Nintendo made Rupee Bulletin Board for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s development

During a talk at the Computer Entertainment Development Conference (CEDEC), Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and and engineer Kenichi Hirose gave a peak behind the curtain. It was revealed that during development of the game, Nintendo created a Rupee Bulletin Board which facilitated communication and development.

As reported by Games Watch and passed along by Automaton, Hirose brought up how the basic production flow of the project was as follows: Drawing Board > Implementation > Playtest after reaching a milestone > Data collection > Analysis. The team would go through this repeated cycle following the last step’s completion.

The last three steps, which needed to be smoother and more efficient, is where the Rupee Bulletin Board came in for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom since. Rupees are known to fans as currency in Zelda, but here Nintendo made an in-house social media site of sorts. Developers were able to share feedback from playtests in real time. Similar to how things play out on social media, developers could also “give Rupees” to posts they agreed with.

The forum was moderated in a way that only opinions based on concrete information were allowed, and not personal impressions. Arguments were also forbidden. Instead, feedback was dished out through Rupees.

Another tidbit worth sharing is that the infrastructure engineers designed their own image-board-based tool. This was needed for the Fuse ability, as there were potentially 120,000 object combinations players could come up with.