Zelda: The Wind Waker HD took six months to develop

Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma has revealed that it only took six months to develop The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, signalling hope that Nintendo may consider remastering other classics from its extensive back catalogue.

The company had used The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword as technical demonstrations of the potential art direction for the new Zelda Wii U, although Aonuma reasoned that it would have been “a waste” to leave it there.

“I thought it would be a waste to for this to simply be a test of the hardware,” Aonuma explains to 4Gamer. “After that, I was told by staff, that this would not take too much time to develop. It takes a long time to develop a brand new game, so I thought it would be a shame to not have a Zelda game on the Wii U for a while. So I felt like it would be best to deliver something that can be done quickly and began work on the HD version.

“With the original release of Wind Waker, the first half of the game was well received, the later portion on the other hand, needed to be re-evaluated. That was my first time in control of the direction of the game and designing a game from scratch, there were some portions that I wanted to expand upon. If a remake were to happen, I believed I could work on some of those portions.

“It took about 6 months [to develop]. Development was still difficult. You had to consider the difference in hardware at the time. Additionally there is a technique known as toon shading, which gives the game a very animated look. At that time, the technique was established, but had not be used before by our staff, everyone had to do everything by hand.”

[Thanks Zelda Informer]