Don't be deceived: the reason why these plans look nice is because of the team structure of the Zelda project. The design team spent a lot of time drawing up po

Don't be deceived: the reason why these plans look nice is because of the team structure of the Zelda project. The design team spent a lot of time drawing up polished graphics and layouts and then "threw it over the fence" for implementation, in waterfall fashion. This is still a common practice within Japanese teams, as evidenced by, for example, Mighty No. 9's documentary, where you can witness an entire level constructed in Microsoft Excel. [0] The separation of roles is not a definite downside if the game design is already well-understood, and American teams have flirted with big up-front design on occasion, but tend to lean towards making sure everyone stays hands-on and can test and iterate independently. One of the stories about Zelda that appears in interviews is that the second quest is the result of a miscommunication about how much space was available: They could have had a single quest that was twice as big. The main direct advantage of drawing everything out is that you can quickly explore different types of setups(relative scales, positioning, iconography, etc.) and do a few passes of testing on it before committing it to code, for the same reasons that one might do wireframing and mockups for application UI. [0] https://youtu.be/Ri4bV3Z186Q?t=249 https://youtu.be/Ri4bV3Z186Q?t=249