Nintendo says it believes in the idea that “it is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful,” which is why it stuffed hundreds of millions of voxels into at least one of the layers in Donkey Kong Bananza.
Nintendo producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara peeled back the layers of last year’s Nintendo Switch 2 Donkey Kong game during a GDC panel attended by IGN earlier today. The hour-long session offered a deep dive into the crust of what made the game special, including information about its ties to Super Mario Odyssey and, of course, its destruction mechanics.
Outside of his love for bananas, Motokura says one of the first things that comes to mind when many others think about DK is that “his arms are big and strong” and allow him to do things most humans are incapable of. The Nintendo team kept this in mind when challenging themselves to deliver a unique experience with Donkey Kong Bananza, which eventually led to its core feature: destructable environments.
Voxels, which Kurihara describes as 3D versions of pixels, were used in Super Mario Odyssey for elements like snow and cheese. Following that game’s launch in 2017, Nintendo experimented with the technology (one famous example saw the team strap arms onto a Goomba) before completely destructible terrain became the core feature in Donkey Kong Bananza.
