the cutting room mirror

Development Insights

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This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Spyro: Year of the Dragon.

Since the game released, developers of the game have recalled other tidbits about the game's development and initial conception.

  • In the 2017 Insomniac Live livestream of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, the developers recalled a variety of interesting facts about the game.
    • Levels were initially designed on graph paper. The designers tried to fit the levels onto two pages of paper, as beyond this point the console would start to run out of memory.
    • The first level Brian Allgeier worked on was "the Danda level" - a level with Pandas and things that rhymed with "Dan" (after Dan Johnson). This appears to have been the first level which was designed for the game, and indeed the first few Moby classes all correspond to Mobys that were used in Bamboo Terrace.
    • Brian recalls that his second level was Cloud Spires. Cloud Spires is also one of the first levels to appear on the internal list of Moneybags gem values, which corroborates this. It doesn't appear to have been the second level designed overall for the game however, as there were a few other designers also working on their own levels prior to this one.
    • They recalled that the lip syncing was done using an external tool where the user would specify when the character's mouth should be open and when it should be shut, "like a Muppet mouth". John Fiorito recalls that he got "stuck doing the Italian lip syncing".
  • In 2018, former Cerny Games designer and producer Michael John recalled his experience with playtesters who were testing the Spyro games in a Twitter thread. It's not clear which Spyro game he's referring to, but it reveals that the reason Spyro 3 had a minigame where the player chases down Moneybags and gets back their cash is due to how hated the character was by the testers - not because of his design, but purely because he took gems from the player. It's also revealed that they gave playtesters questionnaires when developing the game, to determine what worked and what didn't.