Nintendo made a Zelda-themed social media service to aid Tears of the Kingdom development

There are certain things Nintendo diehards know, and one of them is that Nintendo always does things their own way. Turns out that includes literally how they talk to one another during game development.

At the Computer Entertainment Development Conference (CEDEC) in Japan, Nintendo hosted a panel on the development of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that was hosted by director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and engineer Kenichi Hirose. The pair detailed just how Tears of the Kingdom got made, and gave a look at the development workflow.

According to the duo, the order of operations for Tears of the Kingdom’s development went Drawing Board > Implementation > Playtest after reaching a milestone > Data collection > Analysis. This cycle would repeat until Nintendo had everything in place for Link’s next big adventure.

Apparently the approach was definitely helpful, but the last three steps in the cycle proved to be a bit bumpy. Early on, the team realized they needed away to smooth out these steps, which led to them creating a virtual bulletin board system, which Nintendo dubbed the “Rupee Bulletin Board.” This amounted to an in-house social media platform where devs could share their feedback on the game in real-time, and anyone using the service could mark posts with rupees to show their agreement.

The Rupee Bulletin Board was meant for sharing opinions on facts about the game, rather than impressions of how things felt. Along with that, social media service also had a “no-argument” rule, with rupee distribution meant to signify suggestions and conversation that had merit to them.