Behind the scenes of Super Mario Bros Wonder | GDC 2024
During a GDC talk yesterday, Nintendo looked back at the creative process for Super Mario Bros Wonder, particularly how the large development team dealt with incorporating everyone's input when creating the game's 'Wonder effects'.
The first 2D Mario platformer in 11 years, Super Mario Bros Wonder released last October. It features the aforementioned Wonder effects, which change aspects of a level often in drastic ways, whether that's affecting the screen's orientation, Mario's abilities, or leads to Piranha plants breaking into song.
The talk featured Nintendo's Takashi Tezuka (producer of Super Mario Bros Wonder) and Shiro Mouri (the game's director), who shared the particular challenge of releasing a new 2D Mario game after so much time: how do you create a world revolving around secret abilities and overall mysteries when secrets and mysteries are already the franchise's standard?
This led to the creation of the Wonder effects, with Tezuka explaining the challenges faced when working with such a big team.
"As hardware has evolved, the size of development teams has increased in proportion to the scale of game production," he says. "And something we didn't focus on during the NES days, which was team management, is now an important job.
"Getting lots of people to work in the same direction to develop a game with as little waste as possible is without a doubt an important job. However, there's something even more important. Working with many people means we are also working with many abilities and approaches. So it's about how we can represent each person's individuality and strengths in production, and team management should be developed for this purpose."
The creation of the Wonder effects were a team effort, Mouri continued.
"Many types of Wonder effects are needed to fill a game with the secrets and mysteries. We [did] brainstorming sessions where the whole team showed their ideas for Wonder effects. It was up to everyone on the team to come up with ideas regardless
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