Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap remake being revealed soon

[parallaxscroll]

http://i.imgur.com/Udwszy3.jpg

http://www.thedragonstrap.com/

BTW, just in case anyone was wondering, this has nothing to do with that other new game, Monster Boy.



DotEmu and Lizard Cube have launched a countdown website for Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. Two days from now, a game related in some way to Wonder Boy III will be announced. At the moment, all visitors can do is see a new promotional image, see how much longer until the announcement is made, and submit an email address to be notified when new information is available.

http://www.siliconera.com/2016/05/31/wonder-boy-dragons-trap-countdown-website-opened/

[Tanooki]

I'm very very split on dotemu. I hate them, and I don't hate them. They do so much wrong on certain levels on some of the stuff they get their hands into, but then they do these screw ball turns of events on those very projects, or they do something potentially cool like this and I'm torn.

It's popular to hotly dump on them in NeoGeo circles because of their god awful stand alone releases of various straight ported arcade titles on steam or the stand alones with humble bundle. They're old emulators they licensed older versions of so they have problems much like ATGames (just not as extreme by any means) with audio and visuals, and then they don't even get the legit roms from SNK they jack them from other crooks who warez the boards. Yet that crap is with SNK's blessing, and that same blessing you can buy a legit SNK board set for as low as under a dollar a pop with some humble sale...games that can cost $30 or $300 and that's a plus because you can have legit ownership of some great stuff and throw it into an emulator that doesn't suck balls or if you have the tools, repair a hosed board. Then they do solid ios/android releases/conversions of such games and they cherry pick the most loved like Metal Slug's and Blazing Star (plus June 30 Neo Turf Masters arrives.)

I hope they take the care they do with their mobile gems, or even their mobile gem conversions and not the crap road their PC stuff gets whether it's theirs, SNKs, or those bad DS ports of FF3/4, and they do this one right.

[parallaxscroll]

I really don't know much about dotemu to be honest.

There is more information on the project here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=50899


This is the placeholder post, we will add art / shots here.

WHAT

In The Dragon’s Trap, the player, Hu-Man, gets cursed by a dragon and transformed into a fire breathing lizard character. The game follow our character freely wandering in monster land, looking for treasures and dragons. With each dragon defeated the character gets transformed into a new animal. Each of them comes with different abilities allowing the player to explore more of the world. Lizard-Man breath fire, Mouse-Man walk on walks, Piranha-Man can swim, Lion-Man can break certain blocks, Hawk-Man can fly, etc.

The game combine elements of exploration, adventure and action similar to the old Zelda games. Think swords, arrows, boomerangs. Think shield that plays a *tching* sound and pushes you five pixels behind when you receive an arrow. Think undocumented secret rooms. The game is “open-worldey” and put an emphasis on open exploration. It plays as a side-scrolling game. The music will be beautiful.

WAIT…. I KNOW THIS GAME, WHAT?

Ok ok. Some have heard of this game. It was created by a Japanese company called Westone and released in 1989 on the Sega Master System.

What are we doing then? This is a great game and we love it. While Nintendo have iterated (and milked) Zelda and Mario series to the max, some of the old high-quality Sega licenses completely went off the radar. We would like to make an gorgeous modern version of it. Hand drawn, hand animated, 60 fps, full hd, recording instruments and improving the game however we can. The original is quite “raw” and hard to gets your hands on as new player, we want to address that. It also involve securing licensing from old Japanese companies. Hey, no sweat.

Here’s the catch: the way I would like to do it. I want this remake to be very accurate in term of controls and gameplay mechanism. I don’t want to mess it up. I don’t want a pixel to be misplaced or physics or collision to be accidentally inaccurate. Think of Mario: it isn’t too hard to make a game that may look or feel like Mario from a distance, but it’s quite hard to make a game as polished, deep and with all the details of Super Mario World. And very few people are doing so! And The Dragon’s Trap has lots of subtleties in its use of equipments, physics, item drop, attack/defense/charm stats. So while I want to make changes to the game, I want to make them from a position or understanding exactly how it works and making informed changes. Rather than just trying to replicate it by guesswork and losing a lot in translation.
That process will also help me understand how some old games were designed. Plus, it's more fun and interesting the hard way.

HOW

So I am first going to reverse engineer the original assembled/compiled game code and its data, try to figure out how it works and how I can create an enhanced version of it. I will document some of this process, some of it has been done already because I spent quite some time tinkering with the game. Feel free to ask questions. Onward we will see how this can be turned into a real game and work with Ben to make something beautiful.

So probably blog will start off very technical and when the project takes off it will become very visual Smiley
I have been dabbling with this on my spare time for a while now, so trying to catch up with some of what I’ve been doing. We have progressed with Ben and already at the state where we are discussing with a small french company interested in retro games who would help us making this game a reality.

