Nintendo has once again shared a bit on how their sauce is made, this time for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
As reported by IGN, Senior Director Takuhiro Dohta, Sound Programmer Junya Osada, and Physics Programmer Takahiro Takayama were on hand in the latest GDC, to present how they made the game, and in particular, three very impressive ‘physics engines’ hiding just beneath the player’s attention.
One, the idea of multiplicative gameplay carried over from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to this title. This was the idea of bringing actions and objects together, to create an endless amount of possibilities.
And so, the simpler ideas of freezing or using magnets in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was brought to the next level with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultra Hand.
As Takayama said, they weren’t sure they were even going to pull it off. He said:
“When I first saw the prototype, I was excited that this was going to be a great game, but this was going to be very, very difficult. I said to myself, ‘Are we really doing this?'”
Eventually, Nintendo came to the conclusion that everything would have to work with physics, and they needed to assign some quality or ability to everything. In this way, Nintendo met their goal to make a world that runs on multiple physics engines, where all the interactions were built without any assigned use for it. In this way, the players would have to come up to solutions themselves. It seems that people playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom may have been surprising Nintendo themselves.
Now as we know, Ultrahand does more than stick items to each other. You can build vehicles of different sizes and types in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Nintendo had to build a different ‘physics engine’ of sorts for that too. What may surprise you is that building known vehicles, like wagons, required the programmers to work closely with the artists. This was to make sure that those vehicles were completely recognizable after they were built.
So, think about that. Even if you didn’t know what you were doing, the wagon you built had to look like a wagon. Nintendo’s staff did the behind the scenes work to make sure that happened.
And, as insane as it sounds, Nintendo built an audio ‘engine’ for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Why would you even need that? And yet, Nintendo made something that players would not read as various audio cues. Instead, they felt like natural sounds, that we would put together in our heads to resemble something.
For example, there are no dedicated sounds for what a wagon or a paddle boat sounds like. Instead, Nintendo made sounds for things that roll on the ground, or things that rotate in the water. In the context of being in a boat or on a wagon, the player would recognize these as the sounds vehicles made, but they could also recognize them as something else in a different context.
Nintendo went further than that on this audio ‘engine’. Their 3D map of Hyrule had voxels mapped out across each inch. These are not Minecraft like voxels, but voxels that store information in a 3D grid instead. The voxels define information on each terrain, such as if its indoor or outdoor, near a forest, if Ascend can be used on it, etc. Nintendo then made a search algorithm so that the game could use the proper sound for each situation as the player approaches that part of the map.
This is all heavily involved work, that only a big studio with the experience to refine their systems, and the money to keep iterating, like Nintendo could do. It truly is easy to underappreciate the complexities hiding in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
