User:KyuuGryphon/Wonderland Adventures
Wonderland Adventures |
---|
Developer: Midnight Synergy This game has unused areas. |
Wonderland Adventures is the first entry in the aptly named Adventures Trilogy of the Wonderland series. Unlike the classic trilogy, it adopts a completely different (albeit still tile-based) gameplay style, featuring a large hub world for the player to explore, NPCs that can be talked to throughout the world, and many other features... used and unused.
All the game's data files are loose, allowing relatively easy viewing of the resources in external programs. The filenames are obfuscated with a simple cipher (Caesarian shift to the right by one - a = b, b = c, etc.) and have had their extensions replaced. The most common extension is .wdf, which is used for textures (all common formats like bitmaps and PNGs), sounds, and configuration files.
Contents
Subpages
Unused Levels There are a handful of early or otherwise unused levels in the game's files. |
Midnight Vault Wonderland Adventures has its own sort of "debugger" in it... one that's accessible to players who can beat the entire game! |
Unused Graphics
To do: verify all of this, I'm fairly certain of this off-hand but double-checking wouldn't be a bad idea |
There are numerous unused graphics in the game's data files, going very far back in the game's development.
Level Textures
The abstract level texture is used rather sparsely in the game - it's mainly used for some of the Arcade levels, and very briefly for the desaturated Wonderland at the end of the game. As a result, there are numerous unused textures in the file, to the point where it's easier to list which ones are used than not.
The top row has some early ice textures, and two tiles with a star emblem on them (though said emblem did appear in the prototype a few times).
The second row has what seems to be an alternate wall style that isn't used in-game.
The third row has a light grey, Chip's Challenge-esque tile, and an odd "cobblestone" tile from the cellar texture with a black circle on it (possibly intended to be a hole?)
The fifth row, oddly, has a corner tile from the forest "walkway" texture in it.
The sixth row has four interesting floor tiles that aren't used in the game at all.
The seventh row has what appear to be more alternate floor tiles, and a strange "creeping darkness" tile based off of one of the forest textures.
The eighth row is used in the desaturated Wonderland, but interestingly, the greyscale brick wall/brick roof tiles aren't used.
The cave level texture completely lacks any kind of "walkway" tiles in the first game, instead using the hill texture's paths as a placeholder. However, there are some interesting graphics in what would otherwise be blank space - Again, the unused star emblem appears in the lower corner, and what appear to be unscaled, earlier versions of the hill wall texture are nearby. These leftovers are found in several different level textures, though they're sometimes overwritten by other tiles.
While the snowy level texture doesn't have any interest unused graphics of its own, there are some very old leftovers in here - these four tiles belong to an earlier version of the hills texture, when the "drained colour" effect by void spikes looked somewhat more like cracks spreading across the ground.
Similarly, a very early "drained" stone pathway texture can be found in the town level texture, though it's just the one tile this time.
User Interface
While most of the icons in the cursors file are used, the clenched glove icon (third icon, top row) and "X" cursor (near the bottom of the file) aren't. They're both used in the prototype, though.
An odd set of graphics at the bottom of the game's font file. No idea what these are for.
There are four unused graphics in the game's HUD files - A back arrow, an eye, a lamp, and a white crystal shard. While the final game does indeed have a lamp, its graphic is stored in the inventory file instead.
Early | Final |
---|---|
The early lamp icon uses the earlier, thicker inventory outline and has no shading applied to it, while the final uses the standard, thinner inventory outline and has proper shading.
Miscellaneous
There are two kinds of barrels in the game - regular wooden barrels, that do nothing special when destroyed, and explosive barrels, which create a small explosion that can destroy monsters, the player, and other barrels. However, there's a third texture in the barrel folder, which is... This. A very, very basic ice texture. Likely a placeholder for a concept that didn't last very long before getting scrapped.
In the game's data, gates and buttons are split into two separate files. However, these few leftovers remain in the gate graphics file. It's likely that space issues were part of the reason for the file split (though how the rightmost textures would've been used is anyone's guess...).
This small X is in the button graphic files. While technically not unused, it's not visible in the game - it's a visual cue for the level editor, showing where command buttons would go (for things like making NPCs move or activating objects).
One of the hats that the player can wear is a crown. Strangely, though, the texture file used for the crown is a shrunken, recoloured "beanie cap" texture. The only evidence of this that can be seen in-game is a slight miscoloured streak on the inside of the crown itself.
