Cassima and Edgar's first encounter with each other was on the literal edge of the world. This section was cut because the whole sequence felt too slow and clunky for the first playable part of the game, as well as a bit too similar with the Realm of the Dead, tone-wise.
The demon's screech is a barn owl's screech.
One of the extras walking around the Serenia town square is the shoemaker's wife (from King's Quest V). As you may have also deduced, the boy whose toy horse Cassima retrieves is the toymaker's son, and the boy playing with the string is the tailor.
Ashni is an Indian name meaning "a bolt of lightning".
I was originally going to have Sir Greywolf be the male wolf guarding Queen Icebella's castle, but considering the long gap between the time Cassima is there and the time King's Quest V happens, I decided to use another wolf instead. Maugrim is the name of one of the wolves who serves the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
One of my rationales behind giving Cassima an item that allowed her to shapeshift into various animal forms is that every other member of the royal family has changed or been changed into another creature at least once. Conveniently, this plot element ended up planting the seeds for Edgar being confronted by and eventually coming to terms with his past.
Originally, Cassima was just going to talk to the Wiseman, who advises her on where to head next. Since a lot of the original game tended to rely on the "go to this land, then talk to the character who points you towards another land" pattern, I tried to change things up to make the Wiseman sick so that the player has to figure out how to make him better before he can help Cassima. I also added several appearances of swan feathers around the village, which both act as foreshadowing and show how the villagers have embraced the Wiseman's presence.
The Wiseman is from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Wild Swans, and most of the story is retold by him. I felt that the youngest brother was a somewhat tragic character, given how he seemed to be the closest to his sister during her exile from their homeland (even in his swan form), yet through a cruel twist of fate, he winds up with a swan's wing instead of an arm by the story's end.
The puzzle where Edgar gets water for the sprite's bird is heavily borrowed from Aesop's Fable "The Crow and the Pitcher".
I got the idea for the tree puzzle in the Bountiful woods from someone mentioning some stones they saw for sale which had carvings that would make any light reflected off of them form a luminous design.
The sound of the riddles appearing and vanishing in the giant tree is the modified sound of dry leaves crumbling.
Despite being a fairly simple 3D model, it took me several attempts to create a model of the Crystal Dragon that satisfied me. Her slight purple tint was a minor mistake -- I assumed that that was her normal color, but on closer inspection of the dragon's animations from KQ7 sometime later, I realized that she is actually completely clear, and just looked purple because she was reflecting the color of the cave she was in. Only the row of spines on her back is purple regardless of her surroundings.
Putting the fence around the path to Manannan's former home happened late in the game's development. It helps establish that the place's current owner: A) Isn't evil, and B) has to rely on that path as well (as opposed to teleporting everywhere like Manannan).
As King's Quest trivia buffs may be aware, Derek is the author of the Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, and in the King's Quest Companion, where the world of Daventry is framed as a parallel world to our own, Derek is said to be living in Manannan's former house and "sending" the stories of the Royal Family to our world. His physical appearance has never been clearly depicted, so I had free reign to do pretty much whatever I wanted with his look (I though a male KQ character with a ponytail would be fun to design).
Derek's tapestry (which replaced Manannan's mounted moose head because, to reiterate, Derek is a good guy) contains references to Sierra On-Line in the form of Yosemite Valley (with Half Dome in the background) and the World Famous Talking Bear of Oakhurst.
Nathan and Sylvia are from the Grimms' fairy tale "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was". Nathan's adventures are described, and Edgar helps bring about a resolution to the tale in a fashion similar to the original story. They were a late addition, since Llewdor initially was a fairly empty section. The tavern was added sometime after they were.
Sylvia is the name of a character from Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book, an 1889 anthology of fairy tales that includes characters such as fairies named Genesta and Lolotte, as well as a queen named Balanice whose daughter is named Rosanella. Since this book was clearly an inspiration for the original King's Quest games, I decided to give one of the characters in this game a name from the same collection.
