Draft:Meta:Shiren 6 Development

Development of / Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island.

Development

Development of a new Shiren game was proposed sometime before 2021, however, it was only started following the December 2020 release of Shiren 5 thanks to the unexpected good sales and public reception of the Nintendo Switch version. That same December 2020 release of Shiren 5 included a new message by Shin'ichiro Tomie explaining that he would like to work on a new Shiren game, and asking fans to make their voices heard if they want one.

The game was announced in the Nintendo Direct on September 14, 2023, only in the Japanese version. It was released by Spike Chunsoft in Japan on January 25, 2024. The game is known to have official English and Traditional Chinese translations.

For the development of this game, Seiichiro Nagahata is in charge of the game balance, Shinichiro Tomie of writing the scenario, and Kaoru Hasegawa of the character designs. Hideyuki Shinozaki also worked on the game.

Instead of expanding upon the mechanics of Shiren 5, for this game the developers decided to take a look back at the earlier entries in the series to develop a more traditional Shiren game.

On December 11, 2024, Hideyuki Shinozaki revealed in an interview that during development they were considering an additional multiplayer feature for Shiren 6 besides Rescues and Parallel Play, one that plays similarly to Tetris 99 and Super Mario Bros. 35. This feature may be the scrapped Dream Pillow, found in the game's files.

The game was made with the Unity engine.