News a large repository of development materials from WayForward has been recovered, and is gradually being released. (Shantae, Ducktales, Barbie.)

[Krvavi Abadas]

amusingly, it appears it was built off Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus. as there's several filenames referring to it. (BarbieTool.exe , Barbie_22032004.ghx2)
the Leapster game is specifically based off "The Batman" animated series, and is mainly notable for being on such an obscure system.

Apparently the prototype WayForward made to pitch a handheld version of Crash Landed is also part of this?

yeah, there's a few active fundraisers going on for parts of the lot. but i'm mainly focusing on things that have been publicly shared.

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

there it is @CyberWolfBia
for those wondering why the Mario Kart 64 title theme is randomly playing in the background, it’s a stock track included in the Nintendo DS SDK

there’s two other smaller titles that have been dumped over the past few days as well, the unreleased (and rather bizarre) Photography game “Hannah Montana: Pop Star Exclusive”


and some sort of Barbie tech demo for the Wii, which is in the .rpf format used by dev kits.

---

as for the Wayforward situation, I’m having some issues getting the full details due to not knowing the lot owner and the people buying stuff from the lot.
but the gist seems to be that the staffers there sent a polite letter to Hidden Palace around March 6th-7th, requesting that direct links (documentation of the data was okay though) to the files be removed. and as such it’s likely the releases are going to slow down for a while.
a good chunk of the items were already mirrored and it seems likely HP was solely targeted just for compiling everything (I believe their main concern was the Source Code, as the person that posted the Crash Landed demo initially stated that the source wasn’t going to be released before backtracking.) into one place.

it’s not a complete loss, though. as Matt Bozon would later go on to provide context for the 3D Shantae tech demo in a recent interview.

Shantae Advance is the only canceled Shantae game. That said, WayForward has made a lot of internal tech demos over the years, and for a long time it was pretty common to grab Shantae assets, or use her as a test character by whoever was making the tech demo.

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

with source code, as usual. that’s where the early logo came from.
notably it’s an extremely basic port, with no accommodations made to fit a single screen (what would normally be shown on the top and bottom screens of the 3DS are instead displayed simultaneously.)
while there was one released DS to Wii port that inexplicably used a similar setup, it’s more likely the build was just made to test using the “EngineBlack” toolkit across multiple platforms.

another notable find is full source code for the notoriously poorly received DS chat application “Ping Pals”. which was originally developed under the working title of “Chit Chat”.

rounding things out is more prototypes and source code repositories for various smaller licensed games. one based off the live-action series “Unfabulous”, and an “American Dragon: Jake Long” game made for both the DS and GBA.