[Shoemanbundy]

A prototype of Castlevania Bloodlines that's even earlier than the infamous 0.5 build made its way out yesterday.





Some more analysis here:
https://castlevaniad...hp?topic=9526.0

Rom link: https://gofile.io/?c=h8KAdw

Will this bring out the 0.5 proto or any other builds? One can only hope!

[ICEknight]

EDIT: Oops, tried the wrong ROM.

Oh my god, that intro:

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 02 July 2018 - 05:10 PM

[Hukos]

It only goes up to level 2 and just loops back to level 1 afterwards. I have no idea if there's a way to see if the infamous blimp level exists in this prototype or not. This is a fantastic find, however!

[ICEknight]

It's kind of weird that setting the region to "Japan" gives a "Vampire Killer" copyright screen but a "Castlevania Bloodlines" title screen, almost as if they were making this game more with the overseas public in mind.

[ICEknight]

Found the level RAM value, these are the inaccessible levels:

FFFB2B:001BA

Uninteresting fall to your death (clone of the water-rising boss fight, I guess).
This seems to be there just in case that the player somehow managed to go back upstairs from the boss screen, but they messed up the player coordinates. =P

FFFB2B:001BB

Uninteresting copy-paste of a previous level but without water and a bad palette.

FFFB2B:001BC

Quick entrance to the Tower of Pisa.

FFFB2B:001BD

The non-leaning Tower of Pisa.

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 02 July 2018 - 07:32 PM

[Shoemanbundy]

The Konami code on the titlescreen also opens up a level select, but it looks like you found all there is. My guess is they didn't have much of the game past the first two levels complete at this time, so they stripped it down to those two levels and got rid of the rest in order to avoid people from seeing the incomplete mess and getting a bad impression.

[Mistergambit]

Ah nice, I'm glad to see this proto finally out there. I remember when it was still an auction and stuff :P. I actually really like the new title music.

I'm currently looking through all of the stuff inside of the rom, as well as working on a in-depth proto comparison. I've actually managed to do some object hacking and have listed down all objects that are present in the game. It seems from my current impressions, there could have definitely been some stuff stripped from the rom, as there are some bits of art for some Stage 4 and 5 things, as well as some strange objects I had never seen before.

Interestingly, this prototype uses what seems to be Rocket knight adventure's compression format for its level layout and art. Unlike the final version which uses what seems to be modified version of it (which can't be used with the "Rocket" format compressor/decompressor.). I was able to decompress the art and look at what was there.

Here is a listing of what I've found.

