Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s developers on series fatigue and the importance of diversity

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf postmortem was among GDC 2014′s most popular talks yesterday.

Nintendo’s Katsuya Eguchi and Aya Kyugoku argued that Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s diverse team led to the game’s huge audience, during their GDC 2014 keynote. With 7.38 million copies sold to date, the game was so popular in Japan that Eguchi revealed that it was a struggle for his own daughter to find a copy, despite being the producer of the game.

Kyugoku, the first female game designer at Nintendo EAD, describe the way that although women were “still in the minority” more and more were joining the department. “The percentages are evening out,” she said. “For the Animal Crossing: New Leaf team, almost half of those involved were women. When I started it was common to be the only woman on the team, but I have come to discover that when women are in a variety of roles you get a wider opinion and range of ideas; I have experienced how beneficial it is to have diversity on your team.”

The diversity of the team was leveraged by allowing the whole team to share ideas for animals, furniture and so on by providing sketches to the designer regardless of their personal role. “By doing this we opened ourselves up to a variety of tastes and things people like from a variety of male and female staffers from a variety of ages,” said Kyugoku. “This is not something we could achieve if only one person had been given the task.”

The core of the Animal Crossing series is communication, said Kyugoku, from the original GameCube title, where players would share a town and leave notes, up to New Leaf, where players share screenshots across social networks. She said that they hoped the title helped “harmonize relationships in the real world.”

Nintendo’s Kyugoku explained that the Animal Crossing series is about communication – and that there was an unusual lack of tension on the team during New Leaf’s development.

In fact, she claimed that during the latter days of developing New Leaf, her team was told they “didn’t have the sense of tension other teams have at that point.”

“I feel that may have something to do with the subdued mood of the game, but also because the game is about improving communication,” she said. “When testing the game, the team celebrated holidays such as Christmas, and at barbecues and other parties, we’d go around asking for the highest turnip prices and contribute to each other’s public works. Even though we were testing, if felt like we were playing the actual product.”

She joked: “If you are experiencing high development stress on your team, I would be really happy if you would share Animal Crossing with them!”

Kyugoku did admit however that in the beginning, development of New Leaf was challenged by the feeling of series fatigue that players had from City Folk. “The DS version sold ten times what the GameCube version sold,” she said. “So we mistakenly stayed the course for the Wii version, even though that’s the time we should have been making changes.”

Acknowledging the dangers of series fatigue, Nintendo said that New Leaf has to be a reimagining rather than a sequel.

She compared the changes they had to make as similar to Nintendo’s reimagining of Zelda with the most recent 3DS title A Link Between Worlds. “It wasn’t as simple as adding more content, but we had to be aware that overhauling it completely would make something that wasn’t part of the series.”

Eguchi closed the session by choosing to stress the importance of diversity. “When I began the Animal Crossing franchise I wanted to make sure that the content allowed all players to express their individuality,” he said. “In making sure the team was various people from various backgrounds… in hindsight, seeing how diverse the fans are I feel we have taken the right path.”

Considering Nintendo as a whole, Eguchi added: “It was necessary to be flexible in building the team – the diversity is not limited to developing one game, but to expand the kind of games we develop.”

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