You might remember that last month, Nintendo came to the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) armed with interesting talks about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Certain topics covered in these talks trickled out to those of us who weren't there, but we can now watch each of them in all of their glory online! For free!
Now yes, both of Nintendo's talks and many from other developers actually went live earlier this month, but it's never too late to catch up on some words of wisdom from some of the best brains in the biz (and the games in discussion aren't too shabby either).
Many of the talks can now be found in the GDC Vault for you to watch at your pleasure. But it's only right that we first share a little more about those from the Big N before diving in, right?
First up, Zelda. 'Tunes of the Kingdom: Evolving Physics and Sounds for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' gathers together three TOTK programmers (Technical Director Takuhiro Dohta, Lead Physics Programmer Takahiro Takayama, and Lead Sound Engineer Junya Osada) as they discuss the challenges that they faced in the game's development. The talk covers a range of topics including Hyrule's sound design, Link's new abilities and how implementing Ultrahand was rather tricky (who would have thought it).
Then we have good ol' Mario. '2D and Tomorrow: How the Developers of Super Mario Bros. Wonder Find Joy in Creating Classic Side-Scrolling Adventures' caught our attention initially in how it shared some of the game's unused Wonder effects, though there is a lot more to it besides. In this talk, Takashi Tezuka and Shiro Mouri share how the development team drew from Mario's past to innovate the 2D formula while also discussing the process of implementing new features such as Wonder's online play.
As we say, many more fantastic and informative talks from GDC 2024 are now online and a boatload of them can be watched for free. Be sure to head over to the GDC Vault website to check out the full range.