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

Aqua Lake Zone from Sonic 2 8-bit also has purple mountains and domes in its background. Could just be based on that...or the 8-bit assets could be based on it.

 

I'm pretty sure in Aqua Lake Zone, those "domes" are water fountains.

 

OK but those are some pretty peculiarly-shaped water fountains and it would be a sensible way to repurpose the domes as something more water-related. Could still just be nothing though yeah. The level creator background just immediately struck me as similar.

 

Considering how that game was developed by an outside studio (Mediatonic), I doubt that any concept art from Sonic 2 was used.

 

The domes are still a complete mystery.

The ones in the future are obviously just the three acts of Genocide City, but the rest are left unexplained.

I think it was Blue Spikeball who noticed that the timeline documents actually highlight the present and absence of a dome in certain time periods, supporting the Death Egg hypothesis. However, what is that dome doing in the non-ruined present then? If the construction of the Death Egg was already well underway, why would Eggman need to go to the past in the first place?

However, both Death Egg zones are missing from these maps, so maybe none of the developers had come up with them yet. After all, the burning future map really seems to suggest that GCZ Act 3 is the climactic finale.

EDIT: Another thing I noticed is that the past map is the only one where the dome's completely plain, without any "metallic" bolt markings.

 

The sphere in the mountains was in the original present map, but was removed in the updated present map from the timeline documents. In there, it's only in the past and ruined present; and it disappears from the later after the Death Egg launches.

So yeah. The change was probably made because it makes more sense, if it's supposed to be the Death Egg (which I'm positive it is).

As for the suggestion that there would have been a launch base level, I feel if that was the case, they would have marked it as such on the maps. The timeline documents only list the zones from the maps, and the Death Egg, which is presumably not marked on the maps because it's airborne when the player goes through it.

Well, I suppose there might have been a cutscene of Sonic boarding the Death Egg as it launches.

 

Oh yeah, that makes sense. The timeline also seemingly depicts the dome falling from the sky, so it's almost certainly the Death Egg.

Maybe it was another detail that whoever drew the original maps was told to include, even though all the specifics hadn't been nailed down yet.

 

Here's an odd, unorthodox and unlikely theory, but something I observed while looking at the maps:



What are the odds that the actual level order in the future is something like Genocide/Cyber City Act 1 -> Casino Night Zone -> Genocide/Cyber City Act 2 - Chemical Plant Zone - Genocide/Cyber City Zone Act 3

It came to mind because in a later map, all that's remaining is Genocide/Cyber City Act 3:

Which made me imagine a less-traditional progression around the Future South Island. One Genocide/Cyber City dome is destroyed, Sonic and co head through another zone to reach the second Genocide/Cyber City dome, destroy that one, go through another zone, and then go into the final Genocide/Cyber City dome. It might explain the odd ways each act starts and ends, too.

Again, just a theory without much context, but the unusual way that each act of Genocide/Cyber City is laid out on the map compared to every other zone got me to thinking.

 

This would actually make a lot of sense if there were more variants of the destroyed future map out there. But I just can't imagine this being the case based on all the current information that we have.

The weird progression with all the GCZ domes being so far apart has probably something to do with the zone ideas not being finalized yet, like I suggested previously.

 

Or it could be that the Genocide/Cyber City is supposed to cover the entirety of the island in-universe, with Chemical Plant and Casino Night being districts of sorts within it. So they scattered the GCZ acts throughout the island to convey that.

 

That would be way too confusing and complicated. Remember, this is Sonic The Hedgehog, not Kingdom Hearts.

 

So we have enough to piece together a playable hypothetical version of the original vision, right? Like "The Smile Sessions"? I've always thought that was the main goal, not just preservation of dev materials. We now know pretty much all there is to know about the game's development apart from small insignificant scraps. We have maps for both Blue Lake and Cyber City now, along with knowing how their assets were repackaged for SCZ and WFZ. We have the art for the Winter stage, and we're fairly certain Rock World is the Winter stage. We have a good idea of what the original storyline was, along with the original music placement.

I know there have been several hacks already over the years, but they were all working off of old assumptions and a huge amount of creative liberties. This time, we pretty much have everything the devs have ever made. What are we missing? I guess we still don't know the story behind ARZ, and there are still some mysteries behind the music, but that's all I can think of for missing puzzle pieces, and they're far easier to account for compared to what we didn't know before.

 

Even if you have theoretical maps, you need to test, and probably change them, cuz it can looks better than plays.

Almostly noone liked MTZ1 layout in S2Archives, but it was recreation of early map layout with some basic edits

 

When did we find Blue Lake maps?

 

He means art of Blue Lake (or at least zone that has water and palmtrees)

 

I mean yeah, but we know the general gist of what they were going for, what the Badniks were along with some of the gimmicks.

No, I mean maps. Or A map. There was a level layout posted a while back.

 

Or more likely this rough map of an ocean exploration themed zone. I would assume it's for Blue Ocean since it matches the concept art of the zone, but there's no (visible) label on this particular map.

 

So close, yet so far.



This also suggests that Sky Chase Zone's badniks were based off of this level's, given the shark badnik that looks suspiciously similar to Balkiry.

 

Since this crop has come up before:

Apparently some of Tom Payne's docs were themselves photocopies of the originals. This unfortunate cropping was the result of a bad scan circa 1992, not the recent efforts by the VGHF.

 

I brought this up before, but if the "atlantis themed level" brought up in Craig Stitt's interview was referring to Blue Ocean, then that would mean that Mark Cerny was the zone's level artist. Payne likely had this photocopy as reference material for enemy designs.