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Heavy Sigh" post="517701184 posted:

Just cause I can, it's time for some Fun Sonic Facts!

In case you were not aware, 2006 was supposed to be a real humdinger of a year for SEGA. Sure, the five years since going third party in 2001 hadn't exactly turned them back into the powerhouses they were in the early 90s, but that didn't matter anymore. Why? Because now something special was happening that gave everyone in the game industry a chance to start fresh, no matter their previous successes or failures.

For this was the dawn of a New Era: The HD Era.

But the story of Sonic 06 does not quite begin here, in fact it actually starts somewhere before the autumn of 2004. Yoshinari Amaike, who had just got done designing enemies in the terrifically ignored Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, was made part of a small development team at SEGA that had come up with a fun new game idea. This new game was to be set in a 'realistic' world where the player would advance through the world and solve puzzles by playing around with the game world's physics. The Havok physics engine was already being eyed by the team, due to having shown great promise for just this kind of gameplay in tech demonstrations at the time.

But just as that small team got to work in the fourth quarter of 2004, Shun Nakamura got a phone call detailing how SEGA was forming a new team for a game to commemorate Sonic’s 15th anniversary in 2006...and how they wanted him to be Chief Game Designer for this grand project. Nakamura felt rather apprehensive about this choice, as his biggest role in development up to this point was having directed the small scale Dreamcast hit Samba De Amigo, though he did have past experience with Sonic games, having worked on Sonic R, both Adventure games and Sonic Heroes in a support role.

The team grew for the next few months, picking up Yojiro Ogawa as Director and series co-creator Yuji Naka once again taking the role of Producer. Amaike also joined the team as a character artist around this time, as his old game had been unfortunately cancelled, so here he was simply tasked to come up with new characters for the title.

So, even before the first planning meeting, a lot was riding on 06's shoulders. Upper management at SEGA viewed the game as a sort of rebirth for the Sonic series, taking the best features from the Adventure series of games while bringing Sonic 'back to his roots'. In fact, SEGA wanted this game to kick off the Sonic Renaissance so badly that they named the game simply 'Sonic the Hedgehog', banking on the image of the "Most Famous Hedgehog In The World" to smooth over any issues.

Now, development began just a bit after Shadow the Hedgehog wrapped up, and right at the start Amaike learned that the team wanted to use a more realistic world than previous games. This brought to mind his old project, and so he innocently suggested that the player should be able to play around with the physics at will. Everyone loved the idea, and the ball finally got rolling for what the team hoped would be the 'Ultimate Sonic Experience'.

In a way, it really would end up being the 'Ultimate Sonic Experience' for many. As in, their last, as 2006's 'Sonic the Hedgehog' would do more damage to the brand than anything before or since.

Heavy Sigh" post="517755804 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

Work on the 'Sonic the Hedgehog' project began in earnest early 2005 and it didn’t take more than two months before SEGA demanded the team have a closed door presentation ready for the press at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) that year. Since the game was pre-alpha, combined with the complex nature of the Havok physics engine and the fact that no one on the team had any experience working in HD, there was no feasible way to have a gameplay demo ready for E3. SEGA higher-ups wouldn't budge, so the team did the smart thing and put together a quick tech demo showcasing the visual style and general tone they were going for with the title.

In the video, which surfaced online shortly after E3, Sonic runs through a thick forest, leaping out over a large green field before entering a small temple-ish structure which would later be reused in the final game. In here, depending on which presentation you saw that day, Sonic would either look around in first person mode, or SEGA would demonstrate the footage being real time by tossing out boxes of rings into the room. This would also later be reused in the final game for Tails' attack, for reasons unknown.

After the first person section, various far-more-humanoid-than-usual robots drop in and Sonic leaps onto them before outrunning their fire and bouncing out of the temple onto a large grass field. Then, in flies a newly redesigned Egg Carrier. It drops in several more robots that gun down Sonic in a weirdly brutal sequence before Sonic leaps up from the ground, turns into Super Sonic and rams into the crowd of robots, ending the demo. It was a powerful demonstration and honestly worked out quite well. The general buzz in May 2005 was very positive, and the demo is often still brought up as an example of what a modern Sonic game could be like.

