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Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts screenshot

This week we travelled to Microsoft's campus in Reading to check out how Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is coming along. While we were there, we chatted to two members of Rare's development team, lead technical artist Neill Harrison and senior animator Elissa Miller. Here's what they had to say on one of our most anticipated 360 exclusives of the year.

VideoGamer.com: This game is quite a departure from the previous Banjo titles. Is the platform genre dying out, do you think? There are a lot of in-game jokes at the expense of "old-fashioned" platform games.

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Elissa Miller: I'm not sure if it's that - I think we just felt that another platform-specific game might be a bit boring. We thought we needed to be a bit more innovative. We look at it as an evolution of the platform game. I guess [the genre] had its peak in the late '90s, and now we're in the '00s we're trying to bring it up to date with more elements. I think today it's about owning your gaming and just having fun with it - you make your own game, really. That's what we've been trying to do with this, with the build-your-own vehicles. It's more your experience, rather the developer's experience for the gamers.

VideoGamer.com: Between this game, Spore and LittleBigPlanet, it feels that user-generated content is the big trend at the moment. What's your take on that?

EM: Every type of media evolves. Now it's just a different type of gaming. I guess everything is... like in your home, you've got your Xbox and that plays games or DVDs - it's your own experience. That's maybe gone back into developing games where you're trying to create the player's own experience.

Neill Harrison: It's interesting that a lot of developers have simultaneously done this. Certainly on our part we started the development before we knew about those games, and I'm sure they started before they knew about us. So it's strange that we all started to go down this route at the same time. I don't know why it happened, but it is interesting!

VideoGamer.com: What challenges does this pose to developers? It seems that the player is now heavily included in the way the game actually works, as opposed to just playing it.

EM: You've got to make bigger worlds, obviously, and they have to be interesting. The testing side of things is also a big challenge. You have people making their own game and their own vehicles, so how do you test that?

NH: Balancing the game is much harder than if it were a linear experience. Every time someone plays a challenge they'll do it differently, whereas in previous games you'd have 50 testers playing the levels and it'd be the same each time - jump here, grab this. It's much harder to test a game like this, but it's been testing for a long time now and we've certainly fixed an awful lot of bugs.

VideoGamer.com: Have there been any major changes made to the game during the testing period?

NH: Not that much has actually changed. We came up with the idea that we wanted to let people build their own vehicles out of components and then let them choose how they want to complete the task - and that's still very much the core of the game right now. The biggest challenge was probably the vehicle editor, trying to make it functional and very powerful but also easy to use. I mean, the whole concept of being able to build things in 3D, being able to move components in three dimensions and rotate them about every axis - that's something that could be quite complicated for the average person. So that went through a lot of changes to get it as simple as possible. But we're quite proud of that now, there's not much more we could have done to make it easy to build vehicles.

VideoGamer.com: The vehicle editor now uses an invisible grid to determine where components are placed in relation to each other. So far this seems like a pretty smart way of keeping things simple without limiting creativity. Did the editor always work this way?

EM: No. Well, I mean we've always had the grid, but in older versions you had to keep all the components attached at all times, otherwise they would fall and drop to the bottom of the screen. I remember this massive moment at some point during last year where I thought, "I don't want to play it like this." I wanted it to be like my Lego, where I'd be able to lay out the blocks in front of me on the floor, or wherever, and then decide where they went. So that's kind of evolved from where it was before. It's always been there, but all sort of tweaks have gone into it. We also looked at the way it related to game progression, so you can always get through challenges but equally we don't throw too many components at you.

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