Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap devs on working with Switch, no DLC / 3DS plans, more
Lizardcube and DotEmu held a joint Reddit AMA session today. Representatives of both companies touched on various topics, including developing for Switch, DLC, 3DS, and more.
We’ve collected the noteworthy comments from the Reddit AMA below. You can read the full thing here.
Lizardcube on working with 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.
… Porting was fairly easy. At the very second we got our Switch devkit we focused on it and after 3-4 weeks we had a decent version functional. Of course, we had prepared for it quite way in advance.
Lizardcube on potential DLC…
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.
… It isn’t really a game that was developed with DLC in mind, because of how it was holistically designed for the 6 playable characters that the game has. However there is a small chance that we could introduce extra bonus sections if we have time, but for now we are focusing on finishing the Steam release!
Lizardcube on potentially remaking Wonder Boy in Monster World…
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!
Lizardcube on the official soundtrack…
We are working on sorting out of licensing rights to be able to release an OST. Because Music has specific licensing requirements it didn’t come automatically with our initial deal.
Michael is also working on finishing the “proper” soundtrack, with tracks endings, etc.
DotEmu on the retro feature…
The retro feature was not planned at the beginning of the development and was added later on. We thought that it was really amazing to be able to switch from the original to the new version, so we add to put it in the game.
DotEmu on the game’s reception…
The reception for The Dragon’s Trap is amazing and huge! There is so much love for the game, it really is crazy. That makes us want to work harder to bring you guys other games just like this one.
Lizardcube and DotEmu on sales percentages / ratios for the different platforms…
… we do not have the sales numbers yet, but we know that the Switch version was really well received.
The game has been out for less that a week and we don’t have the numbers yet, but it seams that the Switch version is doing well.
Lizardcube on mixing the 8-bit and HD graphics…
It would be possible and in fact our development versions included that sorts of options to help us compare the versions. However it came with a lot of small issues, incorrect layering etc. and wasn’t really fit to usage. Maybe if we have enough time (after the Steam version is done!) we could look into fixing and expose it as an options. Don’t quote me on that 🙂
Lizardcube on a potential 3DS port…
Unfortunately the 3DS screen resolution (320×400) 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.
