Prerelease:Riddle School
This page details prerelease information and/or media for Riddle School.
Being the first game of the series, it's no real surprise that Riddle School went through a surprisingly large amount of changes during development.
Madness Fangame
As mentioned in the main article, Riddle School was originally going to be a Madness Combat fangame. While details regarding this phase of development are scarce, Jonochrome elaborated in the 10th Anniversary Developer's Commentary regarding the original plot and gameplay, where the game was originally going to be more like Pico's School with the roles reversed.
The intro originally started off with Phil shooting the teacher with a gun being added to Phil's inventory and "was going to basically be a Columbine situation". The game quickly evolved from Madness to a original idea, but not before enough progress was made in the visuals. Much of the game was reworked. Phil was simply recolored to resemble a human child, the black and white backgrounds were (partially) given color, and the gun was removed in favor of a emphasis on puzzles.
Not much of this phase of development has survived, with only a single illustration of Madness Phil and minor leftovers in the backgrounds known to exist.
Pre-Redesign | Post-Redesign |
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(The actual pre-redesign FLA is lost to the sands of time. The above is a recreation by Jonochrome sourced from Riddle School 5.)