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Yoshi's Crafted World's dev team discusses where they came up with the flip-side mechanic

Catch you on the flip-side
by rawmeatcowboy
27 April 2019
GN Version 5.0

Nintendo Dream recently sat down with the dev team for Yoshi's Crafted World to talk about numerous elements of the project. In the snippet below, you can read up on how the flip-side mechanic first came into play. The full interview includes comments from Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka, Nobuo Matsumiya, and Emi Watanabe, as well as Good Feel's Etsunobu Ebisu and Masahiro Yamamoto .

We first started talking to Nintendo before the release of the Switch. At that time Nintendo asked us if we wanted to make something new for the Yoshi series. I wasn’t involved in the previous Kirby and Yoshi games, so this was my first time working with Nintendo on a game. I first had to think about how we could make the traditional Yoshi something new for the Nintendo Switch hardware, also thinking about all the necessary play elements. Man, it was a while before we started talking about crafting… (All laugh) Because the concept of the Switch is that it’s fun alone but you can also take it out with you to enjoy with friends, I really wanted to incorporate this into the Yoshi game too. I was thinking about the potential uses of a home console you can take outside with you. For example, what about if when you brought two consoles together one player could complete the front course at the same time as the other play completes the reverse side. Because all of these players gathered together would have a different view, they could exchange tactics and information to complete the course. That was the first thing I wanted to do.

Yoshi is traditionally a side scrolling 2D adventure. But then if you are going to be playing the front and reverse sides but they don’t look any different, that wouldn’t be fun at all. Plus we also needed to design a unique aesthetic. That’s where the idea of a ‘crafted’ world came in. I thought if we made this a world of crafting and made it so that the reverse of the world was also visible this would give the feeling of two whole parts of the game, one front and one back.

[Link]