[ICEknight]

I was just reminded at drx's board about something I found a while ago while decompressing the graphics from the World of Illusion prototype, so I'll post this here since it might be kinda interesting to some.


To give some context, here's a tileset from Quackshot that gets loaded in every level and even the cutscenes (in a different part of VRAM). It includes both font sets and the small icons from the hud, as well as the border for the item selection and the level name in the map screen.



Now it appears that, after Quackshot was released, those graphics were tweaked to make them fit the colors of what came to be the main palette in World of Illusion (the one Mickey and Donald use all the time, and shared by some enemies).


You'll notice that some of these graphics (namely, Donald's face) actually look better than in Quackshot, and the color indexes were rearranged since they included some very needed oranges while removing the the brown and green colors for Donald's jacket and backpack, so it's not just a matter of palette swapping the same tiles.

So we have the Quackshot font, the energy icons from Quackshot and Donald's hud faces, but how do we know for sure this is not just something unrelated to this ROM, that ended up in there by accident?

Well, these graphics are actually loaded by the World of Illusion prototype. You might have noticed already that those letters are used in the main menu, for the sound test at the bottom of the screen.

They look correct with both the third and fourth palettes, which are almost the same except for the saturation of the blues.

But it's not just that... They're also loaded in-game even though they're never used, with the first palette being the correct one for them.


Strangely enough, the second palette does include the same colors for Donald's old backpack, and since the ant enemies in this prototype are using the second palette (instead of the first one like in the final version), that's the reason why they have green pants in there. Even so, their graphics are already prepared to use the first one without problems, but then again they're also compatible with the second palette in Quackshot.


Also, I must note that the default player in the prototype is Donald instead of Mickey, so that might be another hint towards this game having been a cancelled Quackshot sequel.



Of course, all the Quackshot hud elements were removed from the final version of World of Illusion:

...But what you might not have noticed is that the tiles for the colored borders are now thinner. Why would they have been changed if they're not even used in this game?

What's even more odd, is that those graphics for the thinner borders are also present within the Quackshot ROM:




I can't even begin to think how many changes did this project go under since it was started, but this leads me to think they might have been even more significant than in Shinobi 3.