The fastest player to beat the game Donkey Kong Bananza, as of now, is a runner going by Vytox, who finished the game in just under an hour. In fact, players have so thoroughly optimized Bananza that even runners who chose to play in categories that involve beating all bosses and collecting all Bananza forms can do it in not too much more time than that. That’s crazy fast for a game with so many literal layers, and is possible because runners have invented all sorts of tricks to speed their way through levels and even fly through the sky in ways that were pretty clearly not intended by the developers.
And yet, it turns out that the Donkey Kong Bananza developers have been watching all along.
I learned this when I spoke to producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara this week at the Game Developers Conference, following their talk at the show: Constructive Destruction: Fusing Voxel Tech and 3D Action Platforming in ‘Donkey Kong Bananza.’ While their talk focused on the ways in which they encouraged the player to do things like destroy terrain and discover hidden treasures, I followed up with them by asking how they prevented players from doing things they weren’t supposed to do — especially in a game that was so open ended.
Motokura initially responded by telling me that unlike previous games the team has designed, Bananza had a lot more things about the player experience that the developers were unable to anticipate when designing.
“In that sense, we have to give them the play space they can enjoy and everything else would be essentially unreachable,” Motokura said. He gave as examples surfaces that Donkey Kong couldn’t climb, as well as other engineering solutions that made some things simply impossible. I was reminded, for instance, of one of the major barriers remaining in Donkey Kong speedruns: an inability to proceed through a certain boss battle if you haven’t yet broken Pauline out of her Odd Rock prison.
I followed up by asking if they found it was getting harder and harder as time went on to block players from getting into things that the designers wanted them to stay out of. Motokura responded in the affirmative: “To answer your question very briefly, it is getting very hard to keep players from going all over the place. But certainly we take those sorts of things into account as well.”
And indeed, this team in some ways almost appears to have conceded in this battle somewhat. I recalled the Super Mario Odyssey team placing coins up in hard-to-reach places anticipating that players would find savvy ways to jump up there. Bananza, similarly, has special dialogue if the player manages to skip their way to the end of the Racing Layer without going for a Rambi ride.
Motokura alluded to this as well in his answer. “Sometimes there are sequence breaks in game that you can, once you learn about them, design around so that there is a gameplay experience on the other side of that sequence break. And certainly when we see players who actually get to those areas and experience those parts, we look around at each other and say, ‘I’m really glad we made that.'”
Later in the interview, I asked both developers if there was anything players had done since the release that surprised them. Kurihara told me he was surprised that so many people try to break every single voxel on a given layer. He knew this was possible, of course, but didn’t think so many people would do it.
Motokura called back to the speedruns: “One thing that really surprised me, and this is maybe going back to the discussion of the sequence break that we had a little bit earlier, was the surprising ways that people are using voxels for movement, not just double jump, but other movement techniques entirely that they discovered on their own to get to some very interesting places.”
So yes, Donkey Kong Bananza’s designers have seen the silly things people are doing to cross massive gaps and speed across stages, and while they stopped short of condoning the behavior, Motokura at least seemed mildly amused by it. As the team eventually moves to future games, it will be interesting to see if they embrace the chaos or continue to try and find cheeky ways to acknowledge player tricks while simultaneously gating off certain paths.
You can read our full interview with Motokura and Kurihara right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
