Splatoon Raiders, the latest Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, is a looter-shooter spin-off of the competitive multiplayer series. As the team behind it has revealed, the initial prototype was more akin to a base defense game. But the concept didn't feel "Splatoon" enough to the developers.

The revelatory chat took place during Ask the Developer Vol. 22, which is an interview series done by Nintendo. As Splatoon Raiders director Yoshihiko Ito explains, the initial idea started while the team was winding down on updates to Splatoon 3. The staff wanted to see if it could develop a single-player experience that would leverage the gameplay of Salmon Run, Splatoon's signature PvE mode.

Difficulty was an issue early on, as Salmon Run is designed as a four-player co-op mode. "The first thing we tried was building gameplay around placing traps," the director says. "The idea was to place traps all over the place and to fight alongside them."

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Ito says that, at first, Raiders was very much "like a defense game." Yet, the more the team explored this idea, the more it felt like the player was building a fortress with lots of traps and then watching it play out. "It didn't really feel like a Splatoon game to us."

The Splatoon feel that Ito refers to pertains to the usual gameplay loop, which has players performing multiple different actions within a short period of time: fighting enemies, inking the ground, changing in and out of squid form, and so on.

"We think the intensity of the action is one of the game's key strengths," he says. "But when the core gameplay shifts to building a fortress and fighting off enemies, it becomes difficult to make the most of that strength."

Seita Inoue, producer on Raiders, says that despite there being three titles in the series as well as DLCs—some of which have been single-player—as long as the sense of action and unity with the character and the ink remains strong, it always feel like you're playing Splatoon. With traps, the team couldn't recreate that feeling.

That realization was a "turning point" for Ito. This led to the team making a "major shift" away from the concept of building a fortress. Instead, the team focused on expanding the range of actions available to the player to be more dynamic. Over time, this took the form of gadgets, which players can equip to charge forward with power, leap high into the air, hover briefly above them, and so on.

Inoue compares the satisfaction of playing Salmon Run, and how the player reacts before they can think, to being "in the zone" when playing sports. "(...) I thought that level of immersion might be really satisfying in a video game too. And it's not just sports―busy jobs offer a similar sense of satisfaction, don't you think?," he asks Ito.

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"Yes, that's right. We designed this game with the goal of creating an experience where players can feel that same sense of pleasant busyness. In addition to weapons, players can equip two gadgets, with the flexibility to choose whichever's most effective in the moment against the hordes of attacking Salmonids."

Ito continues: "Once a gadget has been used, it can't be used again for a certain period of time, but by rapidly swapping between a weapon and two gadgets, players can minimize downtime and efficiently take down a large number of Salmonids. Once I'd experienced the satisfaction of busily alternating between gadgets, I really felt like this could become the core gameplay."

About the Author

Diego Argüello

Contributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist and critic from Argentina. Video games helped him to learn English, so now he covers them for places like The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and more. He also runs Into the Spine, a site dedicated to fostering