On Creativity and Freedom in Game Development
Aonuma:
There’s a trick to moving things you’re bound to, and this is one of the action elements of the game.
Unleashing Creativity and Removing Restrictions
Terada:
It did. At the beginning of the game’s development, we were thinking a lot about restrictions on gameplay, assuming that certain things would definitely break the game mechanics or stop the game from working properly. We had ideas like being limited to using only 20 echoes in a dungeon. Lots of ideas like these made it so you couldn’t do things you had previously done.
But it would have been frustrating for players if they couldn’t use a solution that worked in a previous situation. So one day, we decided to scrap that approach and not impose any restrictions.
Aonuma:
I used to believe that the theory behind games was that being set loose from restraints gives a feeling of freedom and growth. That’s why old games were designed to slowly lift the restrictions that were there at the start. For a long time, game developers like ourselves have made games while firmly believing this theory to be right, and we felt safe creating restrictions in line with it.
However, the echoes gameplay could fly in the face of this theory at times. When you’re actually playing, it can be more fun not having the restrictions in the first place. And so we asked ourselves, “What do we want to do about this one?”, “Shall we remove it?”, and then gradually began removing those restrictions.
Over time, most of the restrictions we thought were necessary at the start of development were no longer needed. It even led us to allow things that we worried at first would provide too much freedom.
It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s almost as if introducing some freedom attracted even more freedom.
Finding the Right Balance
Terada:
Speaking of which, there was also a key phrase we used during development: “being mischievous”.
The Art of Being Mischievous
Aonuma:
We came up with this key phrase because we wanted to do some things that were really out there. For example, if you roll something like a spike roller along the ground, that’s a lot of work, because it can hit all kinds of things, but if we didn’t allow for this possibility, it wouldn’t be fun. (Laughs) The development team called these kinds of ideas “being mischievous”.
Sano:
We created a document explaining what “being mischievous” meant so that everyone could return to this concept if they weren’t sure how to proceed.
Terada:
There were three rules: “Be able to paste things however, wherever, and whenever you like”. “Make it possible to complete puzzles using things that aren’t there”.
Sano:
And third, “Being able to find uses for echoes that are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating should be part of what makes this game fun”.
Unconventional Solutions
Sano:
Ah, yes. In this shrine, you have to guide a ball across a board with obstacles to reach the goal. However, before the ball drops onto the board, you can flip the entire board over and use the obstacle-free surface on the other side to complete this challenge with ease.