Der Splatoon Producer Hisashi Nogami hat bekannt gegeben, dass man bei Nintendo darüber diskutiert hat, Splatoon mit bestehenden Nintendo Charakteren auszustatten. Somit hätte Splatoon auch rund um ein bestehendes Franchise entstehen können. Schlussendlich entschied man sich aber, dass Splatoon mit neuen Charakteren besser funktionieren wird.

Nogami merkte weiters an, dass man erst während der Entwicklung Dinge wie die Möglichkeit in der Tinte zu schwimmen eingebaut hat. Passend dazu kam man auf die Idee Spielern die Möglichkeit zu geben sich in Tintenfische zu verwandeln.

“First we started with the ability to shoot ink but then we added the ability to swim really fast through it, and as we kept adding more abilities to what the player was able to do, there was this kind of moment where we all realized, Oh yeah, this would work really well with squids,”

“Making them squids, it made a lot of the actions easy to explain and also made it really fun, and it was also this idea where all the actions we wanted to include in the game could be built around the idea of squids to get them all in there.

“You can see all our existing IP on this Smash Bros. poster right here [there was a Smash Bros. poster in the interview room]. When we had a really good long think about, would one of those fit it? Or should this new squid idea be the way to go? we realized squids were definitely the only thing we could go with. If the Wii Fit Trainer would have been the perfect character for this game, we would have gone with the Wii Fit Trainer [laughs].”