AKA Hisashi Nogami
Full interview - http://www.nintendolife.com/news/20...on_squids_kids_and_splatoon_2s_octo_expansion
Other stuff
Full interview - http://www.nintendolife.com/news/20...on_squids_kids_and_splatoon_2s_octo_expansion
In the US, we like to call them squid kids. This is the first time we've ever heard them called teenagers. How old are you in Splatoon 2?
On the development team, we've had discussions that they're right about the peak of when you have that teen spirit, which is right about fourteen to sixteen years old. So, like a teenager at the height of their teenage years, their interests are kind of all over the place. They want to become really good at sports, and they want to look really cool. They want to do a variety of activities. Regardless of what your actual age may be, we want people to be able to enter this world and kind of inhabit that spirit of that teenager I mentioned earlier.
Other stuff
Nintendo Life: In the original Splatoon, hackers modded the game to add playable Octoling characters. Did that server as inspiration for the Octo Expansion, or was this idea already being thought of?
Nogami: I can't say we got inspiration from that, but we did see that and we had the idea of wanting players to play as an Octoling character before that. We had that in our back pocket as a surprise to reveal later on, and when we say that we kind of thought to ourselves, "Aw, come on guys! You took our idea!"
In the Octo Expansion, Octolings and Inklings live together in Inkopolis. Were they enemies previously?
Up until this point, we've filled out the world of Splatoon from the Inkling perspective and players have seen primarily that. That's not to say Inklings are the good guys and all Octolings are the bad guys. Inklings have their own society, and Octolings have their own society, and now we're going to learn more about it.
In Hero mode, you were having to go after these Octarians who were behaving badly. They were kind of the bad guys among the Octoling clan. But in the Octo Expansion, you have an Octoling character who is combining forces with Captain Cuttlefish, who is an Inkling. They combine forces because of their shared goal to reach the surface together, and when they reach the surface, they find that society has progressed and now Octolings and Inklings live together.
You mentioned that you listen to player feedback, where do you look for that feedback?
We get that type of feedback from a wide variety of places, whether that's looking at responses to our official Twitter account in Japan, or our Tumblr account in the US. We also check places like Reddit and real-world events where we get to meet our community face-to-face and see their reactions to things. So it's definitely a wide variety of sources. I think one thing we're also aware of is that often times voices online that you hear expressing opinions are often a limited number of people that have the loudest voices.
One thing we feel is really important is to play our own game as one member of that community, and by interacting with different players online in multiplayer, to experience the game from a player perspective and take our own opinions about what might be missing, or what would be cool to add and listen to our development team voices as well.
That type of listening and watching is something I think multiple people - it isn't just me on the development team - but multiple people engage in, whether it's watching what people are saying online, or attending events, playing the game as one of the community's members ourselves. It's not that we have meetings where we all get together and say, "Okay, here's what we're going to do," but it's more of a living discussion that we have as developers and say, "Hey, did you see this?" Then we'll go and look at it and talk about it. It's just an ongoing discussion that we have among the team.
Something that often happens on our team, will be that one of us thinks we found something really interesting and will want to show it to other members of the team and say, "Hey, come here and look at this thing I found," and the person will come and say, "Oh yeah, I saw that," then another person will come and say "Oh, I saw that too!" So, it's like, okay, yeah everyone's paying attention!
