The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD was only developed in six months, Zelda’s series producer Eiji Aonuma has announced.
In an interview with 4Gamer and translation by Siliconera, Aonuma gave some interesting details about development:
“The game [Wind Waker HD], was developed in just about six months, development was still difficult. You had to consider the difference in hardware at the time.”
Eiji Aonuma went on to talk about the differences in developing the game on the Gamecube and the Wii U:
“Additionally there is a technique known as toon shading, which gives the game a very animated look. At that time, the technique was established, but had not be used before by our staff, everyone had to do everything by hand.
For dramatic purposes, we would have characters we didn’t want in the frame, out of sight, but on the 16:9 ratio, you could still see those characters,” Aonuma shares. These characters, he adds, had to be edited out of the frame manually for the game’s final release.
It is very interesting to hear about these little development quirks. I love the fact that characters where hidden by the aspect ratio that then had to be removed in the Wii U version, it’s these little things that make remakes so fascinating. Six months for the HD version does seem like a small time but when you consider that they had the original game code that time frame makes more sense. I’d love to see a documentary or hear more about the inside development of Nintendo studios, I bet it is riveting.
The Wind Waker HD is out now on the Wii U!
