Has a prototype been found?
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- Anonymous Fish
- PaleSunflower
- Custodian of Corn
- Posts: 446
- Joined: Jul 26, 2009 12:11 am
No straight-up unreleased prototypes have been found to my knowledge. In my experience, beta data and unused elements for the HM/SoS and even the RF series isn't well documented. With that being said, some of the old games were released as pairs of sorts, with a "boy" version coming first and a "girl" version being released later. Examples include HM:DS and HM:DS Cute and HM:AWL and HM:AnWL. These pairs share most of their assets, but, in cases were some assets are not used in the second game, the second game in the pair will generally retain those leftover assets in the code from the first game. The second game also usually includes bug fixes and other changes to hopefully improve gameplay.
In terms of early builds in general, however, the 1.0 version of HM:DS released in the USA probably counts as one. Many American fans at the time would have preferred if the 1.0 version was an unreleased build of the game, anyway. The 1.0 version had a seemingly endless various of glitches and typos, such as the player's save file corrupting randomly, being randomly locked out of marrying certain special marriage candidates for some reason or another, and where the player would get 1 billion G (in-game currency) out of nowhere. A thread on this very website (https://www.fogu.com/hmforum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=49667) has over a hundred pages of glitches and typos from HM:DS alone. Most of the glitches were patched in later versions of HM:DS as well as HM:DS Cute.
In terms of early builds in general, however, the 1.0 version of HM:DS released in the USA probably counts as one. Many American fans at the time would have preferred if the 1.0 version was an unreleased build of the game, anyway. The 1.0 version had a seemingly endless various of glitches and typos, such as the player's save file corrupting randomly, being randomly locked out of marrying certain special marriage candidates for some reason or another, and where the player would get 1 billion G (in-game currency) out of nowhere. A thread on this very website (https://www.fogu.com/hmforum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=49667) has over a hundred pages of glitches and typos from HM:DS alone. Most of the glitches were patched in later versions of HM:DS as well as HM:DS Cute.