Nintendo’s latest Ask the Developer feature interviews the Kirby and the Forgotten Land’s dev team

Nintendo’s rolled out an “Iwata Asks” inspired Ask The Developer feature for three games before this, and with Kirby and the Forgotten Land out tomorrow it’s time for the deal at HAL Laboratory and Nintendo to spill on how Kirby’s first 3D adventure came to be.

The huge article was first released in Japanese only but is now available on the Nintendo Australia website as well. We’ll just pick out some highlights – it’s well worth the full read.

The feature covers four chapters, but questions about how only now are we getting a full 3D platformer for Kirby, and how they finally got it to work are the most interesting.

HAL Laboratory’s General Director Shinya Kumazaki, on the struggle to get a mainline Kirby game on a home console.

Looking back on the history of the Kirby series, there was a period of time where certain game concepts simply refused to come together. As a result, we weren’t able to release a mainline Kirby game on a home console for a little over a decade. We kept hitting walls we couldn’t climb over.

From that point on, our game prototypes shifted to a “trial-and-error” approach. We played with unconventional gameplay angles through comparatively smaller games in the series (3) as a way to further explore the concept of a Kirby-based 3D platformer.

We still had plenty of unique challenges to overcome, though. Some in HAL Laboratory even felt that only 2D games should count as “real” Kirby games, so to speak, so we weren’t able to reach a point where we could deliver a complete 3D-platforming mainline Kirby title.

They even had trouble figuring out how to make sure you knew Kirby was facing the right way. After all, he looks the same in most directions.

Also related to Kirby’s movement was giving players some grace in making sure Kirby’s hits land, even if he’s not facing exactly the right way.

Other tricks that the developers coined, like “Fuzzy Landing” made it so Kirby wouldn’t fly if he was close to the ground so a double jump could be performed.

There’s so much more to this interview that you should read it all. It’ll help pass time until Kirby, and the Forgotten Land is released tomorrow. 

You could also read our review.