Splatoon devs on how Miyamoto wasn’t satisfied with the game’s original ideas
EDGE brought us a whole bunch of information about Splatoon in its latest issue. One topic covered by the magazine was the game’s development, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s thoughts on its early days.
Co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi, producer Hisashi Nogami, and director Yusuke Amano spoke with EDGE about how Miyamoto wasn’t originally pleased with what the team had come up with Splatoon. Here’s what the three developers shared:
[After] the prototype phase, we had all these ideas about the height, the ink, the characters, and the image of the character and the squid. But we couldn’t kind of filter it down to a final result that would result in a simple, fun game. And during this period, we were being scolded by Mr Miyamoto all the time.
He was saying, ‘I don’t understand. What do you want to do? There’s no appeal to this game.’
We had the basics and then we were like, ‘Let’s add the hiding [in ink] feature; let’s add jumping; we need height, because it’s a 3D map.’ And then we thought, ‘We need to be able to shoot up and down.’ And we realised we’d added all this stuff, and we got confused. We didn’t know what the game was about.
Splatoon launches for Wii U on May 29.
