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

Personally speaking I'm happy to wait for Hez to have some sort of playable recreation ready before seeing the documents for Genocide City scanned.

 

Sorry to burst this bubble, but I have no intention of releasing a recreation beforehand or anytime during. I don't want to muddy up my interpretations with anything.

 

What are you referring to? Your own post or someone else's?

 

What are you doing then? I thought you were recreating parts of it before?

 

Really I can understand the time taken, combined with the problems behind the scenes, this comes off like some sort of elaborate jigsaw puzzle that everyone's trying to figure out the pieces for.

 

I'd imagine he wouldn't want to release a version early, only for a major discovery during the release of documents to have to force him to change it.

Once it's all out in public, we'll have a better idea of how everything connects. Maybe even with direct staff input?

I'm also not sure if Hez meant the issues causing a delay were Frank's staffing troubles or Sega's potential involvement, but it doesn't sound like we'll be ghosted now, so it is whatever it is.

Those new gameplay gifs looked amazing, btw.

 

Right. Going several months without even the first word is what makes things seem off. We'd even be happy with a simple "We have X documents out of Y scanned and ready" type of update.

Just don't leave us in the dark.

 

We know from this post that the documents were scanned half a year ago:

This was before the announcement that they would be spending time making fan recreations.

 

Something to note: it likely took less time to develop Sonic 2 than it's taking to release these documents.

We're on month seven I believe?

 

There have been multiple possible explanations for this, which Hez seemingly confirmed. The organization is clearly going through some dire straits.

I understand being disappointed. I am also disappointed that it's taking so long. But these delays happen for a reason, it's not they're just throwing their hands up and saying "shit".

 

Simple, they're remaking Sonic 2 again using these materials

 

Conspiracy theory: Genocide City never existed, they're just making it up

 

I don't think I've ever seen so much hype and impatience for a palette swap level

 

While we obviously should wait until the documents are out before making any brash decisions, do you reckon that some preliminary editing could be done to the GCZ wiki page?

The page is still saying that it was supposed to be a single-act zone which was repurposed into MZ3, and while we're still not quite sure about the validity of the latter claim, we know that the former has to be untrue.

It could say something along the lines of: "While GCZ is often speculated to be the earlier concept for MZ3 which Yuji Naka mentioned in an interview, subsequent revelations such as level maps for three unique acts of the zone imply that this couldn't have been the case."

 

You don't have to ask permission to edit it

 

Is it ruled out that both premises could be true at different stages of development?

 

I agree, the fact GCZ had 3 acts at one point doesn't discredit that possibility. Especially considering the heavy reworking the game underwent.

Like, it's possible that after they scrapped the time travel storyline and the game's multi-part structure, they decided to place GCZ right after MZ, so they reduced the former to a single act to keep players from getting tired. Then they eventually combined all 3 acts into a single zone.

 

As I think I've mentioned before, the level select provides hints about what they were planning. Only two acts are listed for GCZ. Moreover, they used the 0F slot for Neo Green Hill. So it's very likely they considered reducing it before finally cutting it.

 

Sonic 2 had different phases of development. What we got by the time of Simon Wai was leagues different than what was drawn up in the conceptual/development phase. Again, this was a very rocky development cycle where you could almost say they restarted the game from scratch in early spring 1992, using only what assets they could throw together as quickly as possible, with very strong oversight by the JPN side of the team and minimal input from the US side of the team. Cultural barriers seemed to paint this as a very rocky project to work on, where the JPN team started with a huge, massive epic scope of a concept, but realized they didn't have the time or oversight to make a team of developers they could barely speak fluently with deliver that title by the very important Holiday 1992 deadline.

So it all got cut down to a bare bones set of levels with whatever assets they could put together in that time period. Metropolis 3 was probably built from scratch based on loose ideas from GCZ at best, then refined even further after Simon Wai to be more consistent with the other 2 acts. They likely just kept it because it was already built. Hidden Palace Zone was praised by the team intenrally, but cut because they never could get around to fully fleshing it out, and the story importance of the stage was long gone with the original storyline draft no longer being used.

I stand by my question of whether or not any unused GCZ ideas also made it into Wing Fortress, which was nowhere to be found in the original early draft of the game, and seems to have been hastily recreated to give the game a narrative ending (though the zone is very well made, and one of my favorites, even). We have little to nothing on this stage's development beyond whatever can be found in the existing dumps we have.

Once again, I hope we see those documents soon. They were indeed supposedly scanned months ago, but we're just playing a waiting game. I will at least say organizing them for a presentation would take a lot of time, and that's separate from whatever interpretation of the info Hez is working on.