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

Sus

Sometimes I'm regret that I hasn't suggested my help in layout recreation. Work on it too would be really cool

 

Nice! From the palette used it looks like this is still a Metropolis Zone asset, and it fits neatly into the doorway of the final transport tube art - am I right in thinking this means you guys are recreating some of the sprites etc. that were on paper printouts digitally to release alongside the original scans? That'll be great if so - since the palette data is right there on the printouts too, 100% accurate recreations should definitely be possible.

I think this also means there may be a few more printout scans than we thought, as I don't recall seeing this particular Metropolis Zone asset before...! Exciting if so, as it means we might learn a tiny bit more about Metropolis Zone's development too.

It's interesting that the shading looks a little different to the tube itself, even though the main shape of the shading gradient is almost the same. I wonder if this means the main tube also lacked the white highlight initially? If so, had the door survived to the final game, it may also have been redrawn to recolour the dark shading next to the lightest gold shade into a white highlight to match the main tube, as well as adding the extra bar of gold shading just to the left of it.

 

Remember that part about mixing fan recreations with the actual content - I don't know what I'm looking at, and the palettes don't match.

 

Would it still be a fan recreation if they're just translating what's on the documents into actual pixel art?

 

Absolutely - they'd be literally re-creating it

Though I don't know if that's what I'm looking at. Is it real art, or a guess, like Hez' older material in this topic? There's differences in the palette and the light source might be flipped. Are we witnessing people mistake this for the real thing right now?


idk, I saw Gaming Alexandria scan and release a whole book in the other topic without fuss. That style wins more points from me.

 

I’m confused about what Hez posted as well. Is Hez working on the release? Or is that a recreation or…
I would rather that we receive the full release before introducing more fan spritework that isn’t clearly marked. Not to be a downer.

 

https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1657113936326717440/photo/1

Frank posted this on his twitter midway into last month. That's the map layout using Hez's tiles compiled from research in this very thread. The 2 are clearly collaborating, and this certainly looks neat.

But again, the rest of us here can only guess how much of this is based on real concept, interpretations, actual sprite sheets, or whatever else.



I do, however, believe this is the most accurate take on the material that's ever been produced. (And remember "accurate" will be relative given that the stage was never finished). I just wish we already had the clean maps in hand at minimum.

I suppose Hez offering new bits is a good sign that something is still happening, so we'll just have to sit back and deal with it. I also very much liked the actual playable gifs he showed earlier with full visuals. At least one of us is still involved.

 

I’m moving in !!

 

My intentions for my last post weren't to get a debate going on fan-creations vs actual content. I assumed it was without saying that the (mostly*) unedited documents would be released whenever it's ready. I merely saw the hostility raising up a bit and wanted to bring it back down by posting a bit of the stuff I had without getting into too much trouble.

What I did post was a translation of a print out of digitizer art for Metropolis Zone. It does have the correct palette. I hastily grabbed the other parts off of spriters-resource to show where I believe it was intended. The level layouts are strictly data. I happened to be working separately on chunks from the Genocide City print out from a while ago. It happened to align really well, and we got nice clean level layout rips instead of line drawings. The intent is not to "fool" anyone into thinking the chunk art I created is legit. I'd compare it more to the use of false color in images of deep space. You're either going to be looking at a bunch of numbers, or you can throw placeholder art in and get an actual picture.

Since it seems to be a big issue, I can refrain from anything further until the documents are released. It's not my call.

 

Regardless of context I still really like the tease regardless of what it is. It's great to know the project is still going, I hope you can continue to do tiny teases like this (if it is okay) rarely / periodically atleast to keep the excitement from getting hostile. Either way I know the hard work will pay off so I don't mind waiting.

 

Just a note saying it's a translation/based of/whatever the official data, and/or saying when (if) anything is being made-up/open to interpretation/speculation, that should clear any possible doubts.

 

Since I was the one to kinda drum up this conversation I just want to say this is the kind of thing I wanted to see, thank you so much for showing that progress is still being done on this. I still admit I'm a bit anxious about not having the raw dump, but I definitely appreciate you giving something to digest.

 

Hez said “mostly unedited documents.” Could it be that they’re scraping some possibly super-sensitive personal information out? That’d make sense.

 

It would be scrubbing it of personal information.

 

Then yes it would make sense why this is taking so long.

 

Oh my god I didn’t even think about that!

 

...huh? I thought something like that was already a given, especially after the whole Gigaleaks debacle in 2020 with unprofessional Argonaut emails found in the Star Fox 1 and 2 source codes that offended Dylan Cuthbert on Twitter.

Those sorts of things have to be analyzed throug, piece-by-piece and even by hand, because the contents in them could somehow potentially implicate people in unforeseen ways with unpredictable results. That alone would take a significant amount of time to sort through.

 

I would actually prefer the documents to be drip fed so we're not bombarded with material all at once. We know some of it is safe - it's been shown already!

 

I would also prefer drip-feeding in manga/chapter-style.

 

As I said, this confirms what kind of work is going on, and that's better than total silence. It doesn't sound like we'll be ghosted, so that's that.