The Art of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

[Music] hi and welcome to the art of Wonder Boys at dragon trap uh thanks for coming my name is Ben I'm the art director of the game and co-founder fard CU Studio we started in 2015 with Omar the developer be this project I was also the only artist on the game so it's easier to talk about the artistic process behind it as may know this is originally a game from 1989 created by westone and directed bywa Omar and I were Sega kids and we love that game so 25 years later we decided to remaster that L gym in HD boting and drone uh art and animation a RAR range soundtrack made with love musician and on top of that you can swap from the original game at anytime at the Press of a button uh for those who might not know what it's about is a video

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[Music] here you go so there has been many Wonder booy games starting from a young caveman on a skateboard to sloting shifting towards the fantasy action adventure platformer uh this was a big license at the time giving to numerous games on various platform but What mattered to us was uh Wonder Boy 3 is the dragon trap uh also known and as Monster World 2 in Japan Dragon skir for the PC engine and T Monica in Brazil it's consider one of the best game of the platform and also a personal favorite for us so when Omar said to me he wanted to try to do a remake of the game I almost immediately started to draw but how do you start or do you transform Nostalgia into uh some something artistically

relevant uh let's start by talking about inspiration quick note about me I'm a French artist who's been working video games and sorry and animation comics for about 12 years and I've been trained in fine arts and studed animation at Goblin school I'm not specifically a game artist to be honest I don't have the knowledge uh of many talented individuals in GDC but I really wanted to to to reimagine that great game at the best of my abilities uh even if I had to do a lot of interpretation I really triy to nail the original inspiration that were projected into the game at the time so for a start uh AK Toyama uh I think his major inspiration in 80s Japan not only he is definitely one of my favorite artists but I think the developers were even influenced by his style at the time and on top of dragon

uh his work on the fantasy J is absolutely wonderful uh European Comics which is a style people outside of Europe might not be used to but this is a big part of every French kids culture uh it obviously is a huge influence in my work uh the beauty of fosy yosa which I find particularly beautiful and many other I'm trying to show wide range of things I like all of them have in common to live a big place for line art and subtle colors and this why I believe in our style that has never been properly explored in video games and at that point even before starting I knew I wanted to make a beautiful end drone game endcraft 2D video games is beautiful and in my opinion it can give so much life to characters in environments but the amazing things with 2D is that basically the only constraint

is your imagination uh you you get what you see is what you get uh and mainly the thing is we started with a grand total of two people uh Omar who's been doing the programming and I and we couldn't afford other team members so we had to rely on on strength and I'm not a 3D or cut art animation guy uh but I can easily draw an animating traditional animation artistic development this is is something I really like to do uh looking to find the right art style for a particular project in this day and age where there is less and less constraints in terms of visuals it should definitely not be overstated that you need a proper amount of artistic development I'm not saying the visuals are everything in a game but good art will help you not to have your game overlooked and ultimately bring more cells

and first I'd like to pray the beauty of the original game uh it might not look like much for many of you but there are really beautiful choices that were made with with all the constraint of the Master System pet limitation uh the sky for example is rarely blue and this indicates a deliberate taste and work of color theory the style is simple but everything is Rich and vibrant so when I started I really didn't know what shape the project would take so the obvious thing to do was to make mockups for visualizing what I had in mind at first I tried to be very loose uh experimenting far from the actual image and design of the original game uh I tried flat colors uneven ground background actions but as the project took shape I tried to get closer and closer to from of the original

eventually adding effects uh water color style H but limited to the original shapes this was the first image we were really happy with uh an image that will drive the art in the right direction I also like to test out in video form and ended up making a test in after effect just to to see if Parx would work here another markup I did following that direction you can see see a very early version of the UI it's also very important and took many iteration to get right but we won't have time during this presentation at that point I started to implement characters into the background uh one important thing I tried to do was having a sense of unity between characters and background uh this is why the lines are equally sick in the background and in the characters you want to feel that you created a scener not just gameplay assets layered on top of of each

other it is an evolution of the introduction of the game uh which I started by doing a color test and then I didn't details uh in this image I wanted to show all the location you might encounter in the game but it could prove quite distracting so here's the final image and with a final image I Alo tested out animation because I wanted to have that in the game but it was a bit too much work to have proper animation for cutcenes so we decided to scrap it out characters it was time to really focus on characters and the characters were uh kind of tough really because it has been very difficult to pinpoint exactly what they look like like as we've seen the games are all very

