Source http://kotaku.com/ho...made-1686291960
Eiji Aonuma has overseen the development of many of the major Zelda games, from Majora's Mask to Wind Waker to Skyward Sword to A Link Between Worlds. So I figured he probably knows how to make a Zelda dungeon. Last week, I asked him.
He was in Japan. I was in America. But through the magic of conference calls, Skype and a translator, we had a talk about Zelda dungeons in general and, specifically, about The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the game he co-directed for the Nintendo 64 that was released in 2000 and just re-made and re-released for the Nintendo 3DS last week.
We would talk about how Majora's Mask was a bit more of a Zelda for adults.
First, the dungeon stuff:
Kotaku: How do you create a Zelda dungeon? How does that process work? How long does it take?
Eiji Aonuma: Well, the first thing that we ask ourselves when we're designing a new dungeon is what sort of gameplay do we want the player to engage with. And that will help us decide on a kind of theme for that dungeon. For example, are we trying to build a dungeon around puzzle type gameplay, or is action more of a focus? And once we've decided on a theme along those lines, we'll start to think about how a player might use a particular item in that dungeon to interact with the environment. Up until this point all of that is kind of laying out the theory of what kind of dungeon this is going to be and from that point we move on to implementation.
Now, this is sort of like the orthodox version of how to create Zelda dungeons, but I should bring up something that's really important to us now is that we feel it's important to challenge the orthodoxy of the Zelda series as we're creating new games. So while we still need to look for some themes early on, we do want to look at interesting ways to make departures from the rest.
Kotaku: Do you recall vividly at all the creation of the dungeons of Majora's Mask? Are you able to share a story of how long one would have taken? How many people it might have taken to make one of them?
Aonuma: The one that really stands out to me of the dungeons is Woodfall. This was right after the development of Ocarina of Time had finished and we knew we wanted to make a different sort of dungeon. And this is one where I ended up stepping into the role of directing the creation of the dungeon specifically. The person who had been specifically in charge of dungeons up to that point had just changed over. I knew that what I wanted to give it more flavor. I think I was responsible for maybe half of it and I think the new person working on dungeons did the other half in this case.
Kotaku: So it's one person who normally lays it out? The structure I'm used to with Zelda is that there's going to be a set number of dungeons—and I don't know how that works in terms of development. Does each dungeon get made by a different person? And does one person do that dungeon and the artist draws it? I'm curious how it all happens.
Aounma: It depends on the project, I guess is the best way to answer this. In the case ofOcarina of Time I did the original layout for each of the dungeons, but that's really rough to try to do that all on one person. You can approach the schedule in a slightly different way where you have a different person assigned to each dungeon in the planning role, but that's not something you can do when you have a really small team, of course. These days, we have larger teams and all of them come on with the experience of having played previous Zelda games, so it's a little easier to divide that out now.
