Hillock

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Hillock
Profile
Inhabitant	Spider
Quadrant	D3
Stage Number	12
Designer	New: Koji Hasegawa (hw) Old: Nanako Ohmura (oh)

Hillock is the developer name given to the unused arena of Spider, one of the unused colossi.

Description

The stage was mostly a dry natural area with no man-made structures present, and an enclosed space with a lake which the colossus emerged from. A massive hill or hills existed in the arena, such as the one in the background of the picture of Spider with tentacles.

The textures from Hillock do not feature sand or any other texture from the northern desert (neither in the screenshots where it's located near the bridge, nor in any quadrant from the "F" column in the versions available); matching only with the ones from the screenshot of the earlier design of Spider, suggesting that was its proper stage.

Location

The location of Hillock in a mockup version of the early map.

In the screenshots where Spider is next to the bridge, Hillock is located in the "F1" quadrant. After some point in development however, the colossus was moved to "D3".

The textures from Hillock are mostly found in areas surrounding D3, and one of the hill-like mountains in Geyser looks very similar to the one in the screenshot with the version of Spider with tentacles. The likely scenario is that the 9th colossus got moved from I3 to D3 after Spider got cut, merging both arenas together.

Trivia

• Evidence exists that Spider survived much further in development than what was shown in the artbook, namely it having its own unique idol statue texture listed in the PS3 sheets, which is a feature only seen in the later builds; as well as Ueda's comment regarding Spider in an interview for the Weekly Famitsu magazine, in which he states that Spider was almost completed by the time of the game's first public debut, which took place in September 2004, well after the period of development shown in its artbook pictures.
• Koji Hasegawa is one of the many field designers from the game, and a lot of his test stages in the sheets appear to be related to Spider; including an alternate texture segment for Stage 12 (Spider's stage number) named "st_12a", that only lists textures created by Hasegawa.
• A Hillock is a small hill, usually separated from a larger group of hills such as a range.
• Hillock's layer 0 and 1 chip data are full, indicating that the whole quadrant it resided on was modelled.

Gallery

Textures of Hillock.

Wakisaka's test textures list compared to Hillock.

Hasegawa's test textures list.

Textures from Stage 12 (st12a).

Textures from an alternate version of Stage 12 (st_12a).