Robert Seddon has wrote to us an email with some good info that he has found, about the development of Secret Of Evermore.
“I remembered about this, and thought it might interest you:
www.inf.uni-konstanz.de
is an archive of a 2004 GameFAQs board thread with Brian Fehdrau, lead programmer on SoE. There are a few comments about unused/changed stuff:
‘That’s a pre-release screenshot. Notice the power bars are different and the dog’s head is on the other side of the bar. I’d hazard a guess that we changed the Mammoth Graveyard between then and release. Seems to me there was an issue with AI getting caught on the tusks.’
Also this: ‘Some of you probably know about the chicken effect. I won’t go into detail to avoid spoiling it for others. However, if you did trigger the chicken effect, you were meant to be run over (and hurt very badly) by a giant chicken on roller skates at various times during the final battle. He [another programmer] says the sprite is actually in the rom, but the scripting for it never happened due to lack of time.’
On the Seiken-style weapon system: ‘I do remember we had a different weapon system for quite a while, then Someone In Management decided we were going to copy SoM instead. (You can say that about a lot of things in Evermore, actually. :)’
There’s also mention of early concepts that didn’t even get as far as alpha: a Valentine’s Day world and a plug-in mini-cartridge to add new scenarios. (No wonder they were never implemented at all…)”
Thank you Robert! This is usefull :)
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wow, i did not know about that.. i really loved Secret of Evermore, i finished it many times. I wish it had more scenarios.
i have found even some more beta screens to add to the SoE archive, i’ll upload them later, in some of them there isn’t the dog or his bar.. are there some sections in the game were the protagonist does not have the dog?
Complimenti per gli argomenti trattati nel vostro sito, ora diventato più come un blog. E’ diverso tempo ormai che vi seguo e che di tanto in tanto passo per rispolverare ricordi o per controllare che un vecchio progetto non sia stato riesumato. Avrebbe fatto piacere molto anche a me poter dare una mano a raccogliere materiale, vista la quantità di riviste (italiane) collezionate, ma il mio archivio è attualmente irreperibile.
Ancora complimentoni, specialmente per le emozioni che tutt’ora tornano in mente…continuate così che siete forti ;)
yes monokoma in the greek/roman scenario and in the middle age scenario you play for some time only with the main character (and maybe in other scenarios, i don’t remember). If i remember correctly (the last time i finished it was ten years ago), there was even a section when you play only with the dog.
hypercat: thanks :)
That’s right: they can get separated. Hence this from the board thread:
‘I found this really cool glitch in Antiqua. Just after you first enter it (and lose your dog), if you [go to a certain spot], and press select (as if you were changing to your dog), it actually switches to your dog, who is standing right up the very top of the mountain above Blimp’s cave. You can rotate him around a bit, but nothing else. I don’t think you can change his collar or anything… Brian – do you know why this glitch exists?’
‘That glitch exists because someone decided it was easier just to stuff the other character off in the corner of the map than to reduce the number of active characters to one. Perhaps not the best idea, as we didn’t cover all the cases in which you could switch.’
Some of the other pre-release shots RPGamer has show the dog in Antiqua (the Graeco-Roman-Egyptian mish-mash world) but in his prehistoric wolf-type form; in the final game he looks whippet-like in Antiqua. Probably they hadn’t added multiple dog sprite versions yet.