The two people that appear in the Llewdor tavern in Chapter 2 onwards require a lengthy explanation:
They are two of the three protagonists from my unfinished game Three to Make Ready, in which the world was once dominated by magic, then divided into three distinct worlds (which are hinted to be Daventry, Eldritch and the real world), and a modern-day scientist named Robin is trying to reunite them by various means (including time travel).
The man is Finley, who is a selkie-born from before the division (the child of a human man and a faery that can change into the form of a seal, so a place right next to the sea is a very fitting spot for him to be), and the woman is Liana, a reincarnation of a pre-division werejaguar. While the world of 616 Mock Orange Lane is heavily based on what happens to the world after the events of TTMR, I've never actually depicted any of the characters from TTMR in a game (and Liana was never anything more than a pencil sketch).
I was originally going to leave the tavern empty after Nathan and Sylvia leave, but on a whim, I decided to and Finley and Liana ten days before the game's launch (fortunately, it took less than one day to create and implement them). The reason Robin doesn't make an appearance is because she is revealed to be a descendant of Rosella and Edgar at the end of TTMR, so even if she's not here, her ancestors certainly are. ;)
The music that plays when Edgar first meets the oracle is one of the few pieces of Liam's music that I reused. He created the original track in the mid-00's, and I used it in my very first game (Area 50.5).
I originally was going to make the scene with Edgar and the oracle oriented the same way as Cassima's meeting with the other oracle -- with the oracle in the foreground, to the left -- but I decided to keep with the theme of the two characters "mirroring" each other and decided to flip Edgar's background so the oracle was on the right.
The first KQ game I encountered was KQ3, when I was about 6 years old. I rediscovered it when I was 14, and for some reason, I remembered the border of the desert as being in the background rather than on the left side of the screen. Late into the game's development, I suspected that this false memory was what inspired me (on a subconscious level) to show the desert in the background during the Llewdor section.
The music that plays when Edgar eavesdrops on Shadrack's agent and accomplice was another of Liam's early tracks. I planned on using it for this scene back when Cassima was the one eavesdropping on them in the cabin in Tamir (as a lizard), and even with all of Liam's great new music, I still stuck with that track for this scene.
Chapter 2
Due to the numerous sweeping cuts that were made to the game in order to pare it down to a more managable size, the section that took place in Tamir ended up getting completely removed. The removed Tamir section went like this:
Cassima and Edgar initially met right after their first conversation via the pendants (next to the Roman pool). After night falls, Cassima is able to see in the dark after changing into a wolf and meets a black and white ferret named Augustus. Cassima was the one who encountered the conversation between the agent and his companion, who met inside the fisherman's cabin, which Cassima has to infiltrate as a lizard.
The clue that tips Cassima and Edgar off to Shadrack's plans appeared in an encrypted form on a piece of paper which Cassima retrieves. She then heads towards the mountains, continues climbing them as a goat before becoming human again and sleeping in a clearing on the mountain path (I briefly toyed with the idea of Cassima spending the night in a spare room on Genesta's island before journeying into the mountains).
Meanwhile, Edgar arrives at the oasis at night, and after getting the skyship, heads west using it, towards the same mountains Cassima is in. He eventually finds a mountain path and falls asleep inside a stone temple. Both Cassima and Edgar dream about their loved ones and try to touch them before waking abruptly. Cassima and Edgar then meet in the mountains, overlooking the swamp east of Tamir. Edgar helps Cassima to decipher the letter and its message before the two part ways again, Cassima leaving for the Green Isles while Edgar leaves for Etheria.
When I was first designing the oasis's rooms, I hoped that I'd be able to use one room for both the past and future times, simply switching the various features of the room depending on whether it was the past or the future. The various different objects, characters and walk-behinds made this far too complicated, however I was initially able to do this with the room where the pool is. The was a crazy patchwork of objects, hotspots and two different backgrounds implemented in that room before I had to split the past and future into two different rooms since the amount of scripting in that room was getting too unwieldy to handle. I was eventually forced to move the cutscene where Cassima and Edgar meet at the pool to a different room with the same background as well.