So after a successful E3 it was time to get back to work. The team now had a set standard to aim for and it was clear they would have to present live gameplay sooner rather than later, as Sonic's 15th anniversary was looming on the horizon.

This is also where it was decided that the game was going to launch on three separate platforms, Xbox 360 (the original target), with two ports to the PS3...

and the Wii. Whose specs the team hadn't actually seen yet but merrily assumed would be on par with the PS3's.

Heavy Sigh" post="517888142 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

So! At this point in development, summer has started, Naka has begun imagining a life outside SEGA, E3 is over, and the Tokyo Game Show is looming in September. Sonic Team, therefore, buckles down to get to work on something presentable. The skeleton of the story has begun to fit together and some early platforming levels have been whipped up to test the physics. While the team is fighting to get to grips with the new hardware and have pretty much had to recreate everything from previous 3D Sonic games from scratch, it’s something everyone expected, and was still surmountable by mere mortals.

After all, they were only expecting to release Sonic 06 on PS3, Xbox 360, and...the Wii?

Yes, it sounds rather silly, but it’s actually true. As development began, they assumed it would be easy to port a PlayStation 3 game over to Nintendo's Revolution, since the reverse had been perfectly doable back in the Gamecube days with Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog.

Once the team actually got their hands on the specs for the dev units however, things changed.

VERY quickly, Ogawa, the director of the entire Sonic 2006 project, saw that getting a PS3 game running on the Wii would need his full attention, and decided to split the development team and take charge of the part responsible for porting the game to Nintendo’s system. In order to do this, the team focusing on core development for the actual launch platform was not only gutted further...It was left without a Director.

Faced with such an idiotic decision by top staff, directorial duties were thrown onto Shun Nakamura, the only person available with even token directing experience. Now, he was faced with not only having to continue his old duties, but also to pick up Ogawa's pieces, wrangle a gutted team into throwing something together for TGS, and keep up steady communications with Ogawa's team, since they were still working on the same game and could thus share at least some notes and resources.

...At least until Ogawa decided that porting to Wii was completely impossible and that he would just make an entirely new game instead of just recombining the teams. One wonders why SEGA higher ups even let this happen in the first place, but it was likely due to both misunderstanding the new scope and required resources of HD development, as well as wanting Sonic plastered over everything possible for his grand 'rebirth', quality be damned.

Heavy Sigh" post="518040253 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts are NO USE!

Silver's creation was actually inspired by the development process itself! During early development stages, where the development team was making huge levels with multiple paths through them to test out their new physics engine, the idea popped up to include a new character whose special powers let him use the physics themselves to play through the levels. This lead to Silver being given his psychic powers (originally meant to be granted to him by the Chaos Emeralds, but a later rewrite just gave him the powers without explanation).

And yes, the second time travel came up writer Shiro Maekawa immediately and explicitly based Silver off of Future Trunks from Dragon Ball.

However, the mechanics of the psychic abilities actually came from a different action game Sonic Team was working on. According to Shun Nakamura, Silver's abilities were originally designed for a different action game named Fifth Phantom Saga, a (later cancelled) FPS that starred a wraith with powers very close to Silver's. This emphasis on psychic powers also bled over into his design, as the team wanted to really make him stand out from the other characters with special accoutrements. In fact, the design team developed over fifty different concepts for his final look, like a futuristic headset and markings on the hair. One of the team's first ideas was to make a character that had Sonic's scarf-like hairstyle, but with 'even more volume'.

This idea led to Silver's first incarnation being an orange mink named 'Venice', a cute reference to how Soleanna was patterned after the real world city of Venice, Italy. However, the developers ultimately scrapped the design, believing that an orange mink would be too out-there to be taken seriously as a character next to Sonic and co., changing his fur to a whitish gray to better suit his position as an antagonist (and to utilize their new HD shaders).

Fun Fight Facts!

It's entirely possible for Silver to chuck you through the invisible wall surrounding the arena, allowing you to explore pretty much all of Soleanna for as long as you want.

