Omar (Lizardcube):

Seb (Lizardcube):

It was often a limitation, particularly as we are running a heavy modified version of the original engine in the background. So when we wanted to create the new levels, we were faced various restrictions on how many monsters could be used in a scene, how many color variations can be active simultaneously, how they have to be positioned, etc. Little by little we tried to push and lift some of those limitations. You can’t just make a fireball twice the speed in hard mode, because faster speeds are causing problems to the how collisions are processed. Or another example is that we modified the old engine to run widescreen, which involve redrawing the retro version using our knowledge of the game state, altering the visibility of monsters and objects. Which in turn created conflict issues because there weren’t enough “slot” to make more objects active at the same time, editing and moving level sections to accommodate for larger screens, etc. It was surprisingly hard.If we didn’t have so many limitations with the retro engine, we would probably have added more extra levels and tweaked monsters further. I think that would be the main difference.From my side of things, it definitely felt like a limitation, but at the same time a fun challenge I was happy to face. One of the more frustrating parts which Omar and I went through was probably the door mechanics. As it turns out, when opening a door, the original game “changes” the hero sprite into an animated door, so associating retro animations with new ones quickly became a nightmare as we wanted to show the hero walking towards the door while opening it, meaning both were displayed simultaneously. The change to 60Hz (the original ran at 30Hz) also impacted timings throughout the game. A few weeks before release, the intro, opening sequence, and outro were still displayed at the wrong speed, and changing a timing somewhere meant that it could break other spots in the game, so we had to carefully evaluate each possible change to make sure there was no other impact anywhere else. We almost agreed not to include retro versions for some of these due to time constraints. Decisions such as keeping the village house door visible in the outro without making it disappear (to suggest a hidden location) also meant fixing/updating the retro version palette cycling as the shining stars in the night sky shared colors with the door sprite. These are just examples of pain points we endured during development!