Demaking a game can be a challenging thing to do, as to do it well, you need to take many things into account. The main that needs to be thought of is why you would even make a demake in the first place, there are multiple reasons someone would made one, but the main reason would be to challenge themselves creatively. Demaking a game acts as a good challenge, as you will have to take several limitations into consideration, a few of those being the graphics, the mechanics and the overall technological limitations of the intended platform. The audio is a good example of being limited by the platform, as older consoles could not utilise audio like we can today, so they used simpler “chiptune” music, for the much earlier consoles at least. This style of music has become synonymous with this style of game.
Simplifying graphics can be simple enough, all that is required is a speck of creativity and the ability to design a character in a pixel art style, which isn’t too hard as there’s a lot of inspiration out there.
In regards to the audio, it obviously can’t stay the same as it is already, this is because the software used was vastly inferior to what we have nowadays, so the audio had to be made creatively. Sound effects and music were all done in the chiptune style, and all had a specific feeling about them, a feeling that can’t be done by just compressing the original audio.
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I intend to create a demake of The Witcher 3 in the style of Pokemon Blue for the Game Boy. This will be a top down game, featuring pixel art graphics and chiptune sound, all in the style of the Witcher 3. The game will follow a short quest that is given to Geralt by Dandelion in the actual Witcher 3 game, which follows Geralt fetching things for Dandelion’s Cabaret, which can be seen on the research page.
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The Witcher 3 has been nominated for many awards, and has won awards such as the coveted Game of the Year award. The game also scored incredibly high on Metacritic and is a Metacritic “must play”, all of this points to the very large audience of the game, as it has become a favourite of fans all around. The game itself is marketed towards a mature audience, due to graphic scenes featured within the game, though the popularity of the game has reached people much younger than the suggested age, with me being an example of this, playing it for the first time at a younger than suggested age. The audience of The Witcher 3 is a very loyal one, as fans of this game tend to stay fans of it for quite a while, at least from what I’ve seen.
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When the Gameboy was first developed, everything the creators did marketed it towards “9-14 year old boys”, which is a very large and differing group of people. Despite this large age group, the Gameboy has sold 118.69 million copies as of 2020, which shows the insane popularity of the console, being popular among children and adults alike. The people that owned one as children also grew up and usually kept their Gameboy, possibly passing it down to their children, which could show that even people today love the Gameboy, despite its technological limitations.
Finn's Games Design Journal 