(Not so) Secret things about Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild’s development
So last year, between august 30th and September 1st Yokohama, Japan, held the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference or CEDEC.
The information gathered here has been talked about before but I wanted to analyze it, and thanks to Matt Walker, a Production manager at Capcom who translated a lot of the exposition done at the conference, through articles in 4games, Esuteru and IGN Japan, I can talk about the development of an amazing game, even one of the best games I’ve ever played, Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild!
The beginning of the presentation was about fun in the game, one could argue that is something obvious in a game, but there are a lot of details needed to have in mind when thinking about how players will find fun in your game, and in BOTW that is no exception, changes were made constantly during the game’s development, and the big question was always, “How to make this game more enjoyable to players”
In the picture below are two maps, where you can see marked the diference in paths players would make, when playing first time through. In the left map, we can see players were making fairly the same journey, as shown by the dark blue lines, everyone was having a similar experience while ignoring smaller trails, and landmarks that strafed from the main roads. After the changes though we have a much more disperse map traversal, with a significant change, not only in the amount of people that go near the edges of the map, but how people travel along the center of it as well, there’s a significant increase in the overall exploration of the terrain,
These changes, made after testing the design of the first map incite players into exploring and traverse the map in different ways depending on what sparks their curiosity, and leads to a better distribution, not only of the exploration players have, but the experience they have while playing.
The problem with the first map was that initially the team though they could place Sheikah towers scattered around the map and place events and game interactions in between the paths that connected them, this wasn’t the case though because players weren’t compelled by that way of exploration, test players said that they felt guided through the game or it felt too linear, (now you see why most players were having a narrow route on a map that spans quite wide)
Weirdly enough this was diving players into two very different experiences, either they would follow the intended path and found a lot of what the team wanted but in a very short time, or they would miss most things because they strafed away from the Sheikah towers and connecting roads trying to explore the world map, their travels were just empty.
This lead to the team creating a solution based on the concept of Gravity, that’s right, placing structures with different visibility and importance in different places, they could attract player’s attention to various areas of the world, and appeal to their curiosity, leading players away from the main path and into their own adventure. This was the spark that lead to the notion of “infinity gameplay” an idea that focuses on having the player travel between various landmarks depending on their curiosity at any given moment, plus the map will change its look depending on the time of day, as light creates changing shadows, and visibility changes from night to day, places like the Sheikah Shrines like you can see in the image below will have pretty low visibility during the day, because they’re small, usually hidden, and you can see much better big natural landmarks, roads on the ground and the Sheikah towers.
During the night however structures that emit light will pop much more in the darkness, the glowing blue and orange veins of the Sheikah shrines become the most noticeable thing on the map, along with stables and enemy camps, because of it’s fires and torches. This interchanging noticeability between structures means that not only will the player be excited to travel to new places but they may even run back and forth between things they might have missed during the day and only realized were there at night, this actually happened a lot to me while playing (and still does sometimes) where I want to climb a mountain and when I reach the top it’s getting dark already, from there I look on the world only to realize there are a bunch of shiny spots on the map for me to explore! and who doesn’t like shiny things?!
This obviously might change depending on how players tend to play a game, but it only means that more people will experience the same game different ways and it will be better tailored to their way of being and interacting, it makes the game more of a personal experience.
players not interested in fighting monsters will gladly avoid their campfires at night and might instead look for stables, and vice versa, this means the way people will interact with the world is tied to the way they perceive the surrounding environment.
Now for the thing I see as the greatest design idea of BOTW, to lead players into that amazing sense of mystery and adventure.
this is a technic of environmental design the developers call “Triangle rule” it is part of the whole gravity idea and it is pretty much what it sounds like, a rule based on using triangles to hide, show and guide players, all at the same time, we can see how the rule is implemented all across the map in the image below
What does this effectively do? The utilization of the triangle offers different options to the player, on how to face the obstacle ahead, you could climb up to it and get a better view of your surroundings, you could go around it keep ing a low level, and both these interactions will produce a different outcome on how you see what’s ahead of you, the triangle can also be used to partially or completely hide an item behind it
These were divided in three different scales, each one with its own purpose when it comes to player’s interaction, and gameplay, if you’ve played the game you certainly can remember which ones they are and how they are used. Out of many I think the most notorious are the small hills or rocks used to hide chests or enemies, (among others), big triangles to hide larger landmarks such as big bridges or ruins, as well as orient player’s movement, and finally Gigantic triangles in the form of mountains, to serve as not only points of interest but reference when traveling around, these are locations you can see almost from everywhere on the map, and are great guiding aids.
The rectangle is also an important shape, even if not as noticeable, mainly used to completely hide other elements on the map or important map locations (but you can also see it as trees hiding enemies in the woods or gathering items for instance).