Heavy Sigh" post="518191212 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

Well, summer is over, and September is here. Shun Nakamura heads to the Tokyo Game Show with hesitant steps, his pleas for extra staff after Ogawa's strange decision having fallen on deaf ears. But all hope was not lost, for, exceeding even his wildest expectations, his divided team managed to snap together a playable build to showcase at TGS (still behind closed doors). Just like E3, a cellphone video of the presentation leaked online only days later and managed to seriously impress people all over the internet. Yuji Naka, having not yet quit SEGA but rapidly growing disgruntled, proudly presents the new game and reveals the title to be SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, a name that he and Nakamura had worked out with SEGA upper management to indicate that this game was meant to kick off a whole new generation.

The tech demo was actually surprisingly advanced, with several features the final game would lack. The demo began with a heavily squished Kingdom Valley to better show off Sonic and the engine's capabilities. The Havok physics are shown off with Sonic knocking enemies into debris and destroying bridges much like in the final game, all set during a dynamic day-night cycle to allow stages to be playable at all times. This feature was cut shortly afterwards, which may honestly explain some of the weird time jumps in the final story.

Sonic also controls much more fluidly, as boost pads don’t lock him into a fixed path and his Homing Attack actually has sensible physics by following an arc down to the ground instead of a straight line that just drops Sonic like a rock when it ends. Grinding on rails is also much faster, giving an actual sense of speed instead of the lackadaisical sliding in the final product. Even the camera works better, as despite being kinda zoomed in when Sonic's moving slowly, it zooms out when he speeds up or reaches a more open area for better manoeuvring.

Everything said about the demo gave off surefire hit vibes for Sonic 06. No matter what troubles Sonic Team was or would be going through, SEGA wasn’t about to let the good buzz slip away. Therefore, on October 13th 2005 SEGA officially announced SONIC THE HEDGEHOG for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, releasing on Sonic’s 15th Anniversary, with the launch of its official webzone, showcasing E3 screenshots that spread like the plague across the net, to the point where those screenshots were used on the game’s official Xbox Live Marketplace page.

Heavy Sigh" post="518368459 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

TGS was over, and work continued on the game despite the problems that were piling up. On October 12th, a day before the official announcement of the game, the team was still agonizing over hub world design. We know this because in the revision notes from a leaked beta script lay references to desert, snow and forest hubs, which handily explains how one of the final game's objectives is simply “Go to the desert!” early on. Changing plans is all well and good, but not even having finalized plans for your hub world a year before you're set to release is when even the most optimistic game director knows they're in serious trouble.

So then, what's a team that's been recently split in half by its previous Director to do?

Why, start cutting content, of course!

Now the next target for the team was E3 2006, where SEGA management wanted to showcase both a story-focused trailer and have a playable showfloor demo. Therefore, since E3 was a predominantly Western industry show, dubbing was set to start in February 2006 in order to get lines ready, but in what was fast becoming a trend for the game's development, the script was not finished.

Why was this? Well, as the team ran into more and more roadblocks regarding development, Director Shun was forced to take the only reasonable course of action in most cases, and simply cut the offending piece of content out of the game. However, this meant that the script was under constant revision, all the way up to and beyond the actual recording dates.

The biggest issue lay with the main villain, Mephiles. Originally he was conceptualized as being sealed away in an item known as the "Tears of the Sun", which was then changed to "The Book of Darkness", only to then be changed again to "The Sceptre of Darkness". While revising a game's script is not uncommon, rewriting so close to the deadline that the final in-game audio still references the Book of Darkness instead of the Sceptre of Darkness is definitely not good.

(For anyone wondering why it was changed so much, there is speculation that it was chiefly to simplify animation, as a book would require new hand animation while a rod shape could reuse existing assets, though the true reason is unknown)

But it wasn't just rewrites that made this such a problem. Despite dubbing having begun at this point, plenty of characters hadn't actually been cast yet. This included the rather minor character of Princess Elise, who has more lines and story importance than half the playable cast. For lack of other options, 4Kids actress Veronica Taylor lent her voice as a placeholder for the opening sequence so that it could at least be used at E3.

But in all honesty, a rushed, unfinished dub was the least of Sonic Team's problems getting the game at least presentable. With hub areas being cut and features ripped out of the game to simplify development, the already unfinished script that made less and less sense in context was really more of a problem for Future Sonic Team.

A problem for Present Sonic Team was that their demo for E3 took two minutes to load a Sonic level only to instantly fall through the floor.

