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Iwata Asks: In Commemoration, Part 1 - Nintendo Game Seminar 2008

Nintendo Game Seminar 2008 - The Road to Completing Animal Crossing Part 2

by Matt Walker - July 11, 2016, 11:58 pm EDT

Part two of the road to Animal Crossing.

2. The Field is 4 Islands

Iwata - Those that saw the finished “Animal Crossing” probably assume that from the beginning there was this forest that animals lived in, and that it was this kind of game where you just live how you choose. But during the initial phases of planning not even a fragment of that had been thought up yet. Everything started from purely considering the systems.

Eguchi - Right.

Iwata - I think that’s the secret game making for Miyamoto-san and co. At the beginning there’s no characters or world. Of course there’s no story either. I get to see a lot of design docs written by various people, but when you get those that have these passionate ideas for characters or worlds without touching on the game systems at all, I tend to feel that “as this currently stands, since this important thing hasn’t been decided yet I bet they’ll start running into problems after development begins”.

Eguchi - Ya… Even if you begin with creating the world, in the end you’re perplexed trying to figure out how to end things.

Iwata - That being said, I think everyone’s experienced that a little - where first this world they have in their head begins to expand, but they can’t figure out how it should end (laughs). I know because it’s happened to me as well.

Eguchi - True (laughs).

Iwata - Anyhow, after thinking about this relay-type system what did you start working on next?

Eguchi - First we entered into program design like, what kind of field structure would be necessary for picking up and dropping items, and sharing with other people.

Iwata - Nogami-san, you didn’t start out as a technical person by any means, but you do consider how things could be implemented from a programming perspective, don’t you?

Nogami - Right. First I start with considering that.

Eguchi - At that point we had discussions about things like how many floors could we have in a dungeon? How should items be placed? There wasn’t even a hint of being able to have conversations with animals at the time.


Iwata - At that time what were the animals like?

Eguchi - You just issued commands to them with simple button presses.

Nogami - The system was set up so that each player had their own animals at their disposal.

Iwata - That is somewhat RPG-like isn’t it - having your teammates following behind you.

Nogami - There were various different kinds of animals, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The player is powerless, so they would issue commands to the animals as they proceed forward, and eventually you would come to a place where you simply couldn’t proceed forward with the animals you had at your disposal.

Eguchi - You wouldn’t be able to go there on your own, so you’d need the help of another person.

Iwata - So you first thought about systems that would be the birth of the communication aspect - so that you could request to your dad, “do something about this!”

Nogami - I thought, in order to accomplish that, each player would have different animals they would be able to bring with them. Providing that differentiation.

Iwata - And you think about the basic system like that. What did you do next?

Eguchi - At that stage I reorganized all the information and had proceeded to explaining to designers and the like, but then something happened that fundamentally reversed the direction of development.

Nogami - We were no longer able to put it out on the 64DD.

Eguchi - Originally I had organized the design doc so that it would take advantage of the massive amount of space of the 64DD, but things quickly changed surrounding the 64DD, and in the end we wondered if there would be a way to instead release it as an Nintendo 64 cassette.

Iwata - Here you were supposed to be able to take advantage of the large amount of backup data, but then you were told to release it as a normal cassette.

Eguchi - Using a regular cassette meant the backup memory would not be as large, so we had to greatly reduce the amount of content. And so when considering what could be left in, we decided that we should be sure to keep the field structure that allowed for players to mutually affect each other. So I made it my priority to reconsider how to preserve that with the smaller Nintendo 64 cassettes.

Nogami - Additionally, the 64DD had clock functionality built-in, so we planned from the beginning to use that.

Eguchi - So we began looking into things like whether we could include clock functionality in the cassette, and what kind of play we could provide with the size of the cassette.

Iwata - At that time I was helping out with a title called “Pokémon Snap” (*2), and that was another kind of game that was meant to take advantage of the space of the 64DD by allowing you to take all kinds of pictures. As luck would have it, this game also moved away from the 64DD. So I had to rethink how I’d be able to make the data of 1 picture as compact as possible, and I realized that, rather than saving the photo data itself, if I converted the information to what Pokémon were there, faced in what direction, in what state - it could be saved as a rather small data structure.

Like that you went about changing the structure of the whole game - which I guess is kind of a similar experience to us (laughs).

Eguchi - Indeed (laughs).

*2 “Pokémon Snap”= Camera Action Game released for the Nintendo 64 in March 1999.

Nogami - And so we discussed what the maximum limit for a Nintendo 64 cassette was. I think it was 1 megabit, right? (Matt’s Translator’s Note: Pretty sure they’re talking about the size of the save data, not the cart itself.)

Eguchi - Right, right.

Nogami - You could use 1 megabit of flash.

Iwata - 1 megabit. That was huge back then, for semiconductors. Now it’s just a pinch though.

Attendees - (laugh)

Nogami - So we considered how we were going to fit what we were planning up until that point into that.

Iwata - And so instead of penny-pinching, you were memory-pinching (laughs).

Nogami - Precisely (laughs). During our original planning phase the field we planned was incredibly large and split into 4. There would be 4 different islands - one for each of the 4 seasons, and each island would have small dungeons that you would adventure in. Of course, something so large wouldn’t possibly fit, so we thought fine - let’s make it one.

Eguchi - No deep dungeons. And let’s pare down the area while we’re at it.

Iwata - So that’s how you arrived at the village (laughs).

Eguchi - But what could players enjoy doing in such a tiny village? Is what we asked ourselves.

Nogami - We thought, well you can’t really have an adventure now, can you.

Attendees - (laugh)

Nogami - And so we said fine, let’s get rid of the adventure.

Eguchi - That’s right.

Images

Talkback

King of TwitchJuly 24, 2016

Quote:

Iwata - Do you all know about the 64DD? Anyone who doesn’t, please raise your hand.

… There are quite a few. Ah, Miyamoto-san, stop joking around (laughs).

Attendees - (laugh)

♥miyamoto

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