We've heard of some fun development stories over the years, but we think this might be one of the best ones yet — Nintendo created an internal social media-like platform to help streamline development on the absolutely massive The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. (Thanks, GamesRadar!).
Speaking at the Computer Entertainment Development Conference in Japan (via GameWatch, translated by Automaton) director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and engineer Kenichi Hirose spent a portion of their presentation of the production flow for Tears of the Kingdom. And during this section, the pair spoke about the "Rupee Bulletin Board", where Rupees were used in place of likes.
The basic process follows this: Drawing Board > Implementation > Playtest after reaching a milestone > Data collection > Analysis, and then back to the beginning. Those final three steps would often take the longest, so the team wanted to help keep things efficient. Creating the Rupee Bulletin Board allowed the developers to keep an eye on playtester feedback and team progress in real time. Genius.
The Rupees were used to indicate whether the team liked something that was being worked on. One other consistent rule was that all posts on the board should be objective and nothing could be suggested based on subjective impressions — everything on the board needed to be backed up with facts. Plus, all feedback had to be constructive, like any good workplace.
Nintendo, if you happen to be reading this, any chance you can release Rupee Bulletin Board to the public? It'd absolutely, definitely help with a bunch of work here. Though perhaps Nintendo is re-using it for Echoes of Wisdom...
Well, we're sure someone's already done a Rupee-like system for a website or something somewhere, but it's fun that this management social media-like system was aesthetically designed to match the project the team was working on. So we can expect that, the next time we get a big Mario game, will the dev team there use a custom social media with coins or stars...?
Do you want your own Rupee Bulletin Board? Let us know in the comments.