Dylan Cuthbert Recalls StarFox SNES Development with Miyamoto

StarFox designer Dylan Cuthbert spoke this week at GDC about his experiences working with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto.

The Q-Games founder recalled the development of the original SNES entry in the StarFox series, where they "were very cocky British programmers, thrown into this Japanese environment" and had intended to make a full 3D shooting game akin to Starglider 2.

However during the process Miyamoto advised the team that "No idea must go into a game, even if they are good ideas."

Cuthbert said the team had to "grin and bear it" due to the language barrier and working with Nintendo, but "if we had been in Britain we would have been like 'no, screw that.'"

Confused, "Miyamoto would add ideas, and then remove them. And it felt like we weren't really getting anywhere". The original concept was a 3D roaming game, but Miyamoto said "we're going to limit it. It's going to be on rails, and it's going to be fun and playable and a Nintendo game."

The change from first-person to third-person "make it fun to maneuver between buildings, and allowed the barrel roll to be visible and intuitive", during a time where "all British 3D games were first-person to be more immersive".

In our Starglider concept, you couldn't really see lasers coming from behind you and it could be very hard to find where the enemies were in 3D space. It was a very difficult process for the player," explained Cuthbert. "[the change] allowed us to make much better boss battles; you were always flying forward and you could always see the boss.

The intervention by Miyamoto showed the designer that "you can build ideas and then, by destroying them, find other ideas hiding in the shadows."

What do you think of the development process with Star Fox  and the interventions from Miyamoto?