Lizardcube’s wonderful remake of Wonder Boy 3, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, is now available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PS4. The developers took some time out of their day to answer questions about the game’s development for all three platforms and they even answered a question we raised ourselves, about the choice to feature Wonder Girl in the game.
They answered an absolute ton of questions here so I’m only going to go through and highlight the most poignant questions. If you want to know more about the game and its development, be sure to read the full AMA.
Someone mentions the lion transformation as the only animation that doesn’t work for the male and female characters, since the lion has a mane. The developers address this by saying:
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 mean redoing 1000 drawings at least.
Was it easier or hard for you to develop the game for the Nintendo 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.
Do you plan on adding extra DLC to the game in the future, or do you want to leave the game as is?
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.
Any chance of creating an artbook or releasing a soundtrack?
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.
So the physical release is up for the game on PS4 on playasia. Any chance we’ll see an Xbox One or Switch physical release too?
We are working with DotEmu on a release for Asian territories (China, Korea, etc.) which is currently PS4 only, and I believe this is what appeared for early pre-order – and to our own surprise – on Play-Asia. We are working on different deals and possibilities in order to make a more widespread release including more platforms. At this point making physical goods is a bit of an uncharted territory for many so we don’t have any ETA but we are hoping we can make a Switch version later, even if it has to be in small quantities.
I know this game started as a fan remake. Did Sega approach you about making this an official remake or vice versa?
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.
Is there any potential for remakes of other Wonder Boy games by your team? Or perhaps a whole new game with the same style?
Thank you 🙂 Right now we’re still busy with post-launch things and finishing the Steam version, so we don’t have an exact vision of what we are doing next. I personally would like to get back to making “new” games but they also make it harder to iterate when our art style is hand-drawn. So if we make a new game we will have to plan it very carefully.
Finally, anything you can share about sales percentages or ratios by platform?
we do not have the sales numbers yet, but we know that the Switch version was really well received.
It sounds like the game has been really well received among Nintendo Switch fans, since most questions in the AMA were about the Switch version rather than the PS4 or the Xbox One version. Granted, the AMA did take place on the r/NintendoSwitch subreddit, but there were a handful of PS4-specific questions asking about themes and the like.
If you haven’t picked up Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap yet on Nintendo Switch, it’s one of those wonderful old school platformers that has tons of secrets hidden in it. Even if you played the original Wonder Boy III on your Sega Master System, the hand-drawn art style that Lizardcube has re-created here is worth the experience again.
Nintendo eShop Card – $20
