Legend of Zelda - Skyward Sword
Company: Nintendo of America
Agency: Domani Studios
Role: Frontend-Development
Nintendo of America - Zelda website design
For me this was a dream project as I had been an avid Zelda gamer as a child. When I heard that my agency was in line to do the North American website, I put my hand up and asked to be held from other projects to lead this one.
The site was once again in Flash and Actionscript. It used Flash to store visual assets, but was fully programmed in Actionscript and utilized an innovative XML dataset that stored not only content, but also asset positioning data. This allowed multiple developers to code the Flash site simultaneously. Up until this point, our engineers needed to pass Flash files around via SVN. We developed a way to merge Flash files and compile multiple engineers work together.
XML Data Structure - More than content
All the Nintedo websites we worked on were Flash frontend, however the content needed to be updated by non-technical people. We created a way for those people to update an XML and we would ingest that file on site load.
Normally, Nintendo sites were in three languages, with three XMLs. Originally we were asked to only do an English Site for this, but two weeks before launch, they wanted Spanish and French added. It was not difficult as it was adding two more XMLs and adjusting the font size per language so the text fit neatly. (Map to the Right was data-driven in XML)