This kind of layout gives the world a dynamic and fluid feel, that is very organic and real, but thought to give players a greater feeling of discovery and adventure that the legend of Zelda games tend to strive for.
we can see this working in a sequence of pictures used at CEDEC 2017
This environmental construction creates a chain of interest, in this particular case it works like this:
Hill -> Bridge Entrance -> Sheikah Tower,
So we have a triangle hiding a rectangular structure of interest that is hiding another structure behind it. And if you pay close attention left of the Sheikah tower behind the right hill you can partially see an enemy camp, all the rules of this particular design are in play here!
Now that’s all for game design (for now), but what about the tech that got the team there?
As far as tech goes the team as also implemented some new ideas, most noticeably, integration of editing control tools into the game itself, this way no two people would ever see something in the debug log and work on it at the same time, for lack of communication. So a job could be created inside the game and a signal would pop up in the world, clicking the sign would reveal all the technical details as well as a way to contact the dev who put up the task.
A “Field task view” was created, as a window of observation so the team could see and manage tasks of greater importance.
According to the team, this was a great way for devs to share ideas with each other about different tasks. In an interview with IGN japan it was said, about the debugging process, that a member of the team realized how hard it would be to wait until the end of production to begin the working on the debugging, so they tried to implement an action of constant debugging side by side with the regular development. This way the team could block specific errors and tag programmers specifically to make sure these were fixed. Along with this a tool was created that allowed any member of the team to report an error, practically fusing the tools to find and fix bugs creating an in game system called “#ZELDA_ERROR”
Finally I want to tall about the way the game looks, how the UI looks more specifically, the thing most players will have in front of them for the longest time.
The user interface or UI, is the first thing a player sees when they boot up the game, and in this game there was a very important message to give straight away, this is a new Legend of Zelda, this is a new generation of games. So the look of the UI had to be new, reformed, the team had to rethink how a new look would be born, maintaining a very crucial integration between four categories, Graphics, Font, Design, and Animation. following one simple concept, only the necessary should be visible, nothing should stand out in a negative way, and all the information should be concise so players wouldn’t have to look around, and would find everything relevant to them in the same space. Having this in mind we can see it working from the very first screen. Pay attention to how the space is used as soon as you turn the game on.
See how all the information is stored on the right side of the screen and you have this huge open landscape with Link in front of it (triangles again see) what’s beyond link? what is he seeing? just hit play already! these are the things this first screen wants you to feel.
( Side note: the devs even created the color “ZELDA white” which is basically a slightly yellow tinted white, to make sure the UI was clean but not to tiresome to look at. Sweet devs are aware of your eyes.)
Now, there are things that will be different if you have the Original Japanese version or a translated version of the game, in Japan the letter font goes much more in line with the less is more philosophy of the game’s UI, in japan the fonts already existed, they’re “Logo G Black” for Katakana, and “Raguran Punch” for Kanji (Katakana and Kanji are two different ways of writing in Japanese). Now even if the western versions of the game don’t exactly break the rules, they do shy away from them a little and there was a specific font made at least for the Latin alphabet.
(If you’ve played the game you might have also seen the Pro HUD, this is an even cleaner version of the UI Presumably made as a request from Nintendo America or Europe, in an attempt to clean and help with the immersion in the game)
Even the Sheikah Slate was designed along with the artists, specifically so it would have a more decorated design that would separate Sheikah objects as artifacts from an older age than when the game takes place. This is particularly more interesting when you realize that the team only had two UI designers, and they were so overwhelmed with work that they had to work together with programmers to implement small tricks, expanding the exclusive nintendo system “Layout Editor” which is a system to edit the visual composition of the game, this way designers could animate sections of the game and give programmers control over them, the big change BOTW brought to this system was the ability to see various interface images and their animations running at the same time over the main game.
Next, to make the work over the great map easier this was divided into 120 different sections, distinguishing between outdoors and indoors (done through colors) these could be loaded as needed with 4 zoom levels so the map would be easy o analyze with precision, because of this technic 2,344 different areas were created that would be impossible to fully make manually, so the map was procedurally generated (as a Minecraft map would be for instance) and every night textures were generated to each section of the map, so environmental artists would work with them later, this was done using a screen capture technology which allowed artists to add filters and make color adjustments to later harmonize with the UI, after this they’d copy the environment and hide anything that needed hiding using masks, any handmade redesign in the environment was also done here to create a real and dynamic world.
Now making a game of course is no easy task, much less a game with the scale BOTW has, and I find it very impressive to play a game that is so consistently good is so many different aspects, even if you’re accustomed by now to that sweet nintendo polish, but in my opinion, it is always great for us consumers, when we get the opportunity to dive a little into the amazing work and dedication put into the games we play, and learn a bit more about them.
Have different ideas? something that I clearly missed, suggestions? Write them to me, and we’ll be Speaking of Video Games!
To write this post I went around to these cool places on the web:
4gamer - http://www.4gamer.net/games/341/G034168/20170901120/
ESUTERU - http://blog.esuteru.com/archives/20018343.html
IGN JAPAN - http://jp.ign.com/cedec-2017/16963/news/botw
Matt Walker’s page - https://medium.com/@gypsyOtoko
Polygon article on Matt Walker’s translations - https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/3/16412614/legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-development-game-design