Heavy Sigh" post="518531164 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

Now with dubbing mostly done, and the script mostly finalized by March 10th, the team basically just had to slap everything together and just get dat demo done. Next up was April 14th 2006, when SEGA relaunched the Sonic 2006 website in order to hype everyone up for their assuredly grand showing at E3. The website gave the public their first look at Silver the Hedgehog and Princess Elise, and told everyone that Shadow the Hedgehog was a playable character.

This was done to prep for May, where SEGA kicked off what they termed "the Road to E3" inviting the press to learn about the games SEGA would be showing at the expo the week before it was to be revealed to the public. Sonic 2006 was one of the titles, touted as the first Sonic game set in a 'human world', referring to how Sonic would actually have to interact with the people in-game to progress. The game's release window was confirmed to be Fall of that year, and while no one in the press got their own hands on the demo, the initial reaction was quite positive.

Now, while at this point they were in quite a spot to get it all done on time, Sonic Team knew they could always count on the support and guidance of one Yuji Naka, shepherd of the Sonic series since its inception...

...At least, they could until May 9th. That was when Yuji Naka announced his departure from SEGA to form his own company, Prope (Latin for 'Near'), as he had become sick of being stuck in a managerial role and wanted to strike out on his own to become a creator again.

But how would he fill out the ranks of development for Prope? Why, by headhunting a bunch of developers from Sonic Team! That Sega couldn't replace! Knocking the ranks of the development team for Sonic 06 down to a third of what they had started with, and right when they had less than half a year to launch!

And then, E3 happened.

Next time: The truth comes out at E3.

Heavy Sigh" post="518834083 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

It's time.

To talk.

About.

E3.

Now, the truth of Sonic 06 could not be hidden from the public any longer. E3 had begun, and wincing in anticipation, the team had put together a playable demo to 'show off' during the event.

Now it was a pretty plain affair in terms of presentation, with people on the showfloor playing the demo (in lime Xbox 360 and slightly-better-framerate blackberry PS3 flavours) which just consisted of two levels, Sonic in Kingdom Valley (using the TGS level layout) and Silver in an essentially final Crisis City.

The first thing everyone noticed is that Sonic now moves just as stiffly as he does in the final game, fixed boost paths and out of control jumping and all. The Homing Attack no longer arcs and it drops Sonic at the end just like the final game. The camera is nowhere near as dynamic as the previous tech demo and is in many respects barely functional, which was good because if it had worked people would have seen just how much content and features were ripped out of the game, most likely because the other environments they were supposed to work in didn't play nice.

(As a quick side-note, E3 2006 had official flyers given out that listed PC as one of the platforms the game was going to be released on. This was originally thought to be a mistake, but the manual for the PC release of Sonic Riders confirmed that the game was meant for a PC release. Whatever happened to the PC version isn't known, but it’s likely SEGA management canned that version after the reviews came in.)

Now, most people who tried the game at E3 voiced the same sort of concerns, many stating that, while there were flashes of fun in what they played, it felt more like an alpha than something that was supposed to release that fall. Jumps would get you killed for no reason at all, Sonic would stick to random physics objects or walls, and direction in the game was practically opaque at times. Not helping matters was Sonic Team's own internal projections stating that, despite the game being mere months from release, it was only around 40% complete.

Despite it all though, people left E3 confident that SEGA would take their criticisms to heart and turn it all around.

NEXT TIME: Things gets worse.

Fun Level Facts!

The freight trains in this level are based on the American SD70M design made in the 90's!

Heavy Sigh" post="519045301 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

Welp, E3 is over, the reports are in, and even the most optimistic soul at Sonic Team can't kid themselves anymore. Every single staff member knew that their game was not in any fit state to release that fall. They had been gutted to barely over a third of their original manpower, had lost too much time to engine and hardware faults, and had cut far too much content from their original plan to produce something worthy of being called 'The Ultimate Sonic Experience'. Even to produce something on the level of Sonic Heroes or Shadow the Hedgehog was going to take a significant delay and a heck of a lot more butts in seats. So Nakamura hung his head and went to SEGA management to ask for a delay and extra staff.

His head hung even lower when he got back.

