It Came from the Desert (Amiga)

This page details one or more prototype versions of It Came from the Desert (Amiga).

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Implement dialogue differences in desert.dat and dshell.

There exists what appears to be a prerelease automated demo. It's 1 disk and contains what appears to be a condensed build strictly for the purpose of this demo - the final retail game is 3 diskettes. The latest file timestamp is 1989.10.08 03:16, which indicates that this was compiled roughly 3 months before the retail release in December 1989 - just like Cinemaware's previous title, Rocket Ranger. Upon loading, it plays and loops a recorded demo of gameplay with some notable differences.

Audio Differences#

The introduction music has some slight differences:

The demo version is much more compressed, likely to save space on the single demo diskette. Starting around 0:30, the demo version features timpani drums and pitched-down cymbals which is not present in the final version.

Visual Differences#

The demo can be paused with a left-click on the mouse like you can in the final version. The demo also appears to run in a lower resolution than the final version, likely to conserve space on the disk.

Demo	Final	Notes
		The demo features much larger location cards with different formatting.
		Very slight dialogue change with Ida's gypsy accent. In the demo she says notink, whereas in the final she says nothink. In the demo, the non-unique context choice of Go to Map has a lowercase m, and a period at the end. The final version does not have a period at the end of any non-unique context choices, and the m in Map was changed to an uppercase.
		Punctuation correction in Bert's first line between the demo and final versions. The demo version features slightly different context choices, though they net the same result as they do in the final. Slight wording and punctuation differences of the context choices between versions.

After the Bert sequence, the demo then goes to McWilliams dairy, which results in an immediate melee battle with an ant. In the final version, an ant would not be at this location at this day and time. There is a glitched animation frame where the ant's antennae disappear without being shot off. The antennae reappear after a few frames.

Doc (intentionally) does not succeed in taking the creature down. After the ant walks off screen, the demo warps to the scene where Doc fails the ant bombing mini-game, rather than getting the in-your-face last chance to take the ant down. In the demo version, he screams 3 times with a mouth animation for each scream, repeating the same soundbyte as the ant towers over him. In the final version, Doc only screams once and his mouth remains open.

After the aforementioned ant sequence, the demo has a few unique advertisement screens, and then ends and loops for as long as you let it.

Not sure what the 'Double Feature' bit is supposed to mean. It's obviously a nod to the old cinema days of double features, but what are the '2 games'? Perhaps they intended to have the first game and Antheads done at the same time and have a double release?

Unused Dialogue/Narration/Locations + Differences from Final Version#

Arguably more interesting than the differences listed above, the demo disk contains a compacted version of the entire game. With that are the dshell and desert.dat files which contain dialogue, context choices, map locations, etc as the final game does, including a decent chunk of dialogue data that the recorded demo doesn't use at all. Some of this has been demonstrated in the above sections via screenshots; the rest will be demonstrated in the subsections below.

Completely Unused Dialogue, Context Choices, Locations, etc.#

Via dshell:

Miscellaneous#

Via dshell:

There is header data that contains a copyright for the Aegis Sonix music sequencer driver:

Note - This copyright message is slightly different that the final version listed on the main page.

There is a copyright stamp for Cinemaware's proprietary animation engine:

Error Messages#

Via dshell: