Game developers seem to be cautiously opening up about re-using assets once again. Over the past year, prominent voices across the industry—including former Far Cry and Assassin's Creed director Alex Hutchinson, Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki, and IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak—have spoken candidly about why recycling game assets (whether 3D models, sound effects, or other productions) is essential for sustainable development. That openness is significant: for years, vocal segments of the player base have pushed back hard whenever re-used models surfaced, but the realities of shipping large-scale games at a manageable pace have effectively overtaken that criticism.
Now even Nintendo—typically tight-lipped about its development processes—appears willing to join the conversation. At the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming, a presentation on Donkey Kong Bananza covered how the studio built its destructible voxel environments. Programmer Tatsuya Kurihara walked attendees through a custom pipeline his team developed that let Bananza's artists rapidly convert 3D-animated sculptures into fully destructible in-game objects.
How voxels enabled a juicy gameplay loop in Donkey Kong Bananza
Kurihara illustrated the pipeline using the head of Bananza antagonist Void Kong as a working example. A model is built in Maya, converted into voxel data in Houdini, and then "voxelized" at runtime to generate in-game polygons. The result isn't Void Kong himself—it's a massive, destructible piece of terrain carved in his likeness, comparable to the presidential faces at Mt. Rushmore (known to the Sioux Nation, which maintains its territorial claim to the mountain, as "Six Grandmothers").
The stone effigy serves a dual narrative purpose: a monument to Void Kong's outsized ego, and a satisfying target for players to pummel. "The shapes of items and enemies, as well as iconic terrain within levels are all created using this system," Kurihara said.
Seeing Void Kong's character model alongside its voxelized terrain counterpart naturally raised the question of whether the character model itself had been repurposed for the effigy. In a follow-up interview with Kurihara and producer Kenta Motokura, Kurihara declined to confirm whether Void Kong's head was a direct case of asset recycling—but he did confirm that Nintendo's Maya-to-Houdini pipeline is designed precisely to take existing 3D assets and reuse them as voxel environments.
The voxelization workflow, Kurihara explained, emerged later in Bananza's development—after the programming team handed artists and designers their own voxel creation tools. The results surprised even him. "That leads to a situation where the artists or the level designer will start chugging away, and they'll create this complex voxel design that even I, as the creator, [would say] 'I didn't know you could create something so complicated in this level editor.'"
That creativity, in turn, pushed the engineering team to iterate. "It got me thinking—'well, what kind of features can I add to make this process easier?'" After working with the tools, artists came back requesting the ability to "shave" voxels directly. The team built that feature. Artists could then either sculpt assets explicitly intended for voxelization, or feed existing character and object models through the pipeline to generate destructible versions.
What makes Nintendo's approach noteworthy isn't asset reuse per se—that's common practice. It's how the method extends the lifecycle of a 3D model well beyond its original purpose. Conventional asset recycling typically means carrying assets across multiple games: the robotic enemies in Horizon Forbidden West, for example, re-used animations from Horizon Zero Dawn with minimal modification. More creative reuse can happen within a single game—The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim famously generated end tables by sinking bookshelf models into the floor, trimming the total asset count needed for interior spaces.
Bananza's pipeline pushes the concept further still. By converting existing objects and characters into destructible terrain, Nintendo isn't just filling space more efficiently—it's folding those assets directly into core gameplay. An object that was never "meant" to be destroyed becomes something players actively interact with and demolish.
That tension, it turns out, aligns neatly with a design principle the team discovered through iteration: destruction is more satisfying when the target looks like it shouldn't be destroyed. Or, as Kurihara put it—drawing laughter from the packed San Francisco room—"It is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful."
Game Developer and GDC Festival of Gaming are sibling organizations under Informa Festivals.
Bryant Francis is a writer, journalist, and narrative designer based in Boston, MA. He currently writes for Game Developer, a leading B2B publication for the video game industry. His credits include Proxy Studios' 4X strategy game Zephon, Iron Anchor Studios' Down With The Ship, and Amplitude Studio's 2017 game Endless Space 2.