Nintendo

Little King’s Story​ (originally known as “Project O”) is a simulation / strategic RPG co-developed by Town Factory and Cing, released for the Wii in 2009. The game was first shown at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007 and in the early screens we can notice some interesting differences:

• Some enemies were never implemented in the game, as a papercraft bird that could have been able to transform itself into a paper airplane.
• The beta city had a completely different layout than the final one, with buildings and rivers in different places.
• It seems that the king was able to guide more than 30 people at once.
• In the beta the edifices were build by the town folks and you were able to see them work on their new houses while they were in development (as it happens with bridges in the final). In the final game, you just chose which new building you want to create from your throne, and when you came out from the castle, the new building is already finished.
• In one of the screens we can notice the king at the top of an house’s roof, from where he talks to his crowd. You can’t go over roof in the final game.
• There are a couple of images with Verde and a weird character (with a yellow head) that seem to be from a cutscene that was removed from the final game (or did i miss it?).
• A red dragon was  on the beach too, but it’s never in there in the final version.
• In the final game every Animal Hunter has a “cat cap” on their heads, but in a beta screen we can see one of them that doesnt wear any cap.
• In one of the screenshots there are 2 “wooden-totem” enemies, but in the final we meet just one of them in a quest (or did i miss them in some other quest?)
• Howser was able to join the king army too, to battle along the other people.
• In the first trailer from Tokyo Game Show, the intro of the game was different.

Also, from a postmortem  article on Gamasutra we can read about a removed chapter that was planned for the beginning of the game and other unseen features:

In the original code, there was an introduction chapter where you could play Corobo (Little King’s Story protagonist) in pajamas looking for the crown. It took you around 40 minutes before you could find the crown, and it actually hindered the tempo. That’s why we decided to cut this and replace it with the opening you can see in the final game.

We had to scrap the multiplayer feature: A local two-player feature was implemented in the code but had to be removed. I also had to abandon the idea of having a network feature.

In the original concept, we were considering having a system in which the NPCs would develop automatically through their life simulation in the kingdom without requiring the user to grind. However, we started to realize that by using such a development system, the NPCs couldn’t keep up with the later enemies or became far too strong, ruining all the level design created to that point.

In an interview by Cubed3 with Marvelous Entertainment’s Yoshiro Kimura we can find some more info on the removed Multiplayer mode:

There were interesting multiplayer modes where the player could shoot cannons and control Pancho, but unfortunately due to time constraints we weren’t able to implement them into the game. I’m really sad we couldn’t have that in the game.

Milestones:

2006 June: Game Concept
2006 November: Evaluation of the prototype
2007 March: Full development start
End of February 2009: European master submission
End of April 2009: US and Japanese master submission
April 26, 2009, European release
July 21st, 2009, US release
September 3rd, 2009, Japanese release

Thanks to JulianCJ for the contribution!

Images:

Videos: