Nintendo

Bananza mixes free destruction with designer-paced unlocks. It has smashable surfaces, a huge moveset and skippable story so you can finish without a single Banandium Gem, yet hands out animal transformations like classic Zelda items and keeps a real plot.

Co-director Kazuya Takahashi loosened sequence-break restrictions.

Nintendo designers build a playable prototype before pitching an idea. Under the mantra "make before we talk", Nintendo prototyped Splatoon's ink, Tears of the Kingdom's vehicles and Mario's wonder transformations. Breath of the Wild began as a top-down 2D prototype using Zelda 1 sprites.

Prototypes stay ugly and disposable so polish isn't wasted.

Destructible terrain forces levels with many valid routes. Players can tunnel to a Banandium gem from behind, so levels need flexibility built in. Director Kazuya Takahashi called this a huge challenge.

Its layers are hundreds of voxel cubes packed like dirt.

The slow echo list is deliberate friction to push experimentation. The echo list is one horizontal row that grows past 120 echoes, and almost every review criticised it. Co-director Satoshi Terada says it is meant to make players fall upon echoes they may not have noticed.

Mark Brown found it so off-putting he stuck to the same few creatures. "The UI is designed to make you less efficient, but more creative."

Accelerating scroll with a position indicator is a cheap fix. In a Unity recreation, dividing each 0.1 second slide by a growing value makes the row speed up while the stick is held. An indicator at the top shows where you are, since fast wrap-around loses players.

Grouping variants into columns or tabs cuts scrolling. A PS3 Cross Media Bar layout nests variants like fire, ice and electric keese in columns, shrinking the row from over 100 echoes to 55, about half the scroll. Five Minecraft-style tabs of up to 36 echoes remove scrolling entirely.

Since the left bumper is held to keep the list open, one right bumper cycles tabs; the longest trip is four presses.

A radial menu fits the stick but a favourites ring breaks the design goal. Pointing the stick at a ring suits analogue input better than a grid, but it works with 16 echoes and not 116. A favourites ring like Animal Crossing's was rejected because it lets players lean on a few creatures.

"it totally goes against the intended experience of the game."

A spiral menu keeps every echo and gives acceleration for free. Modelled on Beyond Good & Evil's spiral keyboard, the ring coils over itself and only the selected echo and a few neighbours are enabled. Spinning the stick faster scrolls faster.

All five options are in a free browser demo.

The echo mechanic made Zelda the hero instead of Link. Link was assumed to be the hero for most of development, but summoning monsters to fight makes little sense for someone with a sword. Nintendo made Zelda the protagonist rather than explain Link losing his sword.

"Why not just kill the monsters yourself?"

Super Metroid teaches through locked rooms, untaught moves and broken patterns. It locks the door behind you in the room that needs the run, so you can't look elsewhere. It never teaches optional wall jumps, plants a golden statue room mystery, and sets item rooms as safe before the bomb room surprises you.

Nintendo cuts content to ship on time. It scrapped two dungeons from The Wind Waker to make the release window.

Zelda also backed away from complex puzzle box dungeons after they frustrated players.

Mario builds an average main path with easier and harder routes connected to it. Nintendo treats difficulty as three stacked pipes: an average critical path, a lower pipe of help and an upper pipe of challenge. Players move between them at any moment, even mid-level, instead of picking a setting up front.

Miyamoto says no single difficulty can satisfy everyone and prefers players adjusting it while playing, so only one of more than 30 mainline Mario games has anything like an explicit easy mode. Numeric tweaks to health or damage would not work in a hand-crafted platformer. The structure runs from Super Mario World to Wonder, Galaxy and Odyssey.

Experts get optional risks and post-credits content, not a harder main path. Star coins, runaway 1-UPs, flagpole tops and medals reward risk inside levels, and every course can be cleared without them. The story ends before the difficulty curve peaks; Odyssey's hardest content only appears after the 124-moon ending.

Because experts would otherwise play a whole easy game first, Super Mario World hides secret exits to Star Road and the Special Zone early, and Wonder scatters extra-hard courses through its campaign. The Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 was built entirely for experts and labelled "For Super Players".

Reward skill with harder content, not items that make the game easier. Super Mario World's dragon coins gave a 1-UP and New Super Mario Bros. star coins unlocked toad houses with power-ups, which handed experts tools that lowered difficulty. Newer games use expert challenges to unlock even harder stages.

Mark Brown calls the old approach "a nasty negative feedback loop that inadvertently pushes you out of the top pipe."

Requiring only some collectibles lets players skip levels they can't beat. Super Mario 64 has 120 power stars but needs only 70 to finish, and several levels are open at once so a hard one can wait. 2D games do the same with warp zones, Super Mario Bros. 3's map and Super Mario Maker 2's job list sorted by difficulty rating.