SEGA management had flatly rejected any sort of delay, and worse, could not spare any extra manpower to help, as Secret Rings had sucked up all available manpower. But why no delay for such an important project? Wellllllll, turns out that, unbeknownst to Sonic Team, SEGA top brass had struck a deal with Microsoft in early 2006 to promote Sonic 06 as a more Xbox 360 focused title in the West, while it would be a PS3 title in Japan (Mostly because, despite their best efforts to break into the market, Xbox was seen as little more than a punchline in the Japanese gaming sphere.)

This promotional deal was, to SEGA executives, set in stone, and while Microsoft had no intention of pressuring SEGA to release the game on time, SEGA top brass didn't want a repeat of 2003's Sonic Heroes missing the deadline for 'the Year of Sonic'. In their eyes, it had to come out Holiday 2006, or all the effort and money they had spent on Sonic's big fifteenth birthday bash would be wasted. No matter what the quality, Nakamura and his team simply had to get the game as finished as it could be, and if that meant throwing bug reports straight from the mail room into the incinerator, so be it.

This focus on the finish line also meant that the next two times Sonic 06 would be showcased, at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, and another appearance at TGS, it would just be the E3 builds shown off, with all the same issues and glaring failures. It would be some real buzzkill showings, but at least this meant all team members could focus all possible efforts on the main game.

EXCEPT NO, BECAUSE THEN THE X06 EVENT HAPPENED.

Heavy Sigh" post="519308480 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!


So, the X06 event. It was a Microsoft press event held in Barcelona, a two day affair running from September 27th to September 28th. Hot on the heels of TGS, it was thought by many that if Sonic was going to show up here, he'd look just as he did not one week earlier.

But this time, for once, things were different. The X06 Demo dropped Sonic back in Kingdom Valley, but now things like the downwards Homing Attack arc from the TGS 2005 demo is back, allowing you to use it to build momentum, Sonic no longer falls down when you run into a wall, and he even moves faster as well. On the platforming side, he's now also less prone to getting stuck to walls or ceilings, Light Dashing works much more often, the action bar actually functions and can be refilled, and the camera even works a tiny bit better. It's still buggy as all hell, (even more than the final game, actually) and still feels rougher than the rest of Sonic's previous outings, yet everyone who played it and the E3 build felt some real improvements had been made. Maybe SEGA had actually managed to respond to the criticisms from E3?

NOPE! None of these improvements made it into the final game, staying put in the X06 demo. Why is this? Well, it seems that the X06 event demo was a special build of the Xbox 360 version specifically made for the event, and not the core game being developed on PlayStation 3. I must note that while the game was originally announced for the Xbox 360, much more development time was given to the PS3 version as the PS3 was a powerful but very unfriendly machine to develop for, with it becoming the de-facto console for the game around E3. Therefore, to keep parity between both builds, anything specifically added to an Xbox 360 build would not necessarily make it into the game.

No one knows why these fixes weren’t brought into the final code in the time between X06 and release (though it's likely because of time constraints), but whatever the reason, it’s a very strange blip on Sonic 06's path to release.

Heavy Sigh" post="519631355 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

On November 14th 2006, Sonic 2006 hit store shelves in North America and almost instantly garnered the infamous reputation of being one of the worst games a high profile publisher like SEGA ever put out. Criticism was savage, both from journalists and customers, but none of it really mattered as the game sold 870,000 units in its first six months, far short of SEGA projections. The damage was done, and there was nothing the dev team could do as SEGA had no intention of allocating resources to patch a complete disaster into even a partial disaster. While the PS3 version was given one more month of development, that was just to get the game running on the temperamental PS3 hardware, so the only major difference between the two versions was a slightly increased framerate (and it was actually worse in some areas, to boot).

Everything about the game's development history does not excuse what SEGA decided to ship, but it at least explains it. From SEGA upper management expecting a moon shot from a team with far too few resources for their first HD project, to the team themselves pitching a game far too complex to pull off in the allotted time, to Ogawa splitting the team and abandoning them to make a completely separate Sonic game, to Naka taking another chunk of developers as he jumped ship halfway through development, to SEGA executives caring more about profiting off their promotional deal with Microsoft than producing a quality title, there’s not really anything one single person could have done to save this game.

