Trivia / Freedom Planet

• Cut Song: Aside from several early demos, the official soundtrack also has some material that went unused. Relic Maze has a third variation, a theme for a stage that never made it into production called Rage Ravine, Trap Hideout had second act music (the composer has expressed regret this one didn't make the cut), a theme for Zao's Airship, and a somber, slower version of the main theme.
• Descended Creator: Sabrina DiDuro, the head of GalaxyTrail, provides the voice of the Bird Soldier ("Quack").
• Dummied Out:
  • There was a cutscene early in the game where Carol and Milla would be clearly established as Vitriolic Best Friends. The scene was cut, yet Lilac would still comment on it halfway through the game with the line "You both like something? Is this the end of the world?" As of Update 1.20.6, Lilac's line is also Dummied Out.
  • The scene where Carol and Lilac talk about her dragon ancestry to Torque was cut, as Strife felt it took away from the impact of the Pangu Lagoon cutscene and made less sense for her to be surprised about something she would've already suspected.
  • When the girls are at the treehouse, there would've been a discussion about the characters' families with Lilac appreciating her friends, Carol mentioning that she and her sister haven't talked in a while, and Milla wanting to find her parents.
  • There's also several lines that put together show there would've been some quick cutscenes between stages, most notably Brevon would've made an Ironic Echo to Lilac putting her friends in danger as he infects Milla. Sabrina stated in a livestream where she played the game for its nine year anniversary that these lines were cut due to time constraints.
  • Another scene, likely taking place after the cut Rage Ravine level, would have played on pirated versions of the game, where Lilac and Carol talk directly to the player in question. Surprisingly, they would have been okay with the player pirating the game, with Lilac outright saying they'd let the player keep playing the full game and only bother them about it this one time for that save file. They would still politely ask the player to donate to Galaxy Trail nonetheless, though.
• Fake American: Milla's voice actress, Aimee Smith, is Australian.
• Orphaned Reference: In the original version of the game's script, Carol and Milla didn't get along, and later Lilac commended them for agreeing on something for once. While the relationship has been revised to be more cordial, Lilac's comment remained in the game, making no sense at all. A later patch removed this line as well.
• Throw It In!: By Word of God, the name of the series was a result of this. When pressed for what to call the game they'd nearly finished, Strife said whatever two words came out of her mouth next would be the name they stuck with. The protagonists are fighting against a conquering alien, "freedom", and for the sake of their home, "planet", thus, Freedom Planet. The similarity to the Sonic OVA's setting of Planet Freedom was unintentional, they simply thought the title sounded catchy.
• Troubled Production: The Torque and Spade campaigns have had numerous issues, such as engine compatibility problems, the developers not feeling the characters gelled very well with the pre-established levels, among other issues. It has since been confirmed that these campaigns have been cancelled since 2017 and that there are no plans to resume or restart work on them. GalaxyTrail even has a dedicated rule on their official Discord server advising users to refrain from asking about it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • This was meant to be a Sonic the Hedgehog fan game, hence why the characters and stages have similar characteristics. Even the three main characters were originally Sonic fan characters. The developer changed her mind halfway through and decided to make it an original title that harkened back to a retro style of gaming.
  • ZiyoLing initially created Lilac as a hedgehog, but her design went through several iterations and eventually became a water dragon. This design can be seen in early gameplay footage.
  • A development log of the game from its infancy in 2011 is archived at the SoaH City Forums. Most of the images and development videos are lost or taken down, unfortunately. Some interesting details include:
    • Freedom Planet wasn't that much of a Sonic fan game to begin with. Hedgehog!Lilac and a few mechanics such as the Ring system to rub out aside, it was already meant to have an original cast, a unique setting, and most of Lilac's mechanics were in place. Of course, Strife was nevertheless very concerned about how people would perceive the game in comparison to Sonic.
    • The length of the game was first mentioned to be just 5 stages long. The card collectibles were stated to unlock information about the game's setting, but in the final version, they just unlock artwork and the Sound Test.
    • Very early on, Strife considered making a Super Mode for Lilac that would've granted increased speed and an infinite special gauge, but no invincibility.