I was well into creating Gabbro's animations when I realized that I might made him a bit too sexy compared to the rest of the cast.
Gabbro is the name of a coarse-grained igneous rock similar to granite.
When Edgar met Leticia, she was initially wearing a necklace in an earlier version of the game. That detail was later changed, and you might be able to pick up on a little story if you pay attention to where and when that necklace appears during the game.
If you interact with the stringed instrument in Leticia's shop as Edgar, Edgar makes a comment about not being able to play decent music even if his life depended on it. This was a detail I decided to write into his character to set him apart from Rosella and everyone else in her immediate family, who are all able to play at least one musical instrument in their games. Officially, it's not known if Cassima is musically talented or not, but I added a scene where she plays the piano to a piece of fan fiction I wrote about her in the mid-00's.
The sequence featuring the sage at the oasis originated fairly early in the game's development. While working on the game in 2020 (the year when I finally decided to stamp on the accelerator and keep going until the game was finished, for better or for worse), I took two weeks off to create the short game 616 Mock Orange Way, which featured a grumpy old man named Ollie and his roommate, a phooka (a shapeshifting faery) named Cob. Sometime after getting back to work on IT4, I decided to give the sage an invisible friend to make the conversations between the sage and Edgar a bit more interesting. Then, a few months after that, I made up my mind to have Ollie "play" the part of the sage, while Cob plays his unseen friend (note the very similar name). It was an unexpectedly perfect fit, since the sage throws a pair of stirrups at Edgar and Cob has the ability to transform into a pony. I had unknowingly prepared a role for a character that didn't come into existence until many years afterwards. (The transparent "crease" in Ollie's right arm from where it was bent into the 4th dimension is also part of the sage's design, but unfortunately, due to the surrounding colors and the size of his sprite, it's very difficult to see the crease unless you view screenshots of his animation at a high magnification.)
Leticia was meant to have a son when she was first created, but I didn't come up with the idea of Gabbro being his father until many years later.
While anyone who's played King's Quest VI may recognize the man who shows Alexander the library as the former beast which Alexander first meets in that game, his name might not be familiar to everyone. He is called Cocteau the Thrice Blessed in the King's Quest Companion, and I called him "Prince Cocteau" since he has no in-game name besides "Beast", and simply calling that in this game would be a bit jarring for someone who hasn't played KQ6 for some time. Having a large library inside his castle also acts as a homage to Disney's adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which KQ6 also makes subtle references to (for those who aren't aware, Alexander has the same voice actor as Disney's Beast in KQ6).
A copy of A Who's-Who of 2D Adventure Antagonists, a book that appears in Adventure: Welcome to the Genre, sits on the shelf of Cocteau's library.
I really wanted to make the Hole-in-the-Wall cut a hole in the game's inventory window so that the screen beneath the window would be visible through its hole (I discovered a bug that caused sprites with alpha channels to cut "holes" in GUIs on a different project years ago), but I wasn't able to find a way to do this.
Labrusca's name used to be Linden (a species of tree). "Labrusca" is a Latin word that originally referred to a wild grapevine (but has also been used to refer to a species of grapevine, as well as the wine produced from its fruit).
In bit of symbolism, the only item that remains on Leticia's shelves in both the past and the future is an hourglass. There's also a book titled "Tempus Fugit" when Cassima is there, which translates to "Time Flies."
The goat sculpture in Leticia's shop is a nod to the animal removed from Cassima's armlet. There's a little Easter Egg if you interact with it.
The infamous tale of Bluebeard is retold here, with Cassima in the role of his last "wife". I was inspired by a slightly less dark adaptation of the story that was featured an old children's radio program called Let's Pretend (which introduced me to many lesser-known fairy tales when I was a kid) to keep Bluebeard's former wives alive. I also reread the original story, and upon discovering a line in the retelling about the protagonist reflecting that "his beard wasn't really that blue", or words to that effect, I decided to make Bluebeard's beard a deep bluish-black rather than the bright baby blue I originally designed it as.
If you listen very carefully while you're in one of the hallways of Bluebeard's castle, you can hear distant, distorted screams.
The snake the unnamed woman is changed into is based on a saw-scaled viper, a venomous snake native to deserts of Africa and Asia.
Cassima wearing a man's clothing is a parallel to Alexander wearing Beauty's clothing to gain access to the Castle of the Crown in King's Quest VI's "short path".
The griffin Cassima escapes on went through a number of changes to his character. Originally he was loosely based on a bald eagle, but I decided that bald eagles were New World birds, he should be a species that would reflect the (mostly) Old World setting of the KQ games (even though I now realize that a couple of eagles resembling bald eagles have shown up in the official games -- oops). His final design was based on a juvenile golden eagle (the adults don't have white in their wings), since it seems like a young griffin would be more likely to end up captured by a human. His name changed as well -- it was originally Zephyr until I realized that one of the Winds in KQ7 already had that name, so I decided to call him Scintilla instead. Like the character in KQ7, however, his name isn't mentioned (due to a later section in the game where Cassima meets his flock being cut).
Although having two versions of griffins in the world of Daventry and Eldritch might seem a bit lazy, it actually follows in the footsteps of what KQ7 already did. Eldritch shares a number of entities with Daventry, but they differ from their Daventry counterparts in various ways (e.g., Daventry's trolls are hostile and uncivilized while Eldritch's trolls are amiable and have furry feet, the faeries of Eldritch are human-sized and wingless, while the ones in Daventry can be tiny and are frequently winged).
The sound effect of the griffin's beak snapping shut is a shoebill stork's bill.
The ship Edgar buys is a reference to an eastern European fairy tale which there have been a number of variations on in which the protagonist acquires a magical flying ship ("The Fool and the Flying Ship" is one name it's known by). The version I heard at a storytelling festival in the 1990s featured a ship that started out tiny, only growing to full size when the protagonist said a certain phrase. Unfortunately, Edgar's ship turns out to be defective.
Although it's hard to overlook, the sequence with Acilino is one long reference to The Princess Bride.
One of the more interesting journeys this game took me on was designing various buildings, clothing and furniture for Etheria. This was difficult since we only see a few examples of each in KQ7, but it seems to have a pronounced Greek/Roman look, so I mostly went with that. I also threw in a lot of "organic" flourishes (like the vinelike doorframes inside the castle) as well as a number of spirals that mimic the look of the floating islands.
Most of the book titles in the Etherian library were created by Liam Barnesdale, and contain a variety of references to the King's Quest series and other Sierra topics, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Thursday Next series and other related topics. Here's a few that may require further explanation:
-"A Compendium on Resurrecting and Taming Creatures of Ancient Times" is a reference to my game Kynigos, where an evil sorcerer does this very thing.
-1,001 Uses for a Piece of Wire is a book from Adventure: Welcome to the Genre.
-The word "Clew" in the book about maze navigation isn't just a quirky alternate spelling of "clue". A clew is an old term for a spool of string -- the sort of spool that might be used to navigate a maze with, la Theseus in the Labyrinth.
-"Liber ex Doctrina: or, the Book of Lore" is the manual from Conquests of Camelot (Liam came up with this one).
-Kronos is the company that created the 3D intro animation for King's Quest VI (another amazing contribution by Liam).
-A paronomasia is a play on words (thanks again, Liam!).
Initially, I only had designs for the physician's first two patients, since there was no closeup of the third one like there is with the first two -- he's only mentioned by the physician. When I was coming up with designs for the characters sitting inside the library late in the game's production, I decided to make one of them the third patient. Not only does he now have a design of his own, but he also acts as a bit of foreshadowing.
The third extra character in the library (who shows up after the shop sequence) is from an idea I got in 2020 of a Disney princess who could only sing heavy metal music, and this character (Princess Aldeth) was the result. Her wardrobe in the game matches the Etherian style more closely, and the book she is reading (too small to be legible) is Songs from the Forge (because...metal).
Scrimshaw is an art form created by making scratches on bone or ivory, then filling the scratches with ink. As you can see in the game, scratching is one of Scrimshaw the pygmy griffin's favorite hobbies.
Scimshaw pointing Edgar the right way in the maze was inspired by Sierra's edutainment game Pepper's Adventures in Time, where Pepper's dog helps retrace her steps through the Pughs' mansion by moving to the correct doorway whenever you make him sniff the room you are currently in.
The tiny dragon was originally nameless and much more generic in design. I was inspired to give him a row of feathers along his back instead of scales. Since the only other dragon we see in the Realm of Eldritch is made of crystal, it made sense to give this dragon a more unconventional design as well. I also unintentionally gave him the same body plan as the Crystal Dragon (two legs and two wings with hands, which would technically classify them as wyverns, if you wanted to be super-pedantic). The name "Tercel" is a Middle English word for a male hawk (which are typically smaller than females), and his red crest was inspired by the golden-crowned kinglet (the male birds have red tufts of feathers on their heads that are only exposed when the bird is excited or aggressive). I also changed his personality to make him more distinct from the sage, making Tercel more of a slightly unhinged survivalist than a grouchy individual living in a hole at the base of a cliffside.
I cut out a large section of Etheria for several reasons -- the biggest one being the insane amount of animations it would have required. However, two background characters from that section (the maroon-skinned balding man and the man with long red hair) can occasionally be seen walking around the center of Aeolus.
One of the cut sections from the game has Edgar get stuck on a ledge below Cassima in the ugly side of Etheria, and Cassima has to help him climb up to the ledge she's on by using her scarf on a shrub that Edgar rejuvenates. This puzzle ended up slightly modified and reused in the Kolyma cliffs section.
Originally, the Etheria section was even longer than it currently is:
Edgar was going to travel to another island after leaving Tercel via an enlarged crossbow that Tercel set up to defend himself against possible invaders, first contacting Cassima and ask her to come and join him, thinking they might stand a better chance together in a land he is told can be a bit rough. When Cassima arrives there, she sees someone she is convinced is another agent of Shadrack's, and hides from him inside a seedy tavern full of shady-looking men, where a man named Icarus immediately starts to bother her. She finds a place to hide and overhears Icarus talking about a potion he stole from a sorcerer, which is essentially a truth potion.
Cassima steals this from him, causing the men to chase after her. She encounters Edgar at a crossroads, hands him the bottle and takes off down one of the paths, while Edgar takes the other path. The men split off and start chasing both of them, with Edgar alternately Cassima finding ways to slow them down and swapping the bottle between them as their paths keep crossing.
Eventually they both reach dead-ends, but with teamwork, they are able to evade the men. Edgar then leaves for the Land of the Green Isles after Cassima mentions her experience there while Cassima stays behind. Inside a nearby cave, she finds a solitary black unicorn. On a plateau above the cave, she finds a group of griffins, one of which is the one she set free. She gets a sprig of special herbs from them, which she gives to the unicorn to gain his trust. She then gets him to drink the potion.
The unicorn then tells all, explaining that he is the unicorn who was captured by the tailor in the fairy tale "The Brave Little Tailor", and is completely humiliated by his experience, which is why he is living in a remote cave. He is convinced to leave his cave, and tells Cassima what he known about Shadrack, then advises her to seek out King Neptune (most of his lines were ultimately given to the griffin and to Neptune's Channeler).