Mario & Luigi: Dream Team devs on game’s visual style, cut ideas, tutorials, characters
USGamer published an interview with here a few of the Mario & Luigi: Dream Team staff, including producers Yoshihiko Maekawa and Akira Ohtani, its director Hiroyuki Kubota. Topics covered include the game’s visual style, cut ideas, approach to tutorials, and characters.
Read on below for a few excerpts. Alternatively, you can find the full interview over at USGamer.
On the visual style…
Maekawa: This is a pretty simple answer, I suppose. I always thought that Alphadream was really good at designing these 2D sprite characters throughout Mario & Luigi series as well as Tomato Adventures. We always want to play to our strengths in designing those sprites and even though on the 3DS we had the opportunity to go in a slightly different direction, we decided to stay with those sprites because of how useful they were for conveying various kinds of comical expressions. We started early before we knew a lot about the hardware but when we found out it was capable of stereoscopic effect, we knew we wanted to challenge ourselves and have that reflected in the environment of the games somehow. And that was the background of what influenced the creation of the visual style of the game you see right now.
On ideas that didn’t make it into the final game…
Kubota: I think the one idea that really stood out for me was this battle attack in which a lot of Luigis would come together and form a volcano which would then erupt. More Luigis that would then fall on the enemies and damage them. This would have been the Luigi Volcano and we actually did prototype this but we realized it didn’t control very well and it wasn’t as fun as we hoped it would be.
On how most games seem to truncate their tutorials whereas this appears to be the reverse with Mario & Luigi games…
Ohtani: I feel like our approach to the incorporation of tutorials in the series is something we’ve really thought a lot about. It’s really something important to us. For example, we’ve tried to make it so that it works along with the flow of story. And the reason for that is we don’t want to suddenly stop the flow of the game and redirect them to a tutorial corner or area as it breaks the sequence they’ve been experiencing so far. We want it to continue being a part of the journey and feel enjoyable to the players. But we do feel it is necessary because there are a lot of game systems in it. It can be quite complex and we don’t want to lose or alienate any of our players.
On the decision process for Mario & Luigi characters…
Kubota: We have a designer who works on character creation and of the various creations he comes up, we’ll take a look at these and consider the setting and the scenario of the game for what might be the best fit. We have to consider if they have that Mario & Luigi feel. Generally, it’s going to be characters that have the best range of comical expressiveness that we use. We have to send these ideas to Nintendo for their consideration and it’s hard to convey in words how we’ve developed our own intuitive sense for what is considered acceptable or not but a simple phrasing of it is, “fun, but not too twisted” but we always see what we can get away with, nonetheless. We try to push the boundaries a little bit each time though that doesn’t always work.
On getting Dreambert right…
Kubata: The best example of this that I can probably give is Dreambert which was a character that we had to redesign a number of times. The original idea was that we weren’t just going to put a face on a pillow but rather that something would come out of the pillow. The whole thing just seemed too unsettling to many of the people who viewed it and it felt like we weren’t using the idea of the pillow well. So, we had to send back to the drawing board a number of times before we got to the right place.