The final product was built from whatever the team could glue together in order to make a game that was just barely completeable, as the stages are rife with asset reuse, make no sense at all in the overall plot, and lack even vague connections to the world they are meant to be part of. The plot they are meant to serve itself is no better, with characters saying little of worth and accomplishing less, what plot beats exist are buried under interminable amounts of filler, set to animation that tries to sell a relationship where one half looks and moves like a dead-eyed, possessed mascot suit.

In all honesty, Sonic 2006 is not a game that was made, it’s a game that was salvaged.

Heavy Sigh" post="519710411 posted:

Fun Sonic Facts!

In a 2007 interview, the original director of Sonic 2006, Yojiro Ogawa, famously stated “The reason why we probably ended up with what we see today, involves a lot of reasons. One is that we did want to launch the title around Christmas, and we had the PS3 launch coming up, but we had to develop for Microsoft’s 360 at the same time and the team had an awful lot of pressure on them. It was very hard for the team to try and see how we were going to come out with both versions together with just the one team. It was a big challenge.”

This was a rather diplomatic viewpoint that Shun Nakamura shared as well, seen in his final update on Sonic 2006‘s development blog; “Development on a next-generation machine was very difficult, with us with a lot of difficult aspects of things we didn’t understand. Understanding the variety of new technology, understanding the new hardware, handling the enormous amount of information and handling the new technology, these were all aspects that far surpassed both my expectations and experience.”

However, these two interviews vastly downplay the biggest problem Sonic Team was facing at the time, something that would have honestly sank the Sonic series 'rebirth' even if none of the development issues had occurred.

Apathy.

But why were they feeling this way? Thankfully, a blog posted by one Ben Andac, a “Game Evaluator” and “Admissions and Recruitment Executive” for both Sega Europe and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (the blog itself is now long deleted, though preserved on the Internet Archive), gave a rather interesting look at the feelings of internal SEGA employees.

"Sonic Team, for all their past accomplishments (long past one should emphasize), are not the development force they once were. They no longer represent that name and ideal they so desperately cling onto now. While other great SEGA studios - UGA, Hitmaker, Smilebit, Overworks, Rosso - became dissolved and re-structured into new R&D departments (or in UGA's case became part of Sonic Team); Sonic Team managed to keep its name (at least externally for marketing reasons) and position thanks to the efforts (and in no small part the massive ego) of Yuji Naka. But this move was what trapped the team in a Sonic-filled purgatory, and ultimately led to Naka's departure in 2006. Instead of using the re-structuring for good Sonic Team became complacent slaves of their earlier successes. Their primary goal now is purely business driven: to please the managing directors with good ROIs; this is not so abnormal - it is a business after all - but they leave little room for creativity and originality in their particular brand of working practices.

So here we are. Clearly the blame does not lay squarely at Naka and Sonic Team's door - the direction of Sega (or rather Sammy) as a corporation; the narrow-minded short-term annual business-plan practices and development processes (i.e. tight development schedule) that demand yearly churning out of Sonic products all play a major part in potentially damaging any chances NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams has of being a good game."

What Mr. Andac said here is true in many respects, as ever since Sega had restructured itself in 2004 (after Sammy had bought mass amounts of stock from CSK, fusing itself and SEGA into the conglomerate Sega Sammy Holdings) to re-integrate external development teams like Smilebit and AM2 back under the umbrella of the main Sega offices, Sonic Team was kept external, in what could be termed a 'development sweatshop' to milk the brand in a manner not unlike an assembly-line. Sega of Japan had intended NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams as a brief rest from the never-ending onslaught of Sonic game after Sonic game. In Ben’s own words: “There’s no doubt that Sonic Team have lost their quality touch. They are worse than talentless: they are without passion. Bored, weary, closed-minded and out of touch with any sense of what makes games good anymore.”

Simply put, after making so many games in barbaric conditions, under life-sapping scheduling, and without even the chance to make something new, Sonic Team is tired of Sonic.

Fun Boss Facts!

It is possible to finish the battle in less than a minute with the Sky Gem. Throw it just before grabbing the Egg-Wyvern's antenna, and the camera will zoom in on Sonic and get locked there as the robot flies offscreen. After some time spent staring at nothing, Egg Wyvern will get too far away and despawn, so the results screen will appear and function properly.

A more convoluted way lets you use the antenna to fling yourself straight up and hit an invisible trigger to end the fight immediately.