Development:La-Mulana (2006)

This page details development materials of La-Mulana (2006).

A lot of assets that were once privately used in the game's development can be found at g3project/g3kaihatu/g3/, inside the GR3Project website archive. First published on the main page on February 2007, a copy of it from White Knell's blog can now be found on the Wayback Machine. Most of them are used by webpages in the archive, which are listed on index.htm under a title (that will also be mentioned), so they'll be referred to as subpages of the archive.

Sub-Page

Flag List There's a lot of flags here!

Cutscenes

Unless otherwise stated, the content here can be found in kikaku/img/op/, used in a subpage of filename kikaku/op.htm titled ストーリー (Story). Curiously, that file has a duplicate named story.htm, which actually matches the title.

op.gif

Apparently, the prologue cutscene was accompanied by the logo, so its text was also at the bottom-right instead of centered.

opdemo.gif

This image contains the text that was going to be used in the cutscene, which is surprisingly enough the text that would be before and after it in the final, instead of the opening credits. Curiously, the final text uses four dots for an ellipsis as opposed to this text's three. It also has a lot of differences from the final version:

Early	Final	Notes
Ancient times far.	ANCIENT TIMES FAR....	Identical.
An Occurrence when human beings didn't exist.	THERE WERE NO HUMAN BEINGS AT THAT TIME....
It was wraped in an intense light.		A description of the cutscene that was made absent.
It descended from the sky with explosion. And it bore us.	SHE CAME FROM THE SKY AND THEN SHE BECAME THE MOTHER.	Compacted into one less confusing sentence, saying that the Mother became a mother more intelligibly and removing the part "with explosion".
The mother is continuing waiting there.	THE MOTHER HAS BEEN WAITING.	Made more grammatical.
She has been waiting alone.		Also absent in the final.
She dreams of the day which returns to it...	THE MOTHER HAS BEEN DREAMING OF THE DAY WHEN SHE RETURNS.	Clarified and turned into two lines.

That aside, the image is the exact same as the final game's opdemo.bmp; the credits that appear in the cutscene there replaced this text, the final equivalent of which was put in logo.bmp instead.

map.gif

Found in patern/ and used in a subpage of filename 10.htm, titled 企画書４：その他、細かいところ (Proposal 4: The Rest, the Trivial Parts). It features the opening cutscene at the start of the game, with a Lemeza that travels way more pixels than in final and the rough map sketch found in the Demo's folder.

Menus

item/msx.gif

A screenshot of the Items menu used in 06.htm, which is notably not linked anywhere. A hyphen was added to the sub-weapon text while the typo was not fixed, which indicates that this was made shortly after the Demo.

msx/msx.gif

A mockup of the ROMs menu. The layout here noticeably features both slots and the list of ROMs centered making the latter more compact, instead of spreading it out and putting the slots to the left. The font is also very different from any used in any build of the game; this seems to be the font used in MSX computers, which also appears in the La-Mulana Editor tool's font image and two images from the header of the website's homepage based on Doki Doki Memorial.

f04.gif

This is a curious little file; for starters, it's not in the usual directory but rather g3project/lamulana/h_img/, which is the folder for the How to Play section of the website's La-Mulana page. Despite that however, it was never even used, so we only got to see it now! ...Probably for a good reason though, considering the image is just a screenshot of the Demo's Chamber of Guidance 8k map screen with "Chamber of Moonlight" attached. That in itself however might be interesting.

field0/msx.gif

A screenshot of the BASIC screen executing both map ROMs showing the Gate of Guidance's map, albeit still titled "8kSYSTEM". Of note here are two symbols to the right of the area's name that, respectively, represent whether you got its Ankh Jewel and defeated its boss.

Title Screen (...?)

Dated January 29th, 2003, these images can be found in the folder kikaku/img/system/, used in a subpage titled ロード画面 (Loading Screen) of filename kikaku/title_load.htm. Interestingly, the ones depicting an MSX screen have it labeled "MSX2" instead, which never made it to the final game.

02.gif

Weirdly enough, the Conitnue typo is not present but Key Setting was misspelled as "KEY SETING", which does not happen in the Early Release, the only prototype with the F5 menu. Music Device is just named "MUSIC" and the options for it are labeled "DLS" and "MIDI" instead, named after the file extensions of the SSCC mode's driver and of the SC88 mode's music tracks. The cursor used here also looks plain white, rather than being blue and having shading.

03.gif

Even the Continue menu was different! Note that the slashes and colons are already there. Blank file spots were called "new Save File" (presumably intended for the save screen) instead of "File Not Found", and Xelpud has different dialogue.

Original (Early)	Translation (Early)
さて、つづきはどこからはじめるんじゃ？	So, where are you continuing from?
Original (Final)	Translation (Final)
キロクファイルをえらぶのじゃ。	Pick a save file.

01.gif

A relatively different title screen compared to the ones seen in other versions. The logo is a few pixels higher, which made space for an "OPTION" option. According to the webpage's writer, whether this option would lead to a menu different from the current Options menu was still up to debate. This also uses the arrow cursor instead of the hand one.

Overworld

From here on, the files can be found in item/, used in a webpage titled 企画書１２：いろいろな小物 (Proposal 12: Various Small Things) of filename 18.htm.

07.gif

Early	Final

A recording of the player entering an area, of which the animation speed was decreased. For the Temple of the Sun in particular, the primary color of the gates to Fields was changed from red to yellow, the first floor tile was swapped with stone, the wall tile was changed to bricks and the diagonal track tile was removed, probably in favor of the inscription.

Sprites

yousei.gif

Early	Final

The background was changed from black to transparent, and the red color was made lighter.

msx/item/

These images are used in a webpage titled 企画書２：アイテム案・改 (Proposal 2: Item Draft - Revision) of filename msx/item.htm.

07.gif

The Stone Mask, a reference to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and the second version of the Lamp of Time.

34.gif

The Fish Mask is an earlier version of the Scalesphere.

40.gif

What appears to be a green version of the Life Jewel. What it was supposed to do is unknown.

08.gif

A duplicate of 40.gif found in msx/i3/ instead.

07.gif

Found in field0/e/, this image contains frames for the Spriggan enemy that weren't used in any versions of the game, or even this archive since it's not used by any webpage.

Used	Unused

04.gif

Early	Final

An early version of the enemy Leucrotta found in field/9/.

Maps

The following files can be found in map_old/.

Contrary to the name on the label "Chamber of Moonlight" being similar to the final game's Temple of Moonlight, the file 1-6.gif labeled with this name features a map most similar to the Chamber of Extinction's map instead.