The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released in 2017 and was by far the biggest Zelda game. Nintendo followed that title up with Tears of the Kingdom in 2023, with the game taking much longer to release than many expected. It turns out that this extra development time was due to how big Tears of the Kingdom was, along with the many intricacies and new additions to the gameplay.
Nintendo’s developers worked on Tears of the Kingdom for years, refining and designing much of what you see by hand. However, during a panel at Japan’s Computer Entertainment Development Conference, Nintendo’s developers revealed that they used an automated process to develop a specific area of Tears of the Kingdom.
Nintendo’s team tackled the caves in Tears of the Kingdom using a process of conceptualization > implementation > playtesting. Depending on what was discovered during playtesting, the entire phase sometimes had to start over to tweak elements and change design aspects. This caused the development process to slow down quite a bit, and Nintendo saw this as an opportunity to turn to automation.
While Nintendo viewed level design, asset placement, and graphics as features that needed to be created by hand, the actual creation of the caves was left to automation. Nintendo used artist-driven procedural modeling for parts of the caves that were considered decorative, meaning they didn’t affect the overall level design. It turns out that this approach allowed Nintendo’s developers to tackle gameplay and graphics simultaneously, making it an incredibly helpful and cost-effective decision.
The automated process for caves proved so useful that Nintendo used the exact same process when creating the stalactites and sky islands. Again, these were decorative areas that didn’t really affect the level design. Once the team realized how automation could speed up work while maintaining creativity, they were happy to suggest other areas of development where automation would make sense.
