Donkey Kong Bananza’s Simple Design Trick
How Pauline's narrative system is driven by in-game events.
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There’s a lot to love about Donkey Kong Bananza. It’s the latest entry in Nintendo’s decades-long design exploration of how to find the fun in 3D platforming and action games. Whether it’s Super Mario Galaxy breaking up the pacing into weird and wacky planetoids, to Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s and Tears of the Kingdom in their unrestrained exploration and experimentation. Each entry has given players the tools to interact with the world, and then find joy in often the simplest and most primitive of actions, with Bananza from the very beginning giving players the opportunity to revel in smashing the ever-loving fuck out of everything that is in front of you.
But while I could easily write an entire essay on this philosophy - where the fun is found more in the journey than the destination - instead I want talk about something that’s bound to overlooked. Outside of the smashing, the bashing, the blowing shit up, and turning into a swole ostrich, one of my favourite aspects of Donkey Kong Bananza is the story - and its the simplest trick that Nintendo employs to give this game its feel-good factor.
So let’s dig into what is for me one of the rewarding design tricks Bananza employs, and how it’s a classic game AI technique being put to great use.
Jump Up, Super Star!
Nintendo threw the timeline purists of their fandom into disarray when it announced that DK’s companion in Bananza is none other than Pauline, who more recently appeared as the jazz-fuelled mayor of New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey and of course smashing the other queens of the racetrack in Mario Kart World, but was the original damsel in distress all the way back in the original Donkey Kong in 1981. In Bananza, Pauline is a young woman trying to find her voice, both figuratively and literally.
After being released from her confinement as a stubby little purple rock at the beginning of the game, Pauline takes to being your partner and ally as you smash your way to the centre of the earth. Her singing helps remove obstacles, she helps unlock the special bananza forms, and is a playable character in two player mode.
Voiced by actress and musician Jenny Kidd in the English dub, Pauline not only acts as the audiences surrogate - given she’s the only character who actually speaks human language but somehow also understands everyone else - but she also has her own character development and journey. At the beginning she’s shy, anxious, and rather overwhelmed by the situation she’s found herself in. Not to mention the one thing she brings to the table, her singing voice, is the one thing part of herself she is uncomfortable sharing in larger crowds. But over time as her relationship with Donkey Kong develops, she’s finds her confidence and matures as a person.
And the trick to this is really simple, and so I wanted to highlight how this is achieved, when you can see it in action, and how any game developers with a bit of time and effort to produce something of a similar affect.
Barking Mad
Pauline’s journey is achieved largely through use of a bark system, whereby she utters dialogue at moments throughout the game often corresponding to what’s happening in the current state of the world. Outside of cutscenes, where all of this is carefully planned out, each line of dialogue uttered by Pauline often falls under the same set of rules:
So any line of dialogue that is uttered is driven by three key pieces of information:
An event that has just occurred in the game. This can be everything from…
Jumping into a barrel.
Firing the barrel.
Punching open a challenge door
Entering the challenge room
Leaving the challenge room
Or the most clearly noticeable example, is when you go for a nap to restore hearts.
In each case when you trigger any of these actions, Pauline will trigger some dialogue. And you’ll notice the first few times that you jump into a barrel or complete a challenge with Pauline in tow, she panics, or is unsure of the chosen path.
It’s also about the current state of the game.
What level you’re on dictates the dialogue when you rest. It’s a simple look-up function, that correspond the dialogue with the specific getaway that you’ve unlocked. Plus the writers have deliberately written them such that the earlier ones convey Pauline’s unease, while the latter ones help reinforce her wonder and excitement in each layer of the planet’s core.
Lastly, the state also includes the history of what has occurred up until this point.
As the player makes progress, the state also includes a whole bunch of history. Of how many times you’ve completed a challenge room, or how many times you have jumped into and fired a barrel. So over time when a certain threshold is reached, the line of dialogue for an event is going to switch out. Pauline stops yelling in a panic when you fire out of a cannon, and instead cheers in excitement.
Simple Tricks Convey Intelligence
All of this is a simple trick, and it’s one that any game developer can steal. By simply tracking how many times a specific event occurs, or where that event occurs, you can make characters show development and change.
We’ve talked about this in other examples over the years, be it how Alien: Isolation’s xenomorph doesn’t learn, it simply unlocks sub-trees of behaviour as the number of times an event occurs reaches a threshold. But also there’s plenty of other examples of using the audio, the ‘barks’, to convey information to the player.
As discussed in our AI 101 episode on barks first published on YouTube back in 2022, this is a common tactic for sharing information. As we discussed in the episode, Call of Duty 2 is perhaps one of the earliest examples of this at scale, with around 20,000 lines of dialogue in the game, with much of it being put through a bark system that selected them based on the current mission and what was happening in the moment. Meanwhile games like God of War use the system such that your companion NPC Atreus reacts to combat, but also gives hints during puzzles, and even Hades uses pretty much what Donkey Kong Bananza is doing for an entire dialogue and conversation system.
Closing
Sometimes you don’t need a fancy dialogue tree, or a large language model. Donkey Kong Bananza shows that even now, with but a simple rule-based system, a bunch of metadata, and some good writers, you can add a lot of depth to an otherwise ancillary part of your game.