IGN - Zelda: BotW devs talk early designs, breaking conventions, dev team's approach and much more

Coming from an IGN interview with director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, technical director Takuhiro Dohta, and art director Satoru Takizawa...

- Breath of the Wild development started with less than 10 people
- a small team can work on early ideas to make a game for roughly a year or possibly longer
- first phase is spent figuring out the game idea the team wants to make
- once the initial prototype is completed, the findings are presented to Nintendo’s senior staff
- if that team proves the ideas will work, the team begins staffing up
- after the first phase was completed, technical director Takuhiro Dohta joined the team along with art director Satoru Takizawa
- the developers knew they wanted to create a large field full of player-driven actions that could result in lots of possibilities
- the 2D prototype that was made was a great way to explain core goals/ideas to the biggest dev team
- the 2D prototype was presented to Miyamoto, which was somewhat of a surprise for him
- after viewing, he said it will be the collection of all these objects that makes the game world work
- the team came up with some very "out there" ideas to break with series conventions
- the art team used an online bulletin board where staff could freely upload their ideas
- the team could give an idea they liked a rupee on this board, with great ideas getting multiple rupees
- this is how the team decided on what elements should be included in the game
- the game's unique sense of discovery manifested toward the end of the game’s experimentation phase
- ideas were removed that made the game hard to play the game or that it didn't break the convention in certain ways
- the Great Plateau ended up being a culmination of what the dev team was trying to do
- different cultures within the game and the NPCs were added in later
- Guardians were based off of Octoroks in the original game