Splatoon

In case you've been living under a rock, Splatoon is Nintendo's much-anticipated upcoming multiplayer third-person-shooter, though it will also feature single player. Starring a colourful cast of squids that can transform into people (or perhaps people that can transform into squids), it'll be focused around the concept of covering as much of the arena as possible with your team's paint, all the while fending off the opposing team as they try to do the same. It represents a refreshing breath of fresh air in Nintendo's lineup and will likely satisfy some fans that have been begging Nintendo for a new IP.

Famitsu published an interview on its website yesterday (translated via Siliconera) with Hisashi Nogami, Yusuke Amano, and Tsubasa Sakaguchi; Splatoon's producer, co-director and director, respectively. These three gentlemen cover all the bases, with their shared credentials including work on franchises such as Yoshi's Island, Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Animal Crossing and Nintendo Land.

They say development began shortly after Sakaguchi-san finished Nintendo Land and Amano-san finished New Super Mario Bros. 2. The project was staffed mostly by personnel that worked on launch titles for the Wii U and it was born out of the desire to create something entirely new from what they had learned.

Many staff members that have worked on Wii U launch titles are working on this game, so now that we have a grasp of the Wii U's functions, it started out with discussions about wanting to make something new with what we already know… There were many plans, but the one that stayed until the end was Splatoon.

The decision to make multiplayer matches 4-on-4 came from wanting to give each individual player just the right amount of influence over the outcome of the game. Also, due to the goal being about covering territory, rather than defeating the enemy players, they felt that keeping team sizes relatively small would encourage that kind of play.

At first, during the trial stages, we tested the game with different numbers of players. With more than four players, the impact of one single player felt too little, while having three players made it feel like the impact was too much.

The main characters were not initially squids, but tofu-like square characters. As the project progressed and new things were added, the characters were changed to squids as the team felt that squids best represented all the features of the game.

The reason we made them squids… well, to put it simply, 'it was the optimal way to represent all of the game's features'.

At first, players could only shoot ink and were unable to jump. The team wanted to add more verticality and traversal elements which led to the current, faster paced incarnation. This was a double-edged sword, however, as it led to unnecessarily complicated controls. The problem was resolved by isolating specific abilities to either form of the player, with the squid primarily being used for traversal and the human for attacking and spreading paint.

The concept of height didn't exist [in the game], so without height, so you couldn't paint the walls with ink and climb up, but we've added more and more to the feature over time… At first, we had all kinds of actions that went according to when a character was in human-form, however, the result of adding more functions made it too messy. When we made the adjustments, we decided to split what a character could do in human form and what they can do in squid form. Humans can walk and attack, while switching to squid makes them specialize in movement. We decided to make it into something that makes you switch around [between both forms] while playing.

It certainly sounds like plenty of careful planning and consideration has gone into the development of Splatoon. What do you think of this? Does any of this information get you more excited for its arrival in May? Sound off in the comments below.

[source siliconera.com]