Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Developer Diaries

Welcome back, Banjo fans. We continue your guided tour around Showdown Town, the hub world of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, straight from the chap who knows it best: designer Steve Malpass. These entries make for an invaluable insight into game design for anybody eager to break into this fabulous industry. Enjoy!

With the areas of Town decided upon, it had to be laid out and pieced together in detail. L.O.G.’s video game factory was to sit on a hill in the middle of the map, with all the other areas spread around it. That’s pretty much how the map started out, literally seven circles sketched on a piece of paper. I then needed to consider the locations of all the Crates that hold the vehicle parts, which ones were obtained by which ability of the Trolley, etc., and come up with ideas for their locations. This took quite a lot of time to plan out.

The other features such as Boggy’s Gym, Klungo’s Arcade, Trophy Thomas’ House, etc., had to be found a home too. Also, we didn’t want players to be able to explore the entire Town right from the start of the game, which is why the Town Centre (where the game begins) is set in a sort of depression, bordered by little cliffs and slippery slopes. So until you get your Trolley upgraded with Hi Grip Wheels, the game is focused in this initial area, as you can’t drive up these slopes. Later, when you get it upgraded with the Spring, which acts like a jump ability, you can skip the slopes completely and just jump up the cliffs, so getting about is a lot quicker.

Having sketched out the map in full—gradually adding features and landmarks, filling in all the little details, where buildings would be, what shape they should be, which ones you can get on top of, which ones contain doors to Game Worlds, etc.—I ended up with a plan view of the basic layout of the Town. After some final tweaks and approval from Gregg, it went off to the team’s lead background artist, Steven Hurst, to initially model up very roughly so we could get an idea of scale and see how it all felt in 3D. The next stage was to get concept art for the various buildings and features so we could get an idea of what they would actually look like. I’d give the concept artists a brief on each one and they’d draw them up by hand. If all was okay, the concept was passed onto 3D artists and the feature modelled in detail.

Another major task was keeping track of all the new bits being added and making sure they did what they were meant to from a design point of view. This is a necessary process of designing and building any background. There’ll always be modifications and tweaks required to make it all fit together and flow and feel right, although Showdown Town required more than most I’ve been involved with. I think the official document of modifications went through 20 versions and ended up over 50 pages long by the time the Town was finished.

Partway through all this, we learned that one Game World was to be dropped to give us a chance of getting the game finished on time, bringing the total down from six to five. This was a bit of a headache and involved some redesign, as the Seaside lost its Game World doors to the Docks, which required a different Trolley ability to reach, so certain features got changed or moved about to cope with the restructure. Beyond that, we also had a problem in that the size of the actual Town asset was so big, the game kept running out of memory, so a few things had to be pruned. The pier used to have a pavilion you could drive through halfway along it, complete with arcade cabinets and a lower deck. That had to go, which was a shame. There was also a harbour beacon near the beach huts that got ripped out too. On the whole, though, there weren’t too many sacrifices made in getting everything stable.

Once the Town was modelled to a finished state, it then had to be set up. This sort of thing is done by the designers with the in-game editor to place all the bits and pieces onto the background: everything from obvious things like Crates and Notes for collecting, to stuff the player never sees like AI paths for the police to patrol and Mr. Fit to run along and region markers that decide which version of the background music to play. It also needed to be populated, so we have the Townsfolk (made up of pigs, penguins, and rhinos) that you can converse with and, yes, drive into.

The Town is also lit according to four different times of day: morning, noon, late afternoon, and night, which are chosen randomly each time you enter. It looks pretty stunning and atmospheric in some of these conditions and also quite different. So that’s pretty much how Showdown Town got built, gradually being modelled, pieced together and set up—a process which took the best part of a year.

It was only very late into development (as I write, only a few short weeks ago)—when everything was finished and a release version of the game was available with a solid frame rate—that we could finally get a proper idea of how everything felt and gelled together. Of course, there are bits here and there in Showdown Town that I’m less than happy with, little quirks I would change if I did it all again, but on the whole I’m very happy with how it’s all turned out. The nuts and bolts of the game naturally takes place in the Game Worlds, with Jiggy Games providing more frantic bursts of action. But then you come back to Town to vend and bank the Jiggies you’ve just won and can go off for a bit of a leisurely wander, hunt out some Crates, re-house a Jinjo or two and more besides, before heading off for more Jiggy Games when you feel like it. We hope players appreciate the contrast between what happens in Showdown Town and the Game Worlds. I think it works very well!

I’d just like to thank Steve for taking the time out to jot down this memoir. Hopefully this should add to your experience when the time comes to explore Showdown Town by yourselves. Next up, we’ll be talking up Mumbo’s Garage and just how you will be building and editing your own contraptions. In the meantime, if you have a question about Showdown Town or anything else related to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, why not join us on the forums? Lassst one in sssmellsss like Klungo!