How soon after the original Shantae did the GBA game go into production?
Matt: Some of the earliest design work began as early as November 2000, when we had our earliest dev kits and prototype hardware. Shantae for GBC was still in production at that time. So while me, Erin and Jimmy were busy wrapping up Shantae 1, Mike Stragey started to lay the groundwork for the new GBA tech.
What were the things you were hoping to achieve with the more powerful hardware?
I had a laundry list of features for the next generation of our handheld department, and those were all based on was the game intended to prototype all of these features. The way we took these early steps was to finish on GBC at the same time as we were building , which was a proving ground for the GBA game’s core features. Those features were then brought back into the GBA game demo, which would go out to publishers. In this way, we were hoping to have a nice feature loop that would carry multiple years of WayForward GBA games!