different in terms of design and even in the same game things might not be Rock Solid these are the official artworks for example but these are the Sprites you see in game that's not even the same colors for the hero of the air uh what will be considered the right choice and we met with original Creator Nish aasan and I asked him if they had any concept art on the characters on paper it told me that at the time they didn't really do those kind of things mainly because they didn't have the time they drew every pixel art straight away into the game and so the mindset I was in for this project was to to Sublime my childhood to make it look as I saw when I was a kid so I decided that the Master System Sprite were the right uh starting point like with the Mups I started really loose uh at the time we didn't know if we could acquire the official

license and I started to scribble different kind of characters that's when Wonder Girl emerged she eventually found a way into the game as we thought it would be a nice add addition to the game the nurse and shopowner sorry what slowly the first character we were really happy with started to appear some were easier to apprehend and some some to many iteration and on a side note I'd like to say that a good concept doesn't necessarily requires tons of drawing you often see art directors priding thems in having millions of drawing before descending on a specific one but I'd like to say this is not mandatory uh if something good comes at you right away be smart and seiz it if you absolutely convinc it's good I don't know go for it can save uh frustration time and

money I also had to respect the boundaries of the original Sprite for Collision uh but as you can see this is when I started to take some Liberties one of the good thing uh with doing a remake is that you already have the full scope of assets you need uh in this case which kind and how many enemies I had to draw you can say the same about the old the location and even the length of the animations uh I only have two advice uh for character design uh the shapes uh with uh the variety of the shapes gives a rasm to your drawings uh you might want to have a big head and small feet or large body and big ends this is important for adding character and having a good silhouette is also very important and Contra uh on top of the Rhythm you give with

the shapes uh it can also be a huge boost if you vary colors and contrast inside the character so animation is uh something I really like uh actually very important for for me as part of video games uh a good our Direction in my mind should have in mind how the characters will move it can convey more emotions or impact if you play some attention on it and this is my personal references uh I grew up in the 90s and there was a web of beautifully animated GES uh initiated by De Perry in the technique they call dig uh this was the game I loved and it fits to me they were so alive like this one I mean it's beautiful so the pros and cons of traditional Mission uh it obviously is

beautiful uh it's easy to start uh I think what that's what I think you just have to draw succession of drawings instead of a huge setup of rig texturing Etc but you won't have a lot of room for iteration since you would have to redraw your frames every time you make a change and you need a capable team of artists uh and and sometimes it can be tricky to to have uh you can change the character's appearance during the game because you would again have to redraw all the frames and the texture management can be tricky so these are uh the first T Test I did for the animations um is crucial to plan things in advance uh especially with solution Mission and before really starting to make the game

I started experimenting with different design and um software I the first Vision was mainly to try animating in Flash which doesn't quite work for me uh I've been struggling with flash my whole life and the second one was here to refine the technique and also to pass on to Omar to try to implement in in the Prototype I wasn't quite happy with the design and the animation felt a b dull so finally the third version more bouncy better design the technique is almost there another set of Animation tests uh you can see for example that the lion word was not easily readable at first glance uh I decided then to convey Su for gameplay which is one heavy weapon able to crush above and below him so so heavy in fact that he has to drag it behind him and the thing is I love we

kept it but sometimes as far Collision are involved you can see the sword overlapping the background with no no no real sense at all this animation uh is Wonder Boy uh at the beginning of the game this is what I wanted to do uh because at the beginning of the game you're supposed to be at the end of the second uh game one by two and you're all powerful you have the legendary gear and I wanted him to move a bit cocky and sure of himself uh eventually we scraped that because uh again too much work and at some point I wanted to try to have t portals uh but instead of a Magic Door uh I thought it would be funnier to have uh that Dragon Mar in you with pitting you but in town uh now everything this animation doing is just improving the look and

feel of your Movement we didn't change the physics behind it because you can still play the original game but even then just adding Squatch and stretch anticipation or pacing can give a l a world different appr appreciation for controlling your character on screen and in my opinion even if the control stays a bit stiff you now have a better sense of your character and the enemies so here a process video as you can see I started by taking references from the original animation frames uh thanks to the community for that because I grabbed it from internet and first the rough animation uh you can see the word swing is a bit different than in game uh I'll explain later why uh and then after that you have the clean up part where you have to retrace everything you did

