Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap devs on updating visuals/music, tweaking the game for today's players

A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with Lizardcube devs Omar Cornut and Ben Fiquet ...

NL: Wonder Boy on the Master System uses a lot of blank backgrounds during certain events, such as boss fights, which you've filled in. Did you have fun fleshing out the backgrounds from your imaginations?

Fiquet: Yeah of course, it's one of those games that even if there is something, there is a lot of things that were left blank due to limitations. So I had to fill these blanks by adding a lot of details and colours. Nishizawa-san, the original creator, was really thrilled from what we showed him since the very beginning . He did not want to compromise our vision and didn't offer a lot of inputs art-wise. We were showing him our progress every chance we got and he has given nothing but praise.

Cornut: What I love with those old games is how carelessly surreal they were. You open a door in the sky and end up in the desert. We had to embrace this playfully and I believe Ben did an excellent job there. We had some rooms that are completely surreal. It is a testament to an era where designers didn't consider adding scaffolding under floating platforms.

NL: The music and sound effects in the game have also been brought up to date. What was the process for giving this a connection with the original Master System sound?

Cornut: It was tougher than expected! Michael Geyre who made the new arrangements is an enormous fan of the original and knew everything about the tracks. But when we went and started replacing the 4 channels with real instruments it just didn't sound right. So he went and for nearly two years worked on finding ways to expand the tracks while keeping them faithful to the original.

NL: What steps have been made to make the game more accessible to today's players?

Cornut: We tweaked the difficulty and added various hints. There's no handholding tutorial but when the game notices that you are stuck in a situation you may get a hint if you visit the pig in the village. We added item descriptions which themselves are hints, and inventory is easier to use and access. We improved the controls - for instance, Mouse-Man is more pleasant to play with than in the original. We ran the game through many playtesters and found out those additions and the sense of exploration still worked great.