Nintendo on Yoshi's Woolly World designs, lack of Pokemon support, moving away from yarn

A portion of a Game Informer interview with designer Emi Watanabe and producer Takashi Tezuk...

GI: What made you want to make Yoshis with different designs, and how did you go about designing those different Yoshis?

Watanabe: We actually started with just the standard, green Yoshi that is the main playable character, and as we developed the game and came up with all these gorgeous backgrounds, we decided that maybe we could play around a bit with Yoshi himself too. With knitted scarfs and sweaters and things like that, you can have a bunch of different colors mixed in there. We played a bit around with him and made a bunch of unique designs and when we asked around for feedback, people were really divided on what they liked and had their ideas of what we should make. So we decided to throw them all in and put in a bunch of different kinds of designs.

Tezuka: And for me, just changing Yoshi's designs, like the pattern, it was really fun and it made me really happy. At first, we also considered having abilities to go with some of these patterns, but I found that just the aesthetic itself was so fun and pleasurable. So rather than limiting the number of designs based on different abilities we could think of, we decided to focus on kind of the visual aspect and the joy that the colors and things brought.

GI: For Amiibo characters such as the Pokémon, it gives you a Yoshi with a white t-shirt that says "Amiibo". Was there any reason why there weren't Yoshis that looked like Pokémon?

Tezuka: With the Amiibo designs, we had to think about what characters could be represented authentically to the character in the Yoshi form, and so we couldn't do every single Amiibo. We did some trial and error and, unfortunately, we didn't make these ones and have Yoshi wearing an Amiibo t-shirt.

GI: Now that Kirby and Yoshi have gotten the yarn treatment, I was curious what the thought process was in choosing which Nintendo character gets a yarn game.

Tezuka: With Yoshi's Woolly World, I think we really pushed the expression of yarn to its limit, so as far as more yarn games go, we really want to try to play with something else – and that's for Yoshi games or other Nintendo characters.

GI: Now that you've said that, what's the next aesthetic that you guys would like to try?

Tezuka: You probably saw this coming, but I can't tell you just yet.