then? It's weird that the one piece of Cyber City concept art out there for the longest time had that as the identifiable gimmicks, but hasn't come up anywhere else since then and even the leaked objects/tilesets with the beartraps/fans has nothing.

EDIT: If the early CCZ level layout still exists it'd be interesting if it has the narrow tunnels this art/Spinball's The Machine has, since those are pretty identifiable features that'd help set it apart from Metropolis even with the asset reuse.