This month’s issue of EDGE magazine has a short interview with the developers for Yoshi’s Woolly World. They spoke with Nintendo producer Takashi Tezuka and executive producer Etsunobu Ebisu from Good-Feel about the unique visual style featured in the game.
Tezuka started by speaking about Yoshi’s Woolly World’s art style in general:
We’ve always felt that Yoshi deserves to have a handcrafted feel to the graphics, and we’ve strived to bring this into games like Yoshi’s Island and Yoshi’s Story. With those previous titles, it was just that – an aesthetic – and didn’t really have much influence on the gameplay itself.
Next, Tezuka explained the decision to use wool in the title, and how the graphics had an impact on the gameplay:
We decided to use wool in Yoshi’s Woolly World since we felt we’d be able to provide some interesting mechanics and gameplay that we weren’t able to do in previous games. But it was also the toughest challenge we’ve faced!
Finally, Ebisu revealed that the team created real items with wool for testing, before implementing them in the game:
Actually making real items using wool to test our representations in the game was obviously necessary, but it took a huge amount of time! We made these while we were establishing which direction to go with for the graphics, for example.
Yoshi’s Woolly World is set for release in Europe on June 26, while North America and Japan will be receiving the game later, this fall.