Aonuma Discusses Zelda Dungeon Design

In an interview with Kotaku, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma discussed how Zelda dungeons are designed, and revealed that he was initially responsible for Ocarina of Time‘s dungeons.

Though many of Aonuma’s answers to Kotaku’s questions (through a translator and conducted over Skype) were vague, he did provide some insight into what initial steps Zelda‘s developers take when the begin designing a dungeon.

“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.” — Eiji Aonuma

Aonuma also shed some light on how involved he was in designing the dungeons in Ocarina of Time.

“In the case of Ocarina 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.” — Eiji Aonuma

For the full interview, you can check out the article on Kotaku’s website here.

Source: Kotaku via Nintendo Everything