    • At first, Strife was hesitant to put much focus on story and dialogue. We ended up with voice-acted cutscenes.
  • Originally, Lilac's treehouse and many similar areas where the cast spends considerable time in cutscenes were intended as hub levels with shops, missions, and NPC dialogue. Strife nixed the idea early on, feeling that it would drastically slow the pace of the game, and featuring them in the story segments was enough time to show off the extra graphical detail without going to waste.
  • There was originally going to be an option to change the colors of the playable characters, but it was Dummied Out for causing graphical glitches. You can still access the feature by fiddling with your save file.
  • There were plans for a comic and web series to tie into the game, but the developers underestimated the costs for it and focused on the game instead.
  • During early character creation, Lilac would've sported a mini-skirt rather than the more traditional garb she wears.
  • Very early idea sketches found on Sonic Retro imply that several characters would've mistaken Lilac for a princess; it's unknown if this implied anything about her dragon ancestors or it was just meant to be a coincidence. In addition, there's a primitive sprite floating around of a male dragon, looking like he could've been Lilac's father.
  • Neera was originally intended to have a much more villainous role in the story compared to her Hero Antagonist role in the final game as an unused cutscene reveals she was originally intended to be the one who stole the Kingdom Stone instead of Spade.
  • Originally, the already Bittersweet Ending of the game would have been worse. If it seems as though Milla was originally going to be Killed Off for Real, that's because it was. Lilac also has a line where she wonders if what Brevon said about his home planet was true, adding just a touch of ambiguity. When Milla was made a playable character with Kickstarter funding, the ending was changed as Strife felt that it would have made it a Downer Ending, with Brevon already escaping. Unused lines even have him laughing about his escape on his ship, showing that he indeed survived.
  • Torque and Spade were planned to be playable characters (there's even a Dummied Out Torque that can be playable with some fiddling with the game files), but Strife has since nixed the idea due to the sheer amount of extra work required that they'd rather go into the sequel.
    • To better elaborate on this; Clickteam Fusion (or as it was known at the time, Multimedia Fusion 2) is, well, a relic as far as game engines go, with arguably outdated systems and editors, and with limited ability to be extended compared to its more modern contemporaries, hence why the sequel went with Unity instead. It's been implied that the two extra characters and their story campaigns would be an overwhelming amount of effort in such an outdated workflow.^note For context, Clickteam Fusion 2 does everything aside from audio/visual assets within the context of its own levels system, with absolutely no inheritance, class or "prefab" system to speak of, meaning adding new features to the core gameplay or adding new characters essentially means duplicating your work across every level in the game, which anyone with programming knowledge would consider to be absolutely insane. The only reason anyone in the Sonic fangaming community ever put up with it is because for the longest time Fusion 2 was literally the only engine with a solid Sonic-style physics framework to speak of, courtesy of Sonic Worlds (which in itself was because Clickteam's engines were widely used in the Sonic fangaming community for two main reasons - 1) their relative ease of use at the time due to its visual programming system, which was one of the first of its kind, and 2) accessible game engines that could be bought by anyone were hard to come by in the 90s/early 2000s, compared to most engines being freeware today. Until Unity and Unreal Engine 4 hit the scene with freeware models, it was no exaggeration to say that the only real competition Clickteam Fusion had was Game Maker and Construct, which both had their own issues back then and weren't nearly as widely used in the Sonic fangaming community). Fusion 3 was supposed to rectify these issues, but it's vaporware and now the newest version of Sonic Worlds, Sonic Worlds Next, has moved over to Godot in order to escape Fusion's limitations and be more easily available to everyone rather than be locked behind needing to pay for a game engine. Strife has floated the idea of porting Torque and Spade's campaigns to the Freedom Planet 2 framework in Unity, as well, though there's been no indication since of whether that will happen.
  • As revealed in this interview, ports for Play Station Vita and Nintendo 3DS were planned but later scrapped, the former because of Sony discontinuing the system, and the latter, which got as far as a prototype, because it didn’t run well on the system.
• Word of God: Strife had officially debunked the interpretation that Lilac's Prehensile Hair is actually a pair of fleshy tendrils, also adding that the blood actually came from the back of her head, not from the hair.

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