Iwata Asks Ocarina of Time 3D: Your Turn, Grezzo

The latest Iwata Asks interview for Ocarina of Time 3D is now up, and this time it features the team from Grezzo! They talk about how they handled recreating the classic Zelda title for the 3DS, including implementing the 3D, how to remain faithful to the original while still making it a new experience, as well as a neat little tidbit: while some glitches were purged since they were harmful to gameplay, others were preserved and fine-tuned so that they work more like intended features! Though I’m not a glitching man myself, it’s good to see that preserving the original was so important that even the glitches remained!

Check out the full quote on the subject below:

Moriya: Yes. One of our staff members really loves The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. He has in his head an idealized borderline. Making the game today at any level beneath that borderline is unimaginable to him. But if you focus on that too much, the overall balance would suffer and cooler heads would feel like the game had changed too much, so the team’s approach see-sawed back and forth.

Iwata: How did you handle such differing approaches?

Moriya: We sped up revealing it and had Ikuta-san and others try out parts of it. We would ask how it differed from what they had imagined, and then we would fix it. One conflict arose when, as programmers, we wanted to get rid of bugs. But the staff members who had played the old game said the bugs were fun! We were like, “What?!” (laughs)

Iwata: Yes, that is an area of conflict.

Moriya: It wouldn’t be fun if your friends couldn’t say, “Do you know about this?” So we left them in if they didn’t cause any trouble and were beneficial.

Iwata: So you implemented them as you would specs, rather than treating them like bugs. It took some work and you had to go out of your way, but you preserved the spirit of the original. Moriya: Yes. If something simply could not be allowed to stand, we begrudgingly fixed it, so some bugs don’t appear, but we left in as many as we could, so people will grin over that.

GoNintendo also lovingly furnished an awesome overview of all the neat details covered in the interview. Stuff I find interesting will appear in bold.

• Grezzo was called to Nintendo’s headquarters to secretly discuss the 3DS as well as the idea of remaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Grezzo was worried that remaking the game without the original dev team involved would be a mistake
• Grezzo was originally very impressed with the 3D effect of the 3DS, with one staffer saying that it made him feel like he was a kid again
• when updating the game, Grezzo ran into a problem with the new character model for Link. They found that rolling on the ground with a lit stick no longer set the spiderweb on fire. This had something to do with the distance and angle of the stick to the web itself. This problem had to be fixed.
• Nintendo’s Nagako Ikuta is a walking Zelda encyclopedia, so much so that Aonuma constantly talked to her while reworking the Ocarina of Time experience
• Grezzo found it very important to share the same sense of values that the original dev team had while remaking this title
• the dev teams struggled to find a connection between what details of the game should be changed/updated
• some of the dev team wanted to retain the bugs of the original game, because that was a part of the original experience
• the dev team ended up leaving many of the original bugs in, but this time they were designed as features
• Z-Targeting had to be manipulated to work with the 3D visuals
• The team had a lot of trouble working with the increased framerate and implementing it correctly
• collision detection was also a tough area to develop, since this time around collision detection is 30 times in 1 second
• Aonuma’s main purpose for remaking Ocarina of Time was to fix the water temple
• the touch screen became the main method of making that experience easier
• Grezzo made a touch screen testing team soon after development started
• the team quickly came up with the idea of touch buttons in the 4 corners of the screen
• Grezzo felt the dev schedule for the game was impossible, but they kept pushing right up to the end
• Grezzo wasn’t under strict instructions from Nintendo, and instead, Grezzo would come to Nintendo with ideas for the remake
• Grezzo feels that Ocarina of Time was really representative of what 3D polygon games could do at the time. It was creating rules because there were no rules for that type of game
• when making the original, Nintendo would envision what it would look like to Link if he were standing in a location instead of just making a map
• the devs used to leave comments for each other in the source program that would discuss the msot recent game delay, their employee bonuses and more
• Aonuma gave the call to use the gyro-sensor for camera movement about one week before Nintendo’s 2010 conference
• two weeks before the final ROM, Miyamoto said he wanted to have the gyro-sensor change the line of sight at normal times when Link is just moving around
• It turns out that both Aonuma and Miyamoto wanted this, but Miyamoto requested it for Aonuma. They were working together!
• the help function was included for those that were playing the original but never completed it
• Navi’s ‘take a break’ message is implemented to pop up every 60 minutes
• the team also battled about making the default option for saving ‘save’ instead of always defaulting to ‘don’t save’
• the Mario Club members that tested the game this time around never played the original, and they got stuck in all sorts of surprising places
• hint movies were edited over and over again
• the Mario Club loved that Link took double damage in the Master Quest
• Iwata thinks its been awhile since Nintendo has released something as difficult as the Master Quest
• Aonuma says that more recent Zelda games have been easier, but Miyamoto says that games don’t stick with you if you don’t struggle or get stuck
• Grezzo was very interested to hear Miyamoto’s input during development
• they found that Miyamoto has a very unique way of looking at things
• the original Ocarina of Time source code still has developer notes left in during development

What’s your favorite detail from the interview, and what did you find the most interesting or surprising? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Source: Iwata Asks via GoNintendo