Easier characters also lower the bar: Peach's floaty jump, Toadette, and Nabbit, who takes no damage from enemies.

Offer a guide, power-up or skip only when players are near giving up. New Super Mario Bros. Wii's Super Guide has Luigi finish the level without collecting secrets; Super Mario 3D Land gives an invincible tanooki suit after repeated failures and a level skip after 10 deaths. Odyssey's assist mode shows the way with blue arrows.

Nintendo spent a long time deciding how many deaths bring up the Super Guide. Satoru Iwata: "it's fine if it appears when you're on the verge of tears, but [not] if it pops up when you're still brimming with determination."

Make assists temporary and costly so players keep climbing back up. An assist helps with one level and then disappears, and using it yields a lesser reward: Galaxy 2's Cosmic Spirit gives a bronze star instead of a power star, warping through Super Mario Bros. 2 means no World 9, and Super Mario Run's easy mode doesn't save purple coins.

In some games the file select stars stop shining once an assist is used. Miyamoto: "Simply lowering the hurdle doesn't necessarily mean that the challenge will be fun."

Assists should be reversible so they don't trap players in easy mode. Super Mario World's switch palaces fill gaps with blocks, but pressing one is permanent, leaving the player in the lower pipe for the rest of the game. Wonder fixed this with a badge that adds blocks only while worn.

Co-op lets a stronger friend carry a struggling player without taking over. In Galaxy a second Wii Remote collects and shoots star bits, and in Galaxy 2 it can kill enemies; in New Super Mario Bros. U a second player taps the gamepad to place temporary blocks. In New Super Mario Bros. Wii dead players return in a bubble teammates pop, and novices can bubble themselves on purpose.

The bubble replaced respawning in question blocks and solved several problems at once, making death more fun and letting players set their own difficulty. Miyamoto: "A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."

Wonder stacks many difficulty levers and helps players when they fail. Wonder has easy characters that can't use power-ups like Elephant, badges that either ease or harden play (only one worn at a time), and Pipe-Rock Plateau's boss needs only 14 of more than 30 wonder seeds. Dying unlocks a Coins Galore bonus level with 1-UPs and shop money, while flower coins give experts no advantage.

It also hides a hard special world and adds multiplayer and standee checkpoints.

Players invent their own harder challenges if the game is fun. Speedruns, coinless New Super Mario Bros. U runs and the Super Mario Odyssey Nipple% run are all self-imposed difficulty that designers never asked for.

"players will often surprise you in how they find ways to wring out more difficulty from a game."

Nintendo turns key mechanics into characters. Cappy, Navi, Ezlo, Fi and the Baby Luma make mechanics feel crucial; Wonder's talking flowers comment during play.

Ultrahand started as a cog car built in the Breath of the Wild engine. Fujibayashi attached spinning dungeon cogs to a slab for a car and a tube with a bomb for a cannon, which won approval from Aonuma and Miyamoto. Players already building vehicles in Breath of the Wild added confidence.

Ultrahand was kept simple so freedom could grow later. Nintendo cut complexity upfront so anyone could use it, aiming for Lego or Minecraft rather than Blender, and capped exploits like testers' perpetual motion machines that crossed the map.

"The more we weed out complexity upfront, the more versatility and freedom there is to provide options."

Super Metroid teaches through locked rooms, untaught moves and broken patterns. It locks the door behind you in the room that needs the run, so you can't look elsewhere. It never teaches optional wall jumps, plants a golden statue room mystery, and sets item rooms as safe before the bomb room surprises you.

Nintendo's 2D cameras avoid jarring movement. Tropical Freeze ignores DK's jumps and moves up only after he lands higher; New Super Mario Bros. U biases right but swings left once Mario backtracks for a while.

Guiding players tower to tower worked too well and felt like a rail. Nintendo's first plan used about 15 Sheikah Towers as points and roads as lines, with characters and camps along them. Playtesters complained of "an invisible, but obvious guide rope", and those who left the line got lost or found little.

Nintendo explained this at the 2017 CEDEC conference in Japan; the lecture was never uploaded.

Heat maps showed the tower route split players into two groups. Plotting where playtesters walked showed about 80 percent followed the tower route and 20 percent wandered randomly, and neither matched the intended experience. After the redesign the same map showed players roaming freely yet almost all reaching key locations.

Nintendo replaced the line with many landmarks that each offer a clear benefit. Shrines raise health or stamina, enemy camps hold weapons, and stables, first just horse registration points, gained beds, a shop and quest-giving NPCs. Players follow "a breadcrumb trail of interesting landmarks" to the key places.

