Miyamoto on development – making games special, uniqueness, controls, younger devs, more

A lot of the interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto coming out of E3 this year were very game specific – in particular focusing on Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That makes sense given how big of a title it is for the company, but Kotaku went in a bit of a different direction with its discussion.

While speaking with Miyamoto, the site wanted to find out how Nintendo makes games – what goes into making them special, what makes them unique, what their core is. Miyamoto also went in-depth with Bill Trinen on controls, and also talked about topics like sound effects and advice for younger developers. Of course, some talk about Zelda: Breath of the Wild was sprinkled in as well.

Head past the break for some interview excerpts. You can find the full talk here.

On what goes into making a Nintendo game special, and how he knows when it’s good…

Shigeru Miyamoto: Ultimately I want a lot of people to enjoy the game, but the initial barometer and gauge is whether I enjoy it or not. Another thing is whether the uniqueness is maintained in a game as a Nintendo game, compared to [games from] other companies.

On what he means by uniqueness…

Miyamoto: It could be how to play the game or some of the techniques or technology being used. There’s always a limited amount of things that we can use, so it’s how we use that and in what combination. So it’s really–instead of creating–a little more like editing, in a sense.

This becomes a little bit of a conceptual talk, but I think what’s really important is that there is a core [to the game]. And, based on that core, we use technology … to develop the game. I think what a lot of people see as unique is using different technology or different techniques [to make games], but I feel like, as long as you have a core that’s unlike others, that’s what ‘unique’ is. So we can be using the same kind of technology, the same kind of techniques, but when we use it, we get something different.

On what that core is of a game…

Miyamoto: I think it comes down to the experience of the customer or people playing the game. It’s something we do with the Wii U. You can only experience playing a game with two screens on the Wii U, and it’s really about using the past techniques and technology that we’ve used before. We keep at it, and at the end of that we discover something new.

So even with a Zelda world that is about swords and magic, if we were to make it 3D and really realistic, and render the player realistic, you’d run into games that are just like that all over the place.

And so Zelda is really about exploring and adventuring [through] the land. And you’re kind of fighting against the land as if you were hiking in real life, and that’s how this game works. And the player has to think for themselves and has to put their ideas into practice. That’s what this game is.

On how important controls are, and how hard it is to get them to feel as good as they feel…

Miyamoto: So you know programming is all about numbers. The challenge is getting this kind of feeling into numbers. So there’s a lot of back and forth between the programmer and myself and the director. We really go in deep about how to create this feeling. We do a lot of back and forth.

Bill Trinen: It actually goes back to the way they designed the original Super Mario Bros., where when they tested it, originally, there was no Mario and there was no person. It was just a block. And you would press the button and see the block move. There’s actually a word in Japanese that describes what you’re talking about–the feeling–which there is no word for in English. In Japanese it’s called tegotae…

Miyamoto: … tegotae…

Trinen: …which if you were to translate directly sort of means ‘hand response.’ There’s also hagotae, which is the sense that you get on your teeth when you’re eating food. Tegotae is the word that you’re describing when you talk about that feel of a Nintendo game and it goes back to the focus on the notion of pressing a button and what happens on screen and how do you feel.

Miyamoto: So the next one is weight. It’s really important to make the player feel as if they are there. There are many different ways to create the idea of weight. So, for example, if someone jumps from a high place, how long that character stays there.

I think the other thing is response. If we really wanted to make something look pretty, we would just have animator create it and you would just replay it. But there’s no sense of control there. If a character is in front of a wall and they start moving like they’re not in front of a wall, it creates that disconnect. And it becomes unnatural. So it’s really about taking what the animator does and polishing it up and making it so it’s interactive.

On the importance of sound effects…

Miyamoto: So especially in Breath of the Wild, the ground is really there. The player is walking on it. The player sees the grass and the rocks, but program-wise it’s obviously not really grass and rocks. But it’s really how we use the sound. So when you’re in a forest, we try to play sound effects that really remind you of a forest. So if a player goes into that forest, they’re reminded of a forest that they know.

Really, a game is about helping the player remember what they know. And that creates the illusion that they are there. In that sense, sound effects are necessary, and I think Nintendo always taken the time to create the sound effects. For example, checking the ground that the character is running on and making sure it matches that. We use a combination of the skills that we’ve had and what’s available now to create this.

Miyamoto: And I think when you’re hearing the sound, the wind or when you go underground you hear this echo, coming up with ideas and throwing around ideas is really, really fun. He might have said if you hear this sound of falling rocks it might trigger this kind of memory. Throwing around ideas like this is a lot of fun.

On advice he gives younger devs, and if he sees them making mistakes that he made as a younger designer and gives certain key pieces of advice to people…

Miyamoto: I think, in terms of directors, they are sometimes vague. They might tell the programmer, ‘Alright, the enemy chases the player.’ That’s kind of vague. So, a lot of times, it’s up to the programmer to have to kind of figure out how that happens and how they make that into a reality. It’s about: How exact or vague are you being? When you say: the enemy checks the player every 10 seconds, is that vague? Or it does every 10 seconds, five out of those 10 times they make a mistake. Those are the details, and I try to tell everybody to make sure that they include those details when they talk to the programmers.

And not just directors, but any kind of person in a management role: leaders should be more specific, I tell them. [laughs]

But it’s not like I’m trying to force them to do this. If you give them specific instructions you get specific feedback. What happens is the discussion that gets born from there is really important, too.