Destruction is the core focus of Donkey Kong Bananza’s gameplay, but that all started as a goomba with giant arms.
Ahead of the Switch 2 platformer’s release this week, Nintendo published an interview with the development team where they detailed the decision to have destructible environments at the game’s core, built using voxel technology.
It turns out the programming team had been experimenting with destruction shortly after the release of Super Mario Odyssey. They were inspired by that game’s Knucklotec boss who attacks Mario with giant hands.
As one of Bananza’s game directors, Wataru Tanaka, explained, “The programmer who created [Knucklotec] tried attaching those arms to a Goomba as an experiment. The Goomba could smash terrain, tear off pieces to use as weapons, and throw them.
“Those actions felt surprisingly satisfying, and we got a sense that this destruction-based gameplay could be a compelling core mechanic.”
Nintendo even shared a video of the goomba in action as part of the interview. Below is a screenshot.
As a result, the team’s desire to define a new Donkey Kong aligned with the destruction-focused gameplay they were testing.
Indeed, Bonanza’s producer Kenta Motokura noted how in a long-running series “novelty and continuity are both important” but the team wanted to “fully convey the appeal of Donkey Kong as a character”.
As such, they wanted to split between 2D and 3D Donkey Kong games and bring the gorilla’s “strengths and new actions to the forefront”. The concept of destruction was seen as a good fit.
This also led to the use of voxel technology to create detailed destructible environments. However this proved difficult on the original Switch console with the detail the team aspired to, as this sort of technology uses a lot of system memory. Nintendo even shared comparison screenshots to show how differently the game looked across the two machines.
“With the move to Switch 2, we gained not only more memory but also greater processing capacity,” said Tanaka. “That gave us the freedom to incorporate gameplay ideas we’d previously abandoned because they were too demanding. When we got down to trying it, we discovered that not only could it handle the heavy processing requirements, but it also ran at 60 fps. Things we’d given up on, like explosions flinging large objects or causing them to collapse, were now possible. Designers could also place as many objects as they wanted. There were so many moments when we thought to ourselves, ‘Now we can really do this.'”
Donkey Kong Bananza will release on Switch 2 later this week. “A brilliant core mechanic and clever design twists make Bananza a delightfully sticky 3D platform adventure topped off with a sweet central character relationship,” reads our Donkey Kong Bananza review.