You know how many of us spent at least several months of the last year building weird, wacky, and/or impressive things in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Realm? Well, during a panel at GDC, some of the great people working on the game at Nintendo provided a little more insight into how the amazing physics system makes it all possible.
The answer involves Pegasus, just in case you needed a reason to keep reading. But yeah, back on track, all of this happened before the game was released, which according to Nintendo in a lawsuit against the creators of the Yuzu emulator ended up causing the emulator to stop being a thing, having been pirated before it A million times even came out.
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“Multiplication Game”. what is that? Well, that’s Nintendo’s term for the philosophy behind Breath of the Wild and Kingdom Tears, which essentially boils down to letting people play around with actions and objects to create a bunch of interesting possibilities and scenarios. As outlined in this GDC talk (thanks IGN), Ultrahand is an extension of the idea, allowing people to slam multiple objects together, just like you would do as an unruly five-year-old .
Considering everything else in the game, though, it’s no surprise that it took us a while to get it working as expected. Apparently, in an early prototype, if you tried to load a rock onto a carriage, the carriage would fly straight into the air. I don’t think it’ll stay there forever, but the developers don’t seem to confirm or deny this, so maybe there was a poor horse still chilling in the stratosphere in an early version of ToTK.
The poor horse wasn’t alone either. “I’d hear things like, ‘It broke! It flew away!’ and I’d reply, ‘I know!’ We’ll deal with it later! “, explained physics programmer Takahiro Takayama, demonstrating the most relatable game development mentality I’ve ever heard. The developers discussed their various approaches to actually dealing with it later.
For example, switching objects like doors to physics-driven so that everything in the game (adding a few different potential solutions to puzzles involving them) is one step. Another was to have the entire team work together on all the complex objects that could be combined in different ways to make the vehicle, functionality often having to take precedence over artistic design.
While they’re doing all this, some poor horse may be floating around in the stratosphere, an early casualty of the innovation wars. I hope everything goes well.
If you’re interested in learning more about what’s going on at GDC, its awards show didn’t shy away from industry layoffs and the situation in Gaza.
Yeah, I know it’s a bit of a change of pace.