To discuss why The Legend of Zelda: The Tears of the Kingdom’s physics system broke the brains of numerous video game designers, you require to take a look at its most ordinary interactions.
In a 2024 panel at the Game Developers Conference, Tears of the Kingdom technical director Takuhiro Dohta, lead physics developer Takahiro Takayama, and lead sound engineer Junya Osada required to the phase to break down the basics of how the video game’s physics system worked. The discussion covered subjects such as determining the suitable physics for wheel resistance, turning cooking pots into car joints, and architecting a “physics engine for noise.”
Those principles will blow anybody’s mind. Video game developers are the ones who will melt down at the sight of a fully-functioning suspension bridge, like the one published by Monomi Park video game designer William Armstrong.
In an interview with Game Developer after their panel, Dohta, Takayama, and Osada took a minute to see Armstrong’s video, all sharing a chuckle at a fairly easy example of their operate in action.
“When you begin linking several things together [in game development] things end up being really complex extremely rapidly,” Dohta stated when asked why numerous designers responded with pleasure when seeing minutes like this in Tears of the Kingdom.
Related: Player ‘stunts’ in Breath of the Wild offered Nintendo ‘self-confidence’ to press limits in Tears of the Kingdom
Takayama stated that if he put himself in the shoes of an independent observer, he stated he would feel “stunned” that the system was operating “quite well.” “It talks to the truth we had the ability to broaden the kind of gameplay … that we might achieve in this video game,” he stated.
That brief clip catches a lot of the effort that entered into producing physics and stereos for Tears of the Kingdom. In their panel, the 3 gone over how all the items in the scene– the panels, the wheels, and the rock piece binding them– required to be created as independent items whose residential or commercial properties be the structure of “multiplicative gameplay,” a principle explaining emerging gameplay that was presented in Nintendo’s 2017 GDC discussion on the making of Breath of the Wild.
Each element of this year’s discussion– going over the physics and the noise– deserves its own deep dive to totally catch Nintendo’s advancement procedure. Today, we’re going to dive into the physics system that powers Tears of the Kingdom.
“Sometimes it’s essential to have the guts to press forward”
According to Takayama, early models for Tears of the Kingdom try out the gamer’s capability to fuse any 2 items in the video game together. Once it was chosen that this would be the structure for the much-anticipated follow up to Breath of the Wild, he recognized developing a physics system that supported such functions would be “extremely, extremely challenging.”
“I stated to myself ‘are we actually doing this ?! Development is going to be mayhem.'” He stated diving into this advancement frame of mind needed “nerve.”
This system would need the development of the video game’s lots of physics-driven things,
