The fastest player to beat the game Donkey Kong Bananza, as of now, is a runner going by Vytox, who finished the game in just under an hour. In fact, players have so thoroughly optimized Bananza that even runners who chose to play in categories that involve beating all bosses and collecting all Bananza forms can do it in not too much more time than that. That’s crazy fast for a game with so many literal layers, and is possible because runners have invented all sorts of tricks to speed their way through levels and even fly through the sky in ways that were pretty clearly not intended by the developers.
And yet, it turns out that the Donkey Kong Bananza developers have been watching all along.
I learned this when I spoke to producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara this week at the Game Developers Conference, following their talk at the show: Constructive Destruction: Fusing Voxel Tech and 3D Action Platforming in ‘Donkey Kong Bananza.’ While their talk focused on the ways in which they encouraged the player to do things like destroy terrain and discover hidden treasures, I followed up with them by asking how they prevented players from doing things they weren’t supposed to do — especially in a game that was so open ended.
Motokura initially responded by telling me that unlike previous games the team has designed, Bananza had a lot more things about the player experience that the developers were unable to anticipate when designing.
“In that sense, we have to give them the play space they can enjoy and everything else would be essentially unreachable,” Motokura said. He gave as examples surfaces that Donkey Kong couldn’t climb, as well as other engineering solutions that made some things simply impossible. I was reminded, for instance, of one of the major barriers remaining in Donkey Kong speedruns: an inability to proceed through a certain boss battle if you haven’t yet broken Pauline out of her Odd Rock prison.