and finally color and on top of uh the colors I like to to add a dark gradient which helps anchoring the character to the ground here's an example of constraint I had to deal with uh you can see the sword swing of the original which was quite linear I wanted to add more of an impact and it's implied to have a longer pause at the beginning and a swift slash of the sword but we decided to follow the Collision of the original game you can see the Collision here in green and it was animated at 30 FPS H that's why you can see the word is a little bit late at the beginning compared to the Collision but catches up afterward it's not really perceptible but it eventually drives the work in certain ways

is the way I cheated with to the animation um I added a turn animation particularly for smoothing the transition when switching Direction but how to have a right-handed character suddenly become left-handed the original game did an amazing thing by having another Sprite when you turn uh so your character will always have his word in his right hand but but they add a total of seven frames of Animation per character uh and I have 10 times more so even if I really wanted to to have that feature it was simply an absurd amount of work so here's a trick um I drew the animation as to the shield and the S flow a smooth curve and end up in the same place when facing the opposite direction and with the magic of Animation you don't see nothing in real time Boop

backgrounds uh another challenge because uh due to the technical limitation of the Master System the original game uh could feel quite empty in some areas so I had a lot of interpretation to do is the mummy room for example uh there's basically nothing because technically uh the Master System was considering the boss as the background so they couldn't have anything else and here's what I done with the place uh overlooking the changing Graphics in this kind of areas I added visual storytelling by placing various elements in the background here another example uh the forest outside the village was just trees next to each other repeating for two levels and I experimented very different things before before having something interesting and the main thing that was missing was the gameplay readability

because uh the in this level you have a little Cloud throwing new fireballs and it was not uh really obvious so I stripped down the most I cooled and gave space for the cloud but doing so that same background was becoming quite empty so I added that statue uh it doesn't particularly make sense some players have been asking what it represents and even if I know it's mainly for filling a void uh it is also a World building item it's might be the statue of a Lost Hero a place where Heroes die who knows it gives you something to look at and wonder instead of you know void and here's a game you can see I added a lot of Parx to give perspective it's always I candy and on the Statue please note that we added a slight 3D deformation uh it's not really obvious and we use it

we used it for pillars and big Sprites but it feel more natural that way eventually I tried to spark interest in every screen uh adding details and a bit of narrative and here you're going to see three different levels of the desert area in each of them I try to have some something changing you start at the base of the pyramids and then pass in front of the old Temple and finally end up in sort of a noasis uh always mainly the same assets but rearranged to feel you change scener and here you go when you have every asset separated you start to implement it uh Omar managed to create a splendid engine where I could put everything I needed all of it running in real time on top of the original game

allowing me to know exactly where to put my new asset and eventually making something pretty uh and if you feel like a tinkerer you can access that tool in the steam version of the game uh just have to edit you can find the explanation on the website and here we are uh I feel incredibly great grateful uh being here presenting what started as kind of fun project uh not only we got to work on the dear childhood memory but we managed to do it the way we wanted it and it resonated with players uh I'd like to thank obviously rinwa and his team uh for making that wonderful game the not only is really nice guy uh but he has been only but supportive of her work from the beginning and of course uh all the project behind it uh Omar uh whose love

and passion were the true engine of the project and the team at Lea Cube uh and our publisher. who first believ in us and on a side note I'd like to show you a bonus uh that I've been uh playing with uh some of you might remember the game uh which is called kit Cameleon and this is what I've done with it could be awesome uh but this not a real project because uh really I don't have the time uh for for it at the moment so but anyway it could be cool thank you very much we might have time for a few question uh I'm huge fan of the game uh played

through it all it's it's fantastic fell in love with it when I saw the uh original like uh or the the the initial promotional art um I'm curious what's next for uh what's next for lizard Cube and what's next for Wonderboy are you guys going to do a new version of anything or uh actually uh come talk about it it's not kit Cameleon uh obviously but it's uh it's a big project and I'm very happy to be part of it but it's going to be traditional animation no worries awesome yeah thanks hi um thank you for the presentation amazing artk all the way so uh my question is for the large object that you were describing on the backgrounds uh that had a 3d effect was that a normal map thingy or is that like 3D model uh no it's actually just uh a simple uh cylinder uh that uh Omar um added the

option when I wanted a Sprite to behave like a 3D object is just behaving like a cylinder uh based on the camera uh so there's no normal map no uh modeling uh if you look closely uh it's not very very well made uh but uh it does a trick and if you look at the pillars uh it works better because it's very cylinder okay awesome thank you you're welcome here we go another question thank you very much