WHO

I'm Omar. I'll be doing the reverse-engineering, hacking, programming. Past games I've worked on include Soul Bubbles (NDS), PixelJunk Shooter series (Q-Games), Tearaway, Dreams (Media Molecule). Recently working on a free software library called ImGui to help game developers create tools. Been following TigSource as a reader and now finally I am free to post about a project while it is happening. Yeah! Web: http://www.miracleworld.net, Twitter: @ocornut

Ben is amazing artist and animator. He'll be doing the art and.. animation. See his stuff at http://www.benfiquet.com and twitter: @BenFiquet

Edit:

There's also this post from the site admin on smspower.org http://www.smspower.org/forums/16099-OfficialModernRemakeOfWonderBoyTheDragonsTrap

[parallaxscroll]

Trailer is up.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibKf66tVoFw


http://www.thedragonstrap.com/pictures/WonderBoyTheDragonsTrap-03.jpg

http://www.thedragonstrap.com/pictures/WonderBoyTheDragonsTrap-04.jpg

http://www.thedragonstrap.com/pictures/WonderBoyTheDragonsTrap-05.jpg

http://www.thedragonstrap.com/pictures/WonderBoyTheDragonsTrap-06.jpg

[parallaxscroll]

http://www.sega-16.com/2016/06/teasers-wonder-boy-the-dragons-trap/


Sega’s Wonder Boy series was undoubtedly one of its best and brightest franchises during the 8 and 16-bit eras, with multiple entries released on the Master System, Genesis, and Game Gear. Sadly, the series never made the jump into the next generation, and Sega’s 2007 Monster World Collection on Playstation 2 in Japan as part of its Sega Ages line was the first commercial release since Monster World IV debuted on the Genesis 13 years earlier. Fans would see digital-only versions of individual Monster World games on consoles over the next few years, but no word ever came of a new installment. It seemed like Wonder Boy was to remain a thing of the past.

Thankfully, that would not be the case. The drought finally came to an end in 2015, when Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was announced. A true sequel in everything but the name (which Sega owns), it promises to keep Westone’s wonderful adventure/platformer/RPG series alive and well. Fans were elated, and all was good.

As positive as things may seem to be going with a new sequel, the gaming gods seem to have taken favor with Wonder Boy, as it was recently announced that DotEmu (publisher)and Lizardcube (developer) would be doing a fully modern remake of the Master System classic Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap for release on PC and consoles. The project is headed by Omar Cornut, who worked on Tearaway, Pixeljunk Shooter, Soul Bubbles, and created the SMS emulator Meka. It also features some gorgeous artwork and animation by French artist Ben Fiquet.

Arguably the best in the original trilogy and one of the greatest games of the 8-bit era, The Dragon’s Trap is getting a complete HD overhaul, reportedly using a heavily-enhanced version emulator that seems to go far beyond a mere 1:1 remake of the original game. Increased frames of animation, additional layers of parallax scrolling, and animated cut scenes are some of the enhancements Lizardcube is working on. Cornut has disassembled and reverse-engineered the original game code to ensure that the remake remains as faithful to the original as possible. It looks like this version is well on its way to striking a balance between the bells and whistles of modern technology and the look and feel of the original game.

One question is how Sega fits into its release. It owns the Wonder Boy name (hence Adventure Island on NES and SNES), and apparently DotEmu and Lizardcube were able to secure permission to use it. It will be interesting to learn what it took for Sega to give its blessing. In addition to the name, the team has the right pedigree for the project, as both Westone founder Ryuichi Nishizawa and Shinji Fujiwara (LAT) are involved. Cornut considers Dragon’s Trap to be his passion project, so it’s not surprising that he’s gone to such lengths for this remake.This looks to be far above any mere fan release and has all the trappings of a triple AAA title. Here’s a short list of features:

* A huge interconnected world!
* 6 playable forms for our shape-shifting hero, with different abilities!
* Dragons of all kinds! A Zombie Dragon! A Mummy Dragon! A Samurai Dragon!
* An eye-patch wearing shop-keeper pig who may or may not provide a sense of warmth and direction!
* Beautiful, hand-drawn animated graphics!
*A memorable soundtrack, based on Shinichi Sakamoto’s originals, re-imagined and recorded with classical instruments!
* …and more to be announced!

We will be anxiously awaiting this remake and will be covering it every step until its release.

[Nebagram]

Sold.

[kupomogli]

Hope there's a physical copy. Otherwise I'm not getting it.

[parallaxscroll]

I doubt there'd be a physical copy. Of course I want one, but a remake of a game from my childhood, not gonna pass it up.

[Tanooki]

Best you can hope for is GOG and make your own physical copy most likely.

[Damaramu]

Damn, this remake looks so good. Seems the dev team really loves this series to put this much care into the artwork and whatnot. Really looking forward to this when it's released! \\^_^/