Banjo designed after the capitals of love
Rare on Banjo's backpack and Showdown Town
While the Nuts & Bolts release gets closer, the Banjo Team tends to be more open when it comes to talk about design ideas and specific gameplay details. And could there be better places to share their thoughts with the world than a Gaming event like the Tokyo Game Show running this week or the latest Banjo Dev Diary? Well, apart from our own site, obviously not.
Rare’s big boss, Mark Betteridge, has traveled to the kingdom of kawaii plushes and enthralling geishas. We don’t know if an ultra secretive meeting with Satoru Iwata to take GoldenEye XBLA out of the limbo is in the plans, but we do know that he’s definitively trying to promote the new Banjo among the Japanese gamers as an alternative way to knock down Nintendo from his impregnable dominions. Oh well, or at least try to get some attention towards the Xbox 360, somehow.
We already knew about the multiple evolutions of Banjo as a character, but what we didn’t know yet is where the backpack idea came from. Well, in his first meeting with the media, Betteridge acknowledged that, for him, “it’s good to be back in Japan, because Banjo was inspired by Japan.” It seems that he was referring to Kazooie’s moving shelter, which apparently -according to Kotaku- was inspired by backpacks that Japanese children carry around.
Many other places have more recently inspired Rare designers as well. In the latest Developer Diary from the Official BK website, one of the Nuts & Bolts designers, Steve Malpass, talks about which European landscapes determined the final aspect of Showdown Town, Nuts & Bolts‘ main area: “From very early on, even before the whole vehicle building concept was settled on, we knew the hub world for the latest Banjo-Kazooie game was going to be one big area, most likely a town, as opposed to the modular design from the previous games (Witch’s Lair and Isle O’ Hags). The Xbox 360 would enable this without a great deal of compromise,” he assured.
You may have already noticed some differences between Showdown Town and worlds like Jiggoseum or Nutty Acres; well, Malpass smartly linked them to the storyline of the game: “The Town was meant to be ”real”, as opposed to the Game Worlds, which are manufactured by L.O.G. (Lord of Games) and more fantastical. So for inspiration, the coastal towns of Tenby in west Wales, UK and Saint Malo in Brittany, on the north coast of France, were pretty big influences,” he explained. “I’ve wandered round both these places a number of times, and there’s something about their layout and topography that makes you want to explore, such as little winding paths and streets that make you want to see what’s round that next corner.” Montmartre (Paris), the canals from Venice, and the Georgian terraces of the Royal Crescent in Bath (in England) did also inspire the team when designing this seaside resort.
But Malpass also detailed the evolution of the mechanics of this hub world and the limited role of the polemic vehicles in this area: “Firstly, we needed to figure out how the game was to be structured, which Game Worlds were to be accessed when, how they were opened, etc. We decided on restricting the player to the use of just one vehicle (the Trolley) in Showdown Town, so we could more easily control the proceedings. Then, at key moments throughout the game, the Trolley would be upgraded with a new part, which would give it a new ability, enabling it to get somewhere or do something it couldn’t do before.”
Who knows, with this plethora of inspiration places around the World, maybe Betteridge may still come with some neat ideas for an Asian stage for Jago in Killer Instinct 3.
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