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Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap devs talk lack of 3DS version, ease of Switch port, sales, future games & more

by rawmeatcowboy
24 April 2017
GN Version 5.0

The following information comes from a Reddit AMA with various people involved with Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap.

On not including female monster transformations for Wonder Girl...

When considering making the Wonder Girl character, I really wanted to add those transformations. But due to the constraint of production, we thought it would be best to focus on other areas instead. That would have meant redoing 1000 drawings at least.

On bringing the game to Switch...

Working on the Switch was very easy for us. The hardware and SDK are slick and modern. Of course, with the experience of coding games for 15+ years I had prepared for this in advance, way before we even had hope to get access to a devkit.

On DLC possibilities...

The game wasn't really designed for DLC. It would depends if we have an idea that is worthy of it. Most probably the smaller improvements would go in a normal patch.

Interest in other remakes....

Question comes often.. for me maybe Psycho Fox.. Kid Chameleon.. Toe Jam and Earl, Aztec Adventure.. Maybe a Shinobi game?

And even though it will never happen, I personally would love to remake the very first Legend of Zelda and make sure that the remake conserves and supports the feel of mystery and discovery that it had, without holding the player’s hand or telling them where "secrets" are and where to go (note: I haven’t played Breath of the Wild yet). I’d also love to remake Castlevania, because I think there’s something to be done with the great feeling of the whip by adding more frames and getting the timing just right, I think we could do something extremely satisfying there.

Desire to make a new Wonder Boy...

Also, it goes without saying that making a new, entirely original Wonder Boy would be great (I think I speak for the whole team here).

Art book and CD soundtrack releases under consideration...

We are still working on figuring out what would be the best direction in term of goodies. Creating new artworks would be amazing but they also take a lot of time to make, so we don't know yet. Maybe it would make sense to package all those things together, etc. For the soundtrack we are still sorting out the rights to be able to release it. ...Unfortunately for the OST, there is some legal issues preventing us to sale it.

On the charm stones change...

the team felt that the charm stone system was indeed a bit outdated (and anyway different in the GG version), and required too much grinding. After originally removing them, I felt that as a player I would personally miss them had they not been present in this version. After long discussions, we came to the conclusion that they would be a good reward to these tough challenges we added, and that we could still use their overwhelming "charm" for that new sword we added.

On the chances of a Wonder Boy in Monster World remake...

Right now maybe we'd need to step back a little from the franchise and see how the reception to Dragon's Trap evolve, in particular in younger players or people who don't know the original enjoy it. Maybe we also need to sit down and play many old and new games and from then evaluate where to go, that is even assuming we end up remaking more old games. We honestly don't know yet!

How the remake started...

It started like a fan project, we did a prototype with Omar during our spare time. At that point we showed it to the original creator who was thrilled about it and also we found our publisher Dotemu. Dotemu are specialized in doing these kind of things, and they've managed to entangled the rights (which were quite a mess) between the original creator and Sega

On the tech behind the game...

I'd love to get into the tech in more details but it would be too long here. However, we should be working on making detailed tech blog post fairly soon. A lot of the code is custom but what's most interesting imho in how we ended rewriting the game from stratch and went from a different approach in the second iteration. The tech behind it is now rather uniquely hybrid - the way how we are bridging the old and the new. Hopefully will write it soon!

I tend to forget how this game is actually a half-custom engine, half-emulator monstrosity. Thank you both for your answer! I'm eager to read this blog post since I'm a "rewrite everything from scratch" kind of guy too. And I'm looking forward to have Z80 code run on my Switch (gotta finish exams first, then internship, then Zelda, then...) :D

Salut! I can't talk too much about the engine itself - when I joined the team, there was already a good chunk of code that Omar had either developed or integrated. One important part not reflected in your question but key to this game is the emulation of the original game that we "augmented" through some custom hooks and hacks, etc. We patched existing Z80 code to extend the original, either with new Z80 code (!) or C++ - the result is a scary monster, but it works well! We'll probably post a blog entry detailing some of this in the near future.

On sales so far...

we do not have the sales numbers yet, but we know that the Switch version was really well received.

On not coming to 3DS...

Unfortunately the 3DS screen resolution (320x400) wouldn't be a great fit to the game art style. Also the hand animated characters are really heavy in term of texturing and I don't know how well that would work for the 3DS.

On changes outside of the visuals...

We upped the framerate from 30 FPS to 60 FPS and makes various improvements so as the rules for mouse gripping wall, taking corners. We did probably 100+ changes but the vast majority should be extremely minor and unnoticeable to the casual player, so I am surprised to say "the controls feel different from the original".

Also note how adding animations over the existing physics that had lots of momentum (for e.g. character turning) can make things "feels" different. When you compare with the retro version which doesn't have the extra animation but has the momentum.

On creating more games for Switch...

We don't know yet! We are still kept busy by the aftermath of releasing the game and finishing the Steam version. Personally I think it would be great to do something tailored for the Switch, maybe taking advantage of the Joy-Cons better, or doing a local multiplayer game :)

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