User:Driftin Soul/Draft/Splatoon and Splatoon 2: How to Invent a Stylish Franchise with Global Appeal
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Splatoon and Splatoon 2: How to Invent a Stylish Franchise with Global Appeal was a 2018 Game Developers Conference session by Splatoon series producer Hisashi Nogami, detailing the conception and continued development of the Splatoon series. It was presented on 21 March 2018 in San Francisco, California,[1] in Japanese but with English interpretation provided by Nintendo of America employee Ethan Stockton. GDC has provided a full recording of the session via its official YouTube channel, an embed of which can be found below.
This article additionally further aims to serve as a text transcript of the session for posterity; for the greatest ease of understanding, the English interpretation will be listed as though it were being delivered directly by Nogami. Breaks to pause for interpretation are rendered as new paragraphs.
Video
Transcript
Intro
Nogami:
- Hello. I am a member of Squid Research Lab, an institute that studies a mysterious type of transforming squid.
Nogami:
- But I'm afraid speaking like this for a long time might grow tiresome, so I'll just do it like this.
(He removes his sunglasses, swapping them for a regular pair of glasses.)
Nogami:
- Allow me to reintroduce myself. I am Hisashi Nogami from Nintendo. I joined the company in 1994, which means I've worked at Nintendo for almost 24 years.
Nogami:
- My first work was as an artist during the development of Yoshi's Island for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
Nogami:
- After that, I worked for over ten years on development of the Animal Crossing series as both a director and an artist. Now I work as the producer of both the Splatoon and Animal Crossing franchises.
Nogami:
- Today, I'd like to talk about how both Splatoon and Splatoon 2 came to be.
Nogami:
- I want to delve into what we on the development team were thinking about while making these games, and I hope you'll get a lot out of this session.
A new type of game, not bound by existing genres
Nogami:
- In early 2013, we formed a team of ten developers with the goal of creating a new type of game that wouldn't fit easily into preexisting categories.
Nogami:
- We discussed our ideas together every day, until after half a year we found ourselves with over 70 different design proposals and a number of software prototypes.
Nogami:
- The idea that formed the basis for Splatoon emerged from this process.
(Footage labeled as "Tofu Prototype" is shown.)
Nogami:
- Our initial prototype was fairly simplistic. You would move a cube-shaped character around a flat map, shooting out white or black ink. We used cubes because they were easy to create, and eventually ended up calling them blocks of tofu.
Nogami:
- Linking together multiple Wii U consoles allowed us to have team battles, in which we'd compete to cover the most area with our own team's ink, and that became the core of Splatoon's gameplay. Of course, you can also attack and defeat your opponents.
Prototype that became the basis for Splatoon
Nogami:
- And at this stage, we'd also come up with ways to make use of the Wii U GamePad.
Nogami:
- Winning meant needing to ink the ground around you, but also that this would reveal your location to your opponents. This put players in a bit of a catch-22, and we soon realized it would be one of the most interesting and game-like aspects of our prototype.
Nogami:
- You might have seen it in this video, but the idea of hiding within your own ink as a way of concealing your position also emerged around this time.
Exploring ideas for satisfying gameplay
Nogami:
- From there, we explored ways to leverage the Wii U's unique features, like motion control, to come up with actions and inputs that felt good to perform, and in so doing, build out the gameplay of our idea.
Creating a new type of play experience
Nogami:
- The finished game would likely fall into the shooter category, and parts of it make use of the language of shooters, but this isn't to say that we'd set out to create a shooting game from the start; rather, that the gameplay took this shape as a result of the methods we used to make a Nintendo-style action game.
Nogami:
- While our end goal was to create a new game, the first target we aimed for was creating a new type of play experience.
Appearance should reflect functionality and purpose
Nogami:
- So, the look of a game is certainly important, but I think of it as something that makes gameplay more compelling and amplifies its appeal. A game's aesthetic and art must embody and compliment its functionality and purpose.
A new play experience needs a new world and characters
Nogami:
- We did consider the option of using existing IP, but felt that new characters and a new world would be the best embodiment of this new play experience.
Atmosphere for creation of new things at Nintendo
Nogami:
- I should mention that there's a sort of ever-present desire at Nintendo to produce new things. Projects such as ARMS and Nintendo Labo are examples of things born out of this atmosphere.
Nogami:
- We don't abandon this desire to try new things, even when working on established franchises, for example with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Nogami:
- And on that note, I hope you'll look forward to my colleague Mr. Yabuki's ARMS session, which is at 2 PM today.
Why squids that transform into people?
Nogami:
- But, let me backtrack a bit. The characters of Splatoon are squids that can transform to become humanoids.
Nogami:
- People are often surprised when they first hear that the main character for our game is a squid, but there are reasons why things ended up this way, and the road leading to the character's final design was not without its twists and turns.
In the beginning: Rabbits
Nogami:
- As development progressed from prototyping to creating an actual product, the characters we first relied on were rabbits.
Strong territorial sense suited to battling for turf
Nogami:
- Rabbits can be both black and white, making them easy to separate into teams. We also learned that rabbits are apparently very territorial creatures.
Contrast with brightly-colored ink
Nogami:
- We wanted to use brightly-colored inks, and thought they would contrast well with the neutral color of the rabbits.
Nogami:
- These were all reasons we could use to explain why we had gone with rabbits as characters.
Why would rabbits shoot ink?
Why would they hide within the ink?
Nogami:
- But what would rabbits be doing shooting ink? Why would rabbits be able to submerge themselves in the ink once they shot it? These were the sorts of questions that came up when I showed our game to others in the company.
Nogami:
- Something about the concept still didn't sit right.
Disconnect between gameplay and appearance
Nogami:
- That isn't to say that our method for choosing a character was fundamentally flawed, but we could tell there was a disconnect between the look of the game and the way it played; that certain aspects of our game idea hadn't gelled yet.
Consolidation of player abilities
Attacking when not in ink
Moving quickly while submerged
Quotes
| “ | No one expects a dull Nintendo game, but the 'Splatoon 2' game's scrappy ink-hurling heroes who can morph into turbo squid and graffiti up skatepark-style arenas are unusual even for a company that puts hats on mushrooms and wings on turtles. How does Nintendo come up with its big (and occasionally gonzo) ideas? 'Splatoon' and 'Splatoon 2' producer Hisashi Nogami will share his experiences working with a design team whose goal was to create a game that was novel yet easy to grasp and riveting to play. What were the brainstorming sessions like and what kinds of review processes determined the game's final ideas? How do you make a sequel better while releasing it on a brand-new platform with unique features? And how do you land on a quirky concept like "squid creatures fighting turf battles with water pistols" in the first place? Mr. Nogami, who also served as director and lead artist on Nintendo's 'Animal Crossing' series, will don his lab coat, roll up his sleeves, and divulge lessons learned while illustrating the importance of risk-taking. | ” |
— Description from GDC Vault[2]
| ||
