- ten people were involved with the sound development
- 5 on sound effects and system, 5 composing
- the first year and a half was spent on instrumentation and a general sound base
- the last sound effects person was added to the team this year
- no other game from Nintendo has ever had 10 sound devs
- 22 devs worked on landforms
- this was the most for a Zelda game ever, as well as a Nintendo game
- the sky travel was designed as a way for players to travel from dense location to dense location
- the team was inspired by Super Mario games and their stage select screens
- this lead to the creation of Skyloft as a base, and the idea of Link jumping down to the areas below
- Fujibayash saw skydiving on TV, which lead to thinking of implementation for a Zelda game
- originally the travel involved jumping from a huge tower
- you would climb up and jump off, repeat
- the higher you climb, the farther you could fly
- the dev team considered adding a bird that would automatically take you to your destination
- when Aonuma saw the early game from the beginning, he thought it wasn't good at all
- Aonuma pushed Iwamoto to focus on the beginning and make sure things made an impact for the player
- Miyamoto saw the early beginning and asked just what the dev team had been doing all this time!
- Miyamoto says the beginning has to be good or you lose players right away
- Aonuma feels development was harder than ever with this title
- the dev team had a new tool they could use to handle things like character dialog and timing on their own instead of using various people
- Miyamoto told Aonuma he originally put in too much text
- Skyloft was made as a place to prepare for your adventure and to explore at a more laid-back pace
- the bazaar houses many shopping/game mechanics in order to make the process quick and easy
- early on, the designers drew up concept images for the sky and proposed multiple ideas with it
- Batreaux is an example of an idea that cropped up early on that made it into the final game
- great attention was paid to creating wind sounds, with 5 designers splitting up to work on different wind effects
- you can play the harp as you walk and play along with background music
- Mario Club Co. Ltd recorded all the event scenes to check sounds
- once a week, the devs held leader meetings to keep things straight
- changing the placements of enemies even slightly could alter the landforms in a big way
- the team could stay focused on such a huge project due to there being just 4 worlds, although all of them very dense

Thanks to Tingle for the heads up!