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Splatoon devs talk character proportions, Squid Sisters, sound design and more

by rawmeatcowboy
17 August 2015
GN Version 5.0

Coming from a Famitsu interview with producer Hisashi Nogami, art director Seita Inoue, and designer Keisuke Nishimori. Toru Minegishi and Yuki Tsuji...

On body proportions:

Inoue: “That wasn’t changed to an extent. As this is an action game, if you don’t make the action easy to see to a certain degree, it feels out of touch, so it was decided to have big legs and hands.”

Nogami: “There was also a reason to have a low ‘heads tall’ ratio. You can tell when a character is covered in ink from an attack because the head is big. It isn’t so just to make them look cute.”

Inoue: “Having a broader pelvis than shoulder width and the athlete-like form give an impression of a sporty character who is satisfied with his/her real life (laughs). The Inkling boy and girl were drawn as 17-year-olds at the time of designing and they have an ‘I’m cool’ attitude. It seems like 17-year-old girls think they’re the strongest beings alive. I thought like that, too. ”

Nogami: “It’s like there is nothing scary in the world (laughs).”

Inoue: “That also fits well with the setting of Inklings being mischievous and shooting ink. That age is the last moment for seeing painting ink as something cool. If Inklings were a little older, it would be a bit childish. The messing around was designed to look like a sport. Later the corners of the Inklings mouth and the bottom of their eyelids were raised. As a result, they weren’t quite that cute looking and they got a cheeky mood to them. We thought a great deal of that kind of image.”

Inoue: “The girl and the boy were drawn with a same kind of image in mind, but when comparing the boy and girl, the boy has a somewhat obedient image. However, they share the same age.”

Nogami: “When it comes to the setting, they are 14 years old, but they were designed as having a mood of 16-17-year-olds.”

On the Squid Sisters

Inoue: “The world of Splatoon takes place 12,000 years after the present time and the Squid Sisters are those who receive messages from 12,000 years ago. Like there would be a discussion ‘rice or bread?’ in current time, and those words fly to another planet and bounce back for them to receive. Those divine messages come from kami-sama [kami means a god, sama is a honorific like -san].”

Nogami: “Kami-sama is written as ‘paper’ when using kanji [kami has several meanings, two of which are a god and paper], so the topic of Splatfest comes as a fax-like paper. That’s where the name kami-sama comes from (laughs).”

- Nogami mentions that Tsuji created the Squid Beatz minigame by himself
- one day he couldn’t work for roughly an entire day because of the circumstances with the sound development
- he used the day to make a mini-game in which you can play while listening to the background music

On the music of Octo Valley and Turf War

Minegishi: “I created all of them exactly as something similar to techno. First I thought to completely change the musical direction so it would be easy to recognize that they are different from the types of songs used in Turf War. Octo Valley has a feeling of being alone behind closed doors, even with Cuttlefish giving orders, and that is in contrast with noisy and hectic sports-like image of Turf War. Also it’s like the Octo side broadcasts their music in order to control the many Octarians. DJ Octavio and his direct subordinates compose the music. Octarians somehow cross talk into the protagonist’s headphones. The ‘zazzazzazza’ rhythm gives an image of controlled Octarians marching and that mechanical feeling is put together in techno.”

[Link]