00071302 - Skeleton Enemy
00071CAC - Skeleton Accessories
000720BE - Crow Enemy
00072516 - Zombie Enemy
000730FE - Bone Dragon Enemy
00073B52 - Bat Enemy
00073E4A - Stage 1 Boss?
*00075760 - Unknown, it has a fireball and a lot of bonelike sprites, but I'm not sure what its supposed to be.
*00076D74 - More unknown tiles.
*00078EB0 - A large chunk of blank tiles with 3 orbs in them.
000790AE - Unknown, some kind of enemy. it has a face, but what it is i have no idea. I had trouble assembling it, so i give up
00079BE0 - Medusa Head enemy
0007A0F8 - Minotaur Enemy
0007AAD4 - Stage 2 Boss
0007C2E6 - More Stage 2 Boss Stuff
0007CF66 - Even more Stage 2 Boss Stuff
0007DAAE - Harpy Enemy
0007E4AA - Merman Enemy
0007FB1C - Hellhound miniboss
000810B6 - More Hellhound stuff
*000818C4 - Stage 2 midboss (giant mace knight),
*000822C8 - A very odd, what seems to be unused plant enemy.
*00082C18 - The vine enemy from Stage 5
*00083A84 - Some kind of enemy, and some cannonballs? 
00084B3E - Peeping eye enemy
000851A4 - Stage clear orb
00085358 - Debug Numbers
00085412 - An Unused enemy presumably for Stage 5, He has a fire attack and seems to hop around (!!)
00085D48 - Stage 5 Moth Boss from the unreleased prototype
0008748a - Boss Accessories for the Stage 5 boss.
00087D54 - 2 tiles and then a ton of blank tiles. clearly very unfinished. 
00087E12 - Mummy enemy (Stage 3)
000887C8 - Main game font (Title/Option/etc)
0008892A - Title Screen Logo
00089B2A - Early password border. I believe this is also in 0.5 too, and maybe even in the final as well.
00089B40 - Character select art borders
000898F6 - A miniature version of the title screen. its loaded in the PLC, according to hex data, but isn't seen anywhere.
0008A46C - Character select fonts
0008A7D4 - HUD tiles, Pause logo (Unused), and selection cursor from title screen
0008C072 - Candles, Gems, Subweapons, 1up, Money, and other things
0008C8C2 - Subweapon Candle
0008C92A - Skull and Book Powerup
0008C9EC - Powerups for Eric
0008CB8E - Powerups for Johnny
0008CCE6 - Special subweapon icons exclusive to this beta
0008CE36 - Whip sprites
0008D490 - Powered up whip sprites and lightning whip
0008DB22 - Spear Sprites
00090210 - Spear special attack sprites
0009056C - Whip effect and enemy death effect
00090940 - What might be a falling chandellier. I think this may have been in Stage 5.
00090BE6 - 1-8 Swinging axe, 1-7 blood droplets, a chain and some other weird things.
00091226 - 1-7 rotating trap spike platform (it's also used as a placeholder for the logs in Stage 2)
00091566 - Some unknown thing, Stage 3 leaning tower platforms, Water surface, and the log tiles to those platforms in S2. They aren't used in this build
00091820 - Seemingly some pillar tiles either to Stage 2 or Stage 3.
00091976 - Door
000919d4 - Door Open
00091d16 - Stage 1-2 Art
00092240 - Stage 1-2/3/4 Art
00093302 - Stage 1-2/5 BG 
00093652 - Stage 1-4 Art
00093C2E - Stage 1-6/7/8 Art
000946D2 - Stage 1-7/8 FG
0009554a - Stage 1-9 Skeleton
00095dA8 - Stage 1-9 BG and FG
000965D8 - More FG Stuff
00097594 - Stage 1-10/11 FG and BG
00097ADA - Stage 1-11 Castle BG 
000985A4 - Stage 2-1 BG
00098A60 - Stage 2-1/5 FG
00099204 - Stage 2-2/3/4 FG
00099AB2 - Stage 2-2/3/4 BG and assets
0009AF7C - Stage 2-5 BG and Head
0009BB96 - Stage 2-6 BG/FG and some boss stuff?
0009C680 - Stage 3-2 Art and BG
0009CE68 - Stage 3-3 FG Art
0009D1D2 - Stage 1-1 FG and BG Art
0009D892 - Stage 1-1 Animated Grass 
0009DB2E - More Stage 1-1 FG tiles
0009DFA0 - Animated Grass Frame 2
0009E248 - Animated Grass Frame 3
0009E4EC - Stage 1-1 FG Art Continued
*0009F2E2- Stage 1-1 Clouds at the top of the stage.
*0009F44E - Stage 4's Boss
000A04B4 - Mace Enemy from Stage 2
*000A106C - An early Frankenstein, presumably from Stage 4
000A2542 - Water Magician miniboss from 2-3

I'm gonna keep combing through stuff to see if I can find anything else. Level-wise, 3-3 seems to be the last entry, internally. there are no other levels on the list. so no later levels it seems.

[Hukos]

ICEknight, on 02 July 2018 - 06:03 PM, said:

It's kind of weird that setting the region to "Japan" gives a "Vampire Killer" copyright screen but a "Castlevania Bloodlines" title screen, almost as if they were making this game more with the overseas public in mind.

The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive wasn't exactly selling like hotcakes in Japan but was doing pretty well in the west. Konami seemed to have jumped on board with the Genesis in 1993... right around the same time the PC-Engine started to lose steam in Japan - starting with Rocket Knight Adventures. I'm guessing ever since RKA, Konami had planned to make a Genesis Castlevania game made for the west, and when they eventually got around to it, we got Bloodlines.

Also, aside from the first couple of Castlevania games - they don't really sell well in Japan. I'd have to dig to find the raw sales data, but it seems like Simon's Quest kind of killed the franchise in Japan (The Famicom Disk System version of Simon's Quest has loading times that make Sonic 06 jealous, for what it's worth). For all intents and purposes - Castlevania is a franchise aimed at the west through and through.