Prerelease:Doubutsu no Mori

This page details prerelease information and/or media for Doubutsu no Mori.

To do: Lots to cover; [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131056/gdc_is_that_a_franchise_in_your_.php https://web.archive.org/web/20010821065247/http://ign64.ign.com/news/20423.html

Developmental Timeline

2000

• Jun. 5 - Shigeru Miyamato said with IGN that he was working on a "communication game" for the Nintendo 64, teasing Doubutsu no Mori.
• Aug. 25 - Doubutsu no Mori was shown off at SpaceWorld 2000, with a release planned for February of next year.

2001

• Apr. 14 - Doubutsu no Mori was released for the Nintendo 64 in Japan

Internal Material

To do: There's a lot more.

On July 27, 2020, a huge amount of source material was leaked. A few of the leftovers have traces to when the game was still in its RPG phase.

Unused Inventory Icons

Many unused and earlier inventory icons were found in the leak of the unreleased iQue files for Doubutsu no Mori. None of them exist in any released version of the game.

Name	Image	Notes
sickle		Likely the icon for the unused sickle handheld item found in the data for Animal Crossing.
ueki
seed		Likely the original flower seed icon.
nae		"nae" means seedling. Likely the original sapling icon.
nuts		Early fruit item, based on a chestnut; replaced with the cherry in the final game. Nuts would not appear as obtainable fruit until Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which featured lychee nuts.
kusuri		"kusuri" means medicine, which wouldn't appear as an item until Doubutsu no Mori e+.
furniture		Likely the original furniture icon.
carpet		Likely the original carpet icon.
wall		Likely the original wallpaper icon.
binsen		"binsen" means paper or stationery. Likely the original stationery icon.
cloth		associated with string "かえぬの" (kaenuno), which means spare cloth. Likely the planned means of creating custom designs in-game before the mechanic's scrapping in Doubutsu no Mori and the incorporation of Able Sisters in Doubutsu no Mori +.
fuku2		"fuku" means clothes. Likely the original clothing icon.
minidisk		Likely the original icon for K.K. Songs. MiniDiscs were a popular music format in Japan, with their magneto-optical design and portability allowing them to be repeatedly recorded over and shared like Compact Cassettes, indicating that the original concept for airchecks was that they would be recorded by K.K. onto store-bought blank MiniDiscs.
cd		Replaced with the handkerchief quest item in the released game.
guitar		Replaced with the camera quest item in the released game.
megane		"megane" means eyeglasses. Replaced with the glasses case quest item in the released game.
turi		Likely the original fishing rod icon.
ayu		"ayu" is sweetfish. Likely 1 of 3 potential icons to be used for all fish.
ayu		"ayu" is sweetfish. Likely 1 of 3 potential icons to be used for all fish. Of note is that the icon resembles the unused blue fish item found in the data for Animal Crossing.
ayu2		"ayu" is sweetfish. Likely 1 of 3 potential icons to be used for all fish.
pet		Likely an icon for fished trash. "pet" refers to the common abbreviation of polyethylene terephthalate, the type of plastic used in disposable water bottles.
mushikago		"mushikago" means insect cage. Likely the icon to be used for all insects.

Initial Concepts

Though many of the ideas like a working clock were thought of early in development, Doubutsu no Mori originally had a lot of RPG elements.

Development for Doubutsu no Mori originally started on the Nintendo 64DD, so it can take advantage of the system's memory and real-time clock but was moved to the original Nintendo 64 due to the former's failure. This resulted in many of the features and elements having to be reworked and scrapped because of limitations for the console.