Monolith Soft has been Nintendo’s greatest acquisition in gaming, and the company has seen massive growth in terms of scope, scale, projects and productivity and becoming the go-to studio for Nintendo when it comes to heavy lifting on a number of projects, while also putting in a ton of work on their own franchises like Xenoblade.
Recently, CGWorld conducted an interview with various members of Monolith Soft’s team, giving us some unique insight into how the studio operates, the goals they have, and what to expect from their output in the future. A summary of details from the interview below, with thanks to Stealth40k
- Programmer Takashi Shibahara says Monolith Soft is a bottom-up, not a top-down, workplace
- superiors leave it up to the employees to decide on their own initiative
- superiors also try to listen to employee opinions as much as possible
- quality of a game is directly related to how much individual creativity and ingenuity is incorporated
- previously, Monolith Soft developers managed to do 1,000 to 2,000 assets by hand
- in recent years, the number of assets needed has increased to 100,000, which was impossible to keep up with via manual work
- Monolith Soft has used procedural technology to automatically generate up to 70% of assets
- the devs will then adjust the remaining 30% by hand, leading to a significant reduction in work
- Monolith Soft’s Yoichi Akizuki says procedural technology will be very important for their future games
- Monolith Soft’s Mitsuhiro Hirose says the studio is working on a cityscape generation system (seen above)
- the goal is to put this cityscape generation system into a game soon
- developers place grey boxes where they want and by pressing one button, the city will generate
- an appropriate number of floors are auto calculated from the height of the boxes
- Monolith Soft’s Mitsuhiro Hirose detailed how the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 scene above was created, with calculated movements using a procedural method in Houdini
- after that, the output movement was used in VAT for playback
- scenes that would normally take an enormous amount of time to create manually can be produced efficiently by creating an algorithm that lets people walk to their destination without bumping into each other
All of this is fascinating and leaved us wondering what else the future will bring for Monolith Soft
