Nintendo ritar inte längre banor på papper inför spelutveckling

Takashi Tezuka (Osaka, 1960) var med när de allra första Mario- och Zelda-spelen designades och lanserades på 1980-talet. Sedan dess har han producerat eller övervakat i stort sett alla delar av dessa serier, on än med mer fokus på 2D-titlarna.

När vi träffade Nintendos legendariska producent under Gamescom efter att ha spelat Super Mario Bros Wonder, frågade vi honom därför om hur utvecklingen förändrats och om Nintendo fortfarande ritar upp banorna på papper innan de sätter igång själva utvecklingen av dem. Han svarade:

"So first off thank you for noting that. And as you mention, back in the days we used to design these courses using paper and pen, but of course we don't do that anymore! (Laughs). So now we've developed a specific tool for this, and so level designers can use this tool to design their courses. So level design doesn't mean that we're just placing certain given elements and items into a course

So these level designers need to work together with people like programmers, sound creators, and also other designers as well", the Japanese producer continues. "There's also obviously a know-how from past Mario courses as well and certain things that are sort of predetermined in that sense. So we also go through these fixed points as well but we also have a lot of different types of courses and so we need to think about different ideas to create these courses as well. That's one of the most challenging aspects."

Vi jämförde även Super Mario Bros Wonder-märkligheterna och variation med vad vi som vanliga användare kan skapa i ett spel som Super Mario Maker och Super Mario Maker 2. Det visar sig att Nintendo fortfarande har mer att ge:

"I think when we first introduced Super Mario Maker there were some people that maybe thought that this was the pinnacle or this is all we needed for 2D Mario. Please don't worry there's so many many ideas that we can put into 2D Mario and that new things that we can create! (Laughs). Now that we're finally able to introduce this new kind of 2D Mario, we're very happy to be able to do so".

Kika på intervjun i sin helhet nedan för en rejäl inblick i hur Nintendo arbetar med Mario-spelen.