Nintendo showed Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2D prototype at GDC
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild director, tech director, and art director (Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Takuhiro Dohta, and Satoru Takizawa respectively) took to the GDC 17 stage last Wednesday to talk about development of the new game in the series, the biggest project ever made by Nintendo.
In this panel called "Change and Constant: Breaking Conventions w/ Breath of the Wild" they explained that the biggest challenge was to transform a passive game into an active game, and the answer was experimenting with physic and chemistry. This way, the formed a a new freedom of expression and gameplay.
Nintendo developers followed a trial and error system with many tests to find "the reconciliation between the concepts of playability and reality", said Takizawa. To accelerate and save money with these experiments, Nintendo created a 2D prototype of Zelda: Breath of the Wild using the same physics and "chemistry" engine. For example, you can see a 2D Link using the Sheikah Slate in this video.
These are some pictures of concepts tested by Nintendo during development. You can see more of them at Nintendo of America's Twitter account.
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