Nintendo's Fujibayashi Hideyuro and Makoto Yonezu did a session at CEDEC 2017 on the design and

development process of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Here is a link to the original Japanese article: http://www.4gamer.net/games/341/G034168/20170901120

Special thanks to Matt Walker (@gypsyOtoko on Twitter), who was kind enough to post a high
level summary in English through Twitter posts, you can find said post here:
https://twitter.com/gypsyOtoko/status/915037635663425536. This document is simply a formatted
re-post of his, all credit is due to him.

Matt also says FYI - I found all these summaries here. JP net notes that devs were in awe, "only NCL
knows how to really make games http://blog.esuteru.com/archives/20018343.html

Thanks to /u/sylverstone14 on Reddit for the tip, originally posted on /r/games.

Last Updated: October 4, 2017 @ 2:55 PM EDT

Task Management
They managed all of their tasks by integrating their management tools with the game,
so you wouldn't get people doing the same work twice.

A task could be created by setting up a sign in the world, and then all related specs and
meeting details related to it could be readily available by clicking on that sign. There's
also a "field task view" that was set up for higher level items.
It was apparently a great way for multiple devs to bounce ideas off of each other in
regards to the task.
Field Design: Using Shapes
From a field design standpoint they discuss the "Triangle Rule". They explain that using
triangles carries out 2 objectives- gives players a choice as to whether to go straight
over the triangle, or around it.

The triangles also obscure the player's view, so designers can utilize them to surprise
players, make them wonder what they'll find on the other side.
There's also variations that can be more visually interesting, to perk the player's
interest. Korok seeds are usually found in these.

They have 3 different scales that they utilize this principle with as shown here - all to
achieve different objectives.
They also used rectangles as shown here. Instead of gradually revealing something,
rects are good for completely hiding something from sight.

You can get an idea for just how widely this concept was applied in this image.

They give an example of how the design was applied in action in these images. Note
how the structure in the distance is slowly revealed.
The structure hides the tower in the back, so there's this chain of interest - hill -> bridge
structure -> tower.
Lastly, the structure visibility order changes at night.

Debugging
From IGN Japan on debugging. One guy foresaw that the game would be too complex
to leave debugging till the end, so he had the foresight to champion for new practices -
proactively fix bugs blocking programmers and bugs specifically requested for fixing.
https://t.co/iHiMeYWv9r

Also to implement a tool for easy bug reports, merging the tools for managing bugs with
tasks, and implementing a system in the game for bug finding called #ZELDA_ERROR.

Takeaway was that they chose to manage all of their bugs as if they were tasks, and
implicated that there was a bug report button in editor.

Making the Game More Enjoyable

The beginning of the presentation discusses what specific changes they made in order
to make the game more enjoyable.
The first map images show 2 heat maps - showing what paths players originally
traversed in playthroughs. The second map showing how much more well distributed
that became after they made this specific change.

Their initial assumption was that they could spread the towers throughout the map, and
place game events in between, but they found that approach didn't feel appealing to
players. Players felt they were being guided, that the game was too linear, and people
were having completely different experiences, in a bad way.
They realized they could solve these problems with the concept they called "gravity," by
placing structures of varying visibility/importance in different places, leading players in
different directions and allowing players to get sidetracked. This became a catalyst for
"infinite play" - going back and forth between different structures.
You can see in this image how the different structures rank in visibility - naturally
drawing player's attention, and in "objective".
The objective order changes depending on how the player likes to play-if they're
aggressive, they'll go after enemy camps to get better gear.

The Aim of BotW's UI - Immersive, Impressionable UI

Original Japanese text: http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1078846.html
Being that their aim for BotW was to reconsider Zelda conventions from the ground up,
they discussed how they achieved their goal of creating UI that is instantly recognizable
as a change, but seamlessly integrates with the game world in 4 categories:

Graphics
Font
Design
Animation

Their overall concept being - only essential UI. Graphics - goal was to be understated
so nothing would stand out in a negative way. Coalescing information so there aren't as
many places players would have to look.
Title Menu
For the title menu they chose to make proper use of empty space instead of making the
selections large.
Unifying the UI -- Zelda White
To help unify the UI they adopted a color they called "Zelda White", which has a bit of
yellow. Used in the package and logo as well!
Font
They prioritized borderless, simply colored text with zero frills. The overseas fonts were
custom made, but for Japanese they used "Logo G Black" for Katakana and "Raguran
Punch" for Kanji - intending for the Japanese text to be both powerful and nostalgic,
italicising to make it easier to read. They applied this to the logo font for a cohesive feel.
UI Design
The direction was to only display information when necessary, which gives the screen
more breathing room.
Pro HUD
The Pro HUD was actually created because (presumably) NoA/NoE asked to clean up
the screen and get rid of even more UI elements - which lead to more immersion. They
designed the Sheikah Slate in tandem with the artists and chose to differentiate its
design and give an ancient feel by adding more decoration.
Immersion and UI Simplicity
They acknowledge that the lack of a tutorial was intentional to strengthen immersion,
and only display minimal UI elements so players wouldn't feel guided by the hand. They
applied different animations to the UI in order to make things more noticeable after
decreasing noticeability by making UI and fonts smaller.

