Before Dylan Cuthbert made a name for himself with his PixelJunk games, he helped create a Nintendo franchise: Star Fox. But, the SNES shooter had quite the troubled development. And at GDC last week, Cuthbert revealed that if it weren't because of the language barrier, Star Fox could have been a terrible game.

Star Fox originally started off as a first-person 3D flight game called Starglider. While it was technologically impressive, Shigeru Miyamoto thought that it wasn't a "Nintendo quality" game. He recommended taking away many key elements of Starglider's original design, namely 3D flight and the first-person perspective.

Cuthbert was hesitant to follow those suggestions, but "because of the language barrier" between Cuthbert's English-speaking team and Nintendo's Japanese team, he couldn't object. The end result, he realized, was something that made the game much better.

For example, moving from full 3D flight to on-rails 2D flight helped make the game more fun and allowed for "more refined, tuned controls." The move also "helped us find the barrel roll," one of the most iconic moves of the franchise. It also allowed the team to create more fun boss battles. Another happy side-effect of removing full 3D flight was a faster framerate.

Starglider was originally a first-person game, but the move to third-person allowed easier maneuvering between buildings, and allowed the game to easily show off wing damage. It also made the iconic barrel roll "visible and intuitive," Cuthbert pointed out.

The main takeaway from Star Fox's development is that "nothing must go into a game, not even if they are good ideas." Cuthbert says that it's good to "build ideas then destroy them," because you may "discover better ones hiding in the shadows."

That lesson was taken to heart in PixelJunk Monsters, he said. In one of the earliest versions of that game, players were able to melee enemies directly. However, that "took focus away from the core element," which was making the game more "passive." PixelJunk Shooter also originally featured a standard HP system. But by taking that feature away, it led to the unique overheating mechanics that made their shooter so unique and compelling.