Overview
- Programmer Tatsuya Kurihara and producer Kenta Motokura delivered the talk on March 11 in a packed Moscone Center hall, Nintendo’s only GDC presentation.
- Kurihara said each voxel stores data such as density, material properties, damage, and wetness, with polygon meshes generated dynamically to keep performance near 60 frames per second.
- Scale figures shared at the talk included a Canyon layer of about 340 million voxels and an average level containing 347,070,464 individually destructible voxels.
- The team pursued a “voxel everything” approach, evolving Super Mario Odyssey prototypes into mechanics that let players rip off terrain chunks to throw or place.
- Motokura cited Super Mario Bros. world 1-2 as a design touchstone for broad interaction, while Kurihara underscored that “it is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful.”