To do: Picture of streak, unused Santa hat |
To do: Go through all this, see which of the obscure ones are indeed unused |
There are a few oddities in the particle graphics as well. On the second row, there's an asterisk and an arrow that are both unused, there are duplicates of the 100/250 graphic used for bonus points, and amidst the graphics for magic chargers (the stars, smoke, and concentric circles) are graphics for a white charger, which doesn't canonically exist in the series. Additionally, there's a picture of a maple leaf, that goes unused until Planet of the Z-Bots.
Model Oddities
The texture for the FireFlower has visible eyes on it. The actual model for FireFlowers used in the game has no place for them to go, though.
Similarly, there's a white star outline just underneath the main Scritter texture that goes unused.
The DragonTurtle texture has a small tongue texture on it. Unlike the FireFlower, however, this is used - it's just impossible to see in-game due to the camera angle.
Unused Models
There are far fewer unused models than there are textures, but there are still some interesting tidbits to be found here and there.
Unused Item Functionalities
Wonderland Adventures uses a basic "custom" object for most of its items - from things like the Lamp and Spy-Eye, to event items like the Sunscreen or Parcel, they all use the same core object. While these functionalities would eventually be usable in the standalone level editor, some of them exist in Adventures itself despite going unused.
Red Magic & Homing FireFlowers
With how the game handles magic internally, there are theoretically enough slots for eight different spells - one for each colour of the rainbow, plus white. The player only learns three magic spells over the course of the game: Blink, Pop, and Brr. On top of that, there are the fireballs flung by Thwarts and spat by FireFlowers - as they function identically to player spells, that brings the number of used magic slots up to four (The fireball, while functional, cannot be used by the player without save hacking, though it would see a canon introduction as Pow in Mysteries of Fire Island). The remaining slots, for the most part, do nothing, with two exceptions. One is white, which acts like a fireball and can be obtained via a save glitch, and the other is red.
While red magic would canonically see an appearance in Mysteries of Fire Island as Floing - allowing players to create "Floing Bubbles" that would freeze anything that entered them for a short period of time - it has a very different usage in the first game. It effectively behaves as a sort of homing missile - it moves at a much slower speed than any of the other spells, and will home in on the player. If it hits the player, they'll die as if hit by a regular fireball.
The intended use of the "homing missile" magic is quite simple - originally, the game would've had a variant of FireFlowers, that fired the "homing missile" spell at the player. While it's unused in the final game, remnants of this functionality exist - unlike Thwarts, who only throw fireballs, FireFlowers have an object setting that controls what type of spell they fire. Setting this to 0 (red) causes them to spit homing missiles again. This feature would eventually be used in Mysteries of Fire Island, albeit for IceFlowers instead.
Somewhat strangely, even though the homing missile was never intended to be used by the player themselves, a few of the levels that are used for cutscenes have red glove chargers in them. Possibly a leftover from testing the homing missile functionality in the first place?
Unused Sounds
While there aren't as many unused sounds as there are graphics, there are still a few.
Unused Text
To do: See if there are any unused dialogue files |
To do: There are a lot of things like the "functions" text lying around, they could probably use their own subpage... For now, just these ones listed, though |
There's a bit of unused text in the game's executable, but not much of interest.
Thank you for playing the Wonderland Adventures demo. Congratulations! You have reached the end of the demo version. Your journey has only begun!
Leftover text from the demo version of the game. The full blurb is in here.
\intro.wav
This file just doesn't exist - all the pre-game demos are done in the engine.
data\models\chomper\chomper2.md2
Only one chomper model exists in the game's files.
Couldn't Load Texture: File Exists! File Doesn't Exist!
None of these lines are used, although "Couldn't Load Texture" can be made to appear via using custom object textures that don't exist. The error simply states the name of the file it couldn't load, and doesn't say "File Doesn't Exist!".
Get Full Version
Again, just a leftover from the demo.
Power Activate Ice Activate Fire Activate Time Activate Vision Remove Light Detect
Fascinatingly, there are text strings from the very early prototype version of the game in the final version! Most interesting are the "Fire", "Time", and "Vision" options - while the fire magic power could be enabled by pressing a keyboard button, "Time" and "Vision" both go unused in the prototype.
_aadventurehelpline _aadventurehelpsprite _aadventuretextline _aadventuretitlesprite _aadventuretitlespritetex _fselectcharm
Obviously internal functions of some sort, but there don't seem to be any corresponding features to these in the final game.
Revision Differences
To do: All this, oh good lord. Mainly comparison shots |