The game’s environments are built from voxels—three-dimensional blocks that act like pixels in 3D space. By manipulating these voxels dynamically, the developers were able to create highly granular interactions, giving players the feeling of tearing through a richly detailed world. To give a sense of scale, the Canyon layer alone contains roughly 340 million voxels, making destruction both technically impressive and visually rewarding.
In developing Donkey Kong Bananza, Nintendo aimed to make level destruction feel genuinely satisfying, not just functional. Programmer Tatsuya Kurihara explained at GDC that the team realized it’s more fun to destroy something “that doesn’t look like it can be destroyed…that which is beautiful.”