Fujii: ...There were seven programmers in total, and I primarily worked on the boss and enemies: their sprites, hitboxes, etc. Samus alone took so much data to animate and draw, there was a single programmer dedicated just to working on her—that's how big and involved the Super Metroid development was.
There were a huge number of enemies, too, and one day I had an insight about that: I should make a "Programming Tool" for the designers, and I did. It allowed the designers to input their graphics/sprite data directly into the tool, and it would automatically convert that into actual source code, complete with collision detection data. There were so many designers working on Super Metroid, and everyone had their own way of doing things… I knew if they each did their own thing it would be a huge problem down the road. So I developed this tool to help set some rules and unify their process.
