Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap dev talks approaching the remake, what ideas were considered

A portion of a Siliconera interview with Lizardcube’s lead programmer, Omar Cornut...

S: How did you want to remake it? What things did you want to change about it, and why?

OC: The starting point was to make something faithful that felt like the original. We always gave ourselves the option to change things about the game, but we wanted those changes to be done “consciously”, and never accidentally. Games at the time were programmed with different techniques and different limitations than those of today. In turn, those techniques and limitations had a strong influence on game designers.

The same way, modern tools such as Unity have a very strong influence on game designers today. And I say “game designers” and not “game design” here, because you can do anything with Unity. But it is shaping the mind of game creators in a certain way, which affects the end product. So, old games had very slow CPU, very little memory, and that has very direct influence on how monsters behave, how the game controls, and how physics is simulated. It’s hard to replicate those details without looking at the old code with a magnifying glass. And, on top of that, that we wanted to add the hand-drawn graphics and the acoustic music. Something that felt like an animated comic book in Ben’s style.

Read more at http://www.siliconera.com/2017/04/24/wonder-boy-dragons-trap-developer-talks-connection-feel-original-developers/#VMZJBQcTqbPL0XVA.99