Splatoon – devs didn’t want to make a dumbed-down shooter, prototype, and more
Kotaku has another round of quotes up from the developers of Splatoon. Specifically, Tsubasa Sakaguchi and Hisashi Nogami weighed in, and there’s a little bit from Shigeru Miyamoto as well.
Here’s what was shared:
Sakaguchi on not wanting to make a dumbed-down shooter…
“We didn’t make this game with the idea that we wanted to make a simplified shooter or a dumbed-down shooter or anything like that.”
Nogami on Splatoon’s prototype…
“So that prototype was this game where you had four black blocks and four white blocks and they were shooting at each other and trying to control territory. Everyone played that prototype, and we all had a great reaction to it. Everyone thought it was fun, so we decided to present it to [senior Nintendo game designer] Mr. Miyamoto, Mr. Tezuka, Mr. Eguchi and kind of had a few back and forths with them a few times before we got to the point where, ‘Okay, we should make this into a game.”
Miyamoto on the team behind Splatoon…
“That’s being made by some very young members of the group. They’re having a lot of freedom to create the game that they want.”
Nogami on how the team plays other shooters…
“We definitely play those types of games. There’s definitely guys on our staff who are super into shooters. We definitely play other games and other company’s hardware. We do that as part of our jobs and we also do that because we’re gamers and love to play games.”
Sakaguchi’s observation about what made him optimistic about the game…
“For me, what made me realize this could really be something was when we had that prototype and had that four on four with spraying the ink. I noticed the people playing would all take a different tactic. You might have some person who would just rush to the front and try and attack the other team as much as possible. You might have someone who would hang back and try to cover as much territory as possible. So, when I saw kind of people’s personalities and play styles were coming out in this game, even though it was a game built around very simple objectives, [that] made me feel like, ok, this could really be something.”
On the Splatoon developers’ priorities…
“We want to make sure that action of spraying the ink around feels really really good…Just that feeling of shooting some ink and having it splash on the ground and splatter everywhere and be shiny and be bubbling up, the sound of that the graphics of that—everyone on the team is working really, really hard to make sure that feels really great when you do it.”