Each landmark is visible from far away: shrines glow, campfires send up tall smoke, enemy bases sit around skull-shaped rocks and stables have a giant wooden horse. Appeal shifts with need and time of day.

Scarce resources turn the whole map into a reason to travel. Heart drops were removed so players visit forests for mushrooms or hunt animals, and rupees were made rare so they mine ore in mountains and quarries to sell.

Triangle-shaped terrain reveals a few new places at a time. Hills and mountains are mostly pyramids and cones, so they hide most landmarks and show only two or three new ones when you climb or circle a peak. The eye drifts to a triangle's tip, so points of interest sit on peaks.

Each new sight pulls players off their plan, they later return to it and get distracted again, creating what Mark Brown calls "an infinite loop of discoveries".

Nintendo tested open-world scale by running Link around Kyoto. Early on it used Google Maps data so Link could run around Kyoto and climb Himeji Castle, to get a feel for distance and density. It also built new tools so a large team could work on one map.

Experts get optional risks and post-credits content, not a harder main path. Star coins, runaway 1-UPs, flagpole tops and medals reward risk inside levels, and every course can be cleared without them. The story ends before the difficulty curve peaks; Odyssey's hardest content only appears after the 124-moon ending.

Because experts would otherwise play a whole easy game first, Super Mario World hides secret exits to Star Road and the Special Zone early, and Wonder scatters extra-hard courses through its campaign. The Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 was built entirely for experts and labelled "For Super Players".

Metroid Prime fixed missed tunnels with design, not hints. Playtesters missed morphball tunnels, so Retro added spotlights over the entrances. Its visor jiggles and steams up to build presence.

Co-op lets a stronger friend carry a struggling player without taking over. In Galaxy a second Wii Remote collects and shoots star bits, and in Galaxy 2 it can kill enemies; in New Super Mario Bros. U a second player taps the gamepad to place temporary blocks. In New Super Mario Bros. Wii dead players return in a bubble teammates pop, and novices can bubble themselves on purpose.

The bubble replaced respawning in question blocks and solved several problems at once, making death more fun and letting players set their own difficulty. Miyamoto: "A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."

Nintendo turns key mechanics into characters. Cappy, Navi, Ezlo, Fi and the Baby Luma make mechanics feel crucial; Wonder's talking flowers comment during play.

One-way barriers stop the explorable area from ballooning. In Super Metroid there are 13 rooms to check after the missiles but well over 100 after the power bomb. Dread counters this with ledges, slide gaps and doors that lock behind you, confining players to a small map segment.

After the Phantom Cloak, the wrong direction in Artaria hits three tight passages and a fiery plant needing ice missiles. Most players never notice the barriers appear.

Put each lock near its key and give each key few locks. For 13 of Dread's 22 abilities the lock is in the same biome as the key, so it stays in working memory. After the Plasma Beam only one door in the world needs it, and it is the next place to go.

Metroid Prime does the opposite: the Boost Ball is found in Phendrana Drifts but used back in Chozo Ruins. Many-lock abilities like the grapple beam are kept for optional pickups.

Teleporters make distant locks feel next door and add a second route. The morph ball in Cataris leads through a nearby teleporter to the Varia suit in Artaria, which is needed back in Cataris. Walking the long way right reaches the same room, doubling the chance of finding it.

The space jump and screw attack likewise open teleporters to where they're needed.

Breadcrumb pickups and lighting pull players to the critical path. After the screw attack, a chain of missile and energy pickups behind screw attack blocks leads to the teleporter where it's needed. Fireflies hang around the right doors, and lights signal where to use the spin boost and space jump.

Heavy guidance suits action fans but patronises players who love navigating. Mark Brown felt guided to the end, stopped working things out and finished with 39% completion because points of no return discouraged hunting secrets. Action fans get a well-paced tour with little backtracking.

Older Metroids guided too, such as Super Metroid's one-way door in Brinstar; Dread differs in frequency and intensity. Guidance still fails in open areas, and replayers fight it with sequence breaks like killing Kraid early with bombs.

Metroid Prime fixed missed tunnels with design, not hints. Playtesters missed morphball tunnels, so Retro added spotlights over the entrances. Its visor jiggles and steams up to build presence.

Nintendo cuts content to ship on time. It scrapped two dungeons from The Wind Waker to make the release window.

Zelda also backed away from complex puzzle box dungeons after they frustrated players.

Hide small surprise rewards wherever players are tempted to poke around. Every suspicious nook in Breath of the Wild could hold a Korok seed, and Super Mario Odyssey leaves coin caches in spots only advanced moves reach. Nothing tells you to go there.

Nintendo's Bill Trinen: "There are things you can do in the game that will result in some sort of reward or unexpected surprise."