Enjoy a bit of fresh insight into how Nintendo built Breath of the Wild

Today on Twitter, Capcom's Matt Walker translated some of the intriguing takeaways from a recent talk given by Breath of the Wild director Fujibayashi Hideyuro & senior lead artist Makoto Yonezu.

Alex Wawro, Contributor

October 3, 2017

1 Min Read

About a month ago Nintendo devs speaking at CEDEC (Japan's big game developer conference) opened up about how, exactly, they designed Switch launch hit The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Developers capable of reading Japanese can read about those talks on Japanese-language sites like 4Gamer, and now some of the takeaways are available in English thanks to the translation efforts of Capcom's Matt Walker.

Today, in a series of Twitter posts that were later formatted into a PDF by a third party, Walker translated some of the most intriguing parts of a talk given by Breath of the Wild director Fujibayashi Hideyuro and senior lead artist Makoto Yonezu.

For example, the Breath of the Wild devs reportedly integrated their task management system into the game world itself, so that devs could literally plop down a sign in-game that would lay out a task to be completed and any relevant details/meetings.

There's also a lot of trivia about Breath of the Wild's level design, including mention of a "Triangle Rule" whereby devs would rely on triangle-shaped objects in the world (mountains, buildings, etc) to both create opportunities for surprise ("what's behind this rocky outcropping?") and player choice ("do I go left, right, or over this mountain?")

Together, these bits and bobs of Nintendo knowledge-sharing shed a bit more light on how the team behind one of the most successful Zelda games in recent memory thought and worked.