Tons of Animal Crossing: New Leaf details from the latest Iwata Asks
Nintendo has gone live with another Iwata Asks. This time around, Satoru Iwata sat down with some of the staffers behind Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
Read on below for a ton of information about the game’s development.
-Iwata notes that having 2 directors is uncommon. Mr. Moroeki says that the division of labor occurred naturally between the two based on their own specialties.
-Both supported City Folks’ Director Mr. Nomura during development. Division carried over from there.
-No problems between the directors during dev time.
-Because the plot (Moving into town, buying a house, paying a loan, etc) may have become stale now the series is over 11 years old, the two directors decided to ‘reset’ the parts that had become usual from the start.
-Thus the initial concept was ‘To create a ‘new’ Animal Crossing’.
-Some new ideas initially included things like ‘Gold Dust digging’ to go with fishing and bug catching.
-While that idea didn’t get used, the idea to give players the ability to build benches and bridges in the village was there from early on.
-Giving people the ability to customize villages would also make visiting other villages more fun.
-The idea to make the character mayor was quite late. The first year this was not in place, although they were worried just being able to build items may not be ‘new’ enough for players.
-A preparation for a presentation for Mr. Miyamoto and Mr. Tezuka forced them to come up with the mayor idea to give a more cohesive sense to the game.
-The team then realised they already had a mayor in Tortimer so they decided he would retire.
-But they found a happy place for him to live.
– Kyogoku would often come home late and find Tom Nook’s store closed. They recognize that many players play around with the clock in previous titles to get over this.
-Of course, if all the shops were open 24 hours, there’d be no difference between day and night and no sense in having the game match up with real-world time.
-Once they made the main character mayor, it made sense that they would be able to alter the laws to some extent.
-Can make the stores open early, or keep them open late.
-Items in the town are paid with donations. The animals will provide some money, but you as the player will end up paying a lot of their own money.
-If you don’t do your job as a mayor ‘properly’ no one will complain at you in the village.
-There is an initial ‘hurdle’ you must complete as mayor early on, but once clearedyou’re free to do what you want.
-The tree planting at the beginning of the game – your first act as mayor – was included after Eguchi played the game and didn’t feel like he really was mayor. This was quite late in development.
-The also added a ceremony after building your first bridge to help with this.
-You can chose not to have the ceremony if you’d like.
-The worried about including Mr. Restti again. Some people don’t like being yelled at by him. Especially young girls – they have heard of some who cried while playing.
-They gave the player the ability to include the Reset Management Center as a part of being mayor.
-They’re starting to run out of recognizable animals – to the point where they were looking at different breeds of dogs.
-Lisa, the owner of the Recycle Shop, is an alpaca, which have been quite popular in Japan recently. The developers consider it quite lucky.
-The try to pick animals that suit the shops they run. Reiji the Lazy Sloth owner of the garden shop was decided because sloths live in the forest and they thought a forest animal would suit that shop.
-A tapir runs the Dream Emporium because of the Japanese myth of them eating dreams (like the Pokemon Hypno or Munna), but the devs realised only Japan thinks this way.
-Some animals like Cap’n and the seagull have returned to earlier roles.
-This may be brand new stuff for people who began with Wide World.
-Because of the 3D they had to work harder to avoid crude elements.
-They are happy with the amount of furniture in the game.
-They aimed to create 1.5 the amount of items as in City Folk.
-Not just filler, but items people would want to use in their homes.
-There was a board for ideas not just for the designers, but all development staff.
-If you’re not good at design, you can easily just repaint/refurbish things in a solid color.
-The team is excited to see what people come up with post-release.
-They hope that people will see other people’s model homes and want to improve their own homes.
-They wanted to include a feature using Wii Connect24 for City Folk where people could visit your town while you slept, but there were limitations so they couldn’t.
-However, they could do it with this game (the Dream Emporium). You upload your data to the server and then other people can come visit you easily.
-Doesn’t require friend codes. Doesn’t affect the other person’s village.
-Good for people who don’t have friends or people who play near by.
-For online functions, not only can you do stuff with 3DS friends, there is stuff you can only do with those registered as best friends.
-Best Friends don’t have to be system friends. For people playing on the same cart who don’t want the system code to be shared with people they don’t know.
-You can exchange chat messages with Best Friends even if they aren’t in your village, but they are online.
-Great for turnips!
-And fishing tournaments!
-The DS holidays were designed to make localization easier – rather than making regional events.
-Of course, holidays you are familiar with are more fun.
-They worked with localization teams to create items. Like a plate of 12 grapes for the Spanish New Year.
-Thus some items are region specific. If you visit a friend’s village in that region during the right time, you can buy these items.
-They considered what animals would have what items in their homes and included items they thought would match.
-Many veteran staff of the series as well as many new staff to the series.
-They improved the graphics, mentioning the animals themselves and the museum exhibits.
-Finally, Iwata mentions the benefits of the download version.