One example - hearts light up white when you've taken damage. "Display simple UI and
make it appear high quality." They created a tool they could use to capture textures and
modify as necessary for this.
Design Tricks
They only had 2 UI designers who wouldn't be able to handle everything alone, so they
worked with the programmers to implement little tricks.

Expanding on NCL's proprietary "LayoutEditor" tool in a "data driven" fashion, allowing

designers to place and animate screen nodes, and giving programmers control over
them. Up until BotW designers needed programmers in order to implement data into the
game, so with BotW it was changed so that the game screens could be previewed on
top of each other, over the running game.

The game map was split into 120 sections that could be dynamically loaded, with 4
levels of zoom. This included distinguishing non-open areas with separate colors, so
they needed to create 2,344 different screens, which would have been impossible
manually, so the map was procedurally generated, textures would be generated for
each section every night.

Finally, they give examples of how they utilized their "screen capture" technology to add
filters & color adjustments to create UI. Image shows how they composed the gear
select screen, capturing the environment, masking and redrawing.
BotW - The Open Air Sound Playing a Massive, Breathing World
They required the kind of sound design that would heighten the immersion of being in
Hyrule, relaying the rules of the world and the material of the objects located within and
the sense of air flowing through that world. It was something the sound director couldn't
explain with words, so he chose to make a concept video during production to help
explain this and shared with the composers, sound designers programmers, planners
and artists.

To heighten this immersion they chose to express that which could not be seen through
sound - separating into several categories: environmental sounds, base noise, water
sounds like rivers and waterfalls, birds chirping, grass bristling, insects, the wind,
footsteps, etc.

Wind sounds were created using noise as a base, spawning 3 different sound sources
to twirl around the player, eventually adding footstep noises - which were recorded on
site in Kyoto. The base noise - the foundation for all environmental noise is a feint air
sound which changes depending on whether you're indoors or out, or near water, and
also changing base on nearby plant life, time, organic activity or rain.

For music, they started with the idea to restructure what music in Zelda is really meant
to be. So they first chose not to play a looping song on the over world. This meant that
they'd place an emphasis on the environmental sounds - those being the only thing you
would always hear.

With this they found that they were missing something - nothing to accent certain
moments, that feeling of arriving somewhere special. So they chose to one play music
at special places, and to play random phrases occasionally to break up the monotony.
In doing this it's less apparent that the music has looped over a long period of time.

This still felt too simple, so they chose to play music in places like villages. They made
these songs dense, made them all unique, and placed them as emitters on specific
areas of the map to make it feel like you were in just one place of a vast world. These
emitters were made so as not to feature any special progression, then change from this
environmental music in stages as you proceed into the area, which also expands the
role of the field's design.

All the different music and sound effects were each given a priority and volume to help
decide what should take precedence and when - note how environmental sound effects
stop momentarily while in battle. Next they go into their development environment.
Normally the sound team takes orders from game designers and artists and creates
sound based on those, but for this title they worked proactively.

So normally, that would mean they would get an order for "shield surfing" for instance,
including all of the little details such as the change in sound based on speed, playing a
different sound for the edge as it turns, etc. That style requires specialists that will be
able to pick out the finest details to achieve something of high quality, which it does, but
that requires that they also have an complete understanding of the whole project design
spec and schedule, or else spec changes could be costly. They realized this would be
devastating to the project, so to avoid that they improved their workflows, using tools,
libraries, working between sections so as not to burden the sound team with work they
wouldn't have to do.

They introduced 3 tools into the mix: SLink, allowing designers to click an actor in game
with their mouse and bring up a sound table where they could then specify their sound
and test it out - which also worked for animation. AssetBinder, their asset manager tool
with search, filter, single and batch volume adjustment, automatic conversion and
version control.

They also decided to "leave it up to the machine" in regards to tasks to minimize

necessary work, using Jenkins to randomly place sound emitters for the environmental
sounds throughout the field. This allowed for various parameters such as only placing
bird chirping around trees, but not small trees, stumps or dead trees.

Finally, they made it so that non-sound members could set sounds as well - so allowing
the scenario writers to set cutscene voice, for instance.