Miyamoto saw “no appeal” in Splatoon’s early development

splatoon-artwork

When not upending tea tables, legendary games designer Shigeru Miyamoto now concerns himself with helping safeguard Nintendo’s future by nurturing the company’s younger developers.

That’s been the case with Splatoon, although Miyamoto hadn’t always been convinced about the Wii U exclusive’s the gleeful paint-splattering multiplayer game.

“[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,” co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi shared with EDGE. “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.”

That criticism came as Miyamoto felt that they hadn’t taken time to think about the game’s audience.

“He was saying, ‘I don’t understand. What do you want to do? There’s no appeal to this game,’” producer Hisashi Nogami added, with director Yusuke Amano continuing: “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 will release exclusively for Wii U in Europe and North America on May 29th.

Total
0
Shares
Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *