In the latest developer interview for Donkey Kong Bananza, Nintendo showed two screenshots of an early version of the game running on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

While the level depicted in the screenshots is generally the same, the Switch 2 version has considerably more floral and other on-screen elements as compared to the Switch version.

Nintendo developers also shared that the game moved to Nintendo Switch 2 sometime in 2021, and that the increased performance of the Switch 2 enabled several scrapped gameplay ideas to return, as well as gameplay in 60 FPS, rather than 30 FPS.

Check out the screenshots and details below:

Speaking of what’s changed since Super Mario Odyssey, Donkey Kong Bananza is being released as a Nintendo Switch 2 game. Given the development timeline, was it planned as a Switch 2 game from the beginning?

Motokura: We originally began developing Donkey Kong Bananza on Nintendo Switch, but we ran into some challenges. I think it was around 2021 when we started to think about moving development to Switch 2.

Watanabe: We first looked into how we could upgrade what we’d originally built for Switch to take advantage of Switch 2. One of the most obvious improvements was that we could place far more objects in the environment than before. Being able to place more objects in the terrain didn’t just enhance the game’s visual richness. More importantly, it increased the amount of things players could destroy, which amplified the exhilaration of being able to demolish anything and everything. That went hand in hand with the game’s core concept of destruction. It convinced us that this game would be even more fun if we developed it for Switch 2.

Tanaka: From a programmer’s perspective, voxel technology is well-suited for creating gameplay centered around destruction. However, it also uses a lot of system memory, and we faced the challenge of Switch not having enough to support everything we wanted to do. I’ll explain with some simple arithmetic. If you’re asked to double the size of a 1 × 1 pixel image in both width and height, you end up with a 2 × 2 image, which means four times as many pixels. But when you do the same with voxels, you’ve got width and height, but also depth to contend with. So, doubling all three dimensions gives you 2 × 2 × 2, or eight times the data. It may sound simple to just “double something,” but the reality is that memory usage, voxel density, and all kinds of processes end up gobbling up eight times the resources. It was clear that the memory available on Switch would struggle to handle that load, and we felt that manifesting the huge volume of terrain that we did in this game might have been unachievable on that platform. With the move to Switch 2, we gained not only more memory but also greater processing capacity. That gave us the freedom to incorporate gameplay ideas we’d previously abandoned because they were too demanding. When we got down to trying it, we discovered that not only could it handle the heavy processing requirements, but it also ran at 60 fps (10). Things we’d given up on, like explosions flinging large objects or causing them to collapse, were now possible. Designers could also place as many objects as they wanted. There were so many moments when we thought to ourselves, “Now we can really do this.”

(10) Frames per second. This value represents the number of images (frames) that are displayed per second on the game screen. Thirty fps means that 30 images are displayed per second, while 60 fps indicates 60 images per second. The higher the number, the smoother the image.

Watanabe: As well as running at a smooth 60 fps, the core gameplay of smashing got way more satisfying.

The physics of smashing involve lots of things all happening at once. Donkey Kong throws a punch, the terrain and objects break apart, and visual effects show debris flying outward. All of that is packed into a single moment. At 30 fps, we couldn’t fully capture everything that happens in that instant. But at 60 fps, we saw that sense of destruction coming through much more clearly. We thought to ourselves, “Now we’ve got something seriously satisfying!” Not only did Switch 2 enable the game to run well, it unlocked the game’s full potential – no, it made the game possible.

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