Take A Look At The First SNES Mini Developer Interview From Nintendo

The SNES Mini, or SNES Classic Edition, will be launching very soon and Nintendo has posted up a developer interview on their website. The interesting interview is with Shigeru Miyamoto, Takaya Imamura, and Tsuyoshi Watanabe and the main focus is on Star Fox and Star Fox 2.

Miyamoto explains, his desire to use polygons to make a three-dimensional game, Watanabe talks about the difficulties with the designs and the Nintendo employee’s explain the design behind the console, amongst other intriguing bits of info.

Miyamoto: And the design of the round ends, where you hold it, makes it easier for small children to grip the controller wherever they want. We shaped it that way so it would be easy to hold for any hand size.

Watanabe-san, you did polygon design. What difficulties did you encounter?

Watanabe: Even with the Super FX chip, Super NES had a lot of constraints. Rendering any design you like in polygons results in processing overload. So when rendering starfighters, I went through a process of trial and error in order to make the direction their noses were pointing clear with the smallest number of polygons possible.

Miyamoto: Each new polygon vertex increases the processing burden. So I investigated how many vertices I could show on one screen beforehand. As a result, I made many buildings square or triangular and made enemies with as few polygons as possible, with flat shapes so they could fly in any direction.

Check it out the full (and lengthy) interview here.

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