dwindled over time, she has come to terms with it. Development Nintendo EPD, an internal division of Nintendo, developed Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch and Wii U. According to series producer Eiji Aonuma, the development team aimed to "rethink the conventions of Zelda". Development started immediately upon the release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011). Aonuma received comments from players who wished to see a more interconnected map to explore the locales between the gameplay areas. In 2013, Nintendo experimented with nonlinear gameplay in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, which was a common point of praise from many outlets. At E3 2014, Aonuma said he planned to reform dungeons and puzzles, two of the series' major gameplay elements, and redesign the game to allow players to reach the end without progressing through the story. As Nintendo had never developed an open-world game on the scale of Breath of the Wild, they looked at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Shadow of the Colossus, the latter of which had some similar climbing mechanics and whose creator, Fumito Ueda, was friends with Aonuma. For the art style, the team drew inspiration from various Japanese anime which they had grown up watching, suspected to include Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki productions, among other anime. Series protagonist Link was redesigned for the game, with Aonuma purposely making him more gender neutral so that players could more easily relate to him. Before full development, the developers designed a playable 2D prototype similar to the original Zelda to experiment with physics-based puzzles. The final game uses a modified version of the Havok physics engine. At the 2017 Game Developers Conference, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, technical director Takuhiro Dohta, and art director Satoru Takizawa held a presentation titled "Change and Constant – Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", during which they demoed the prototype. Aonuma called the physics engine in Breath of the Wild a major development for the Zelda series, saying that it "underpins everything in the world" and makes things operate in a "logical and realistic way", allowing players to approach puzzles and problems in different ways. He expanded on the difficulty in developing this system, recalling how one day during development he entered an area in the game and found that all the objects had been blown away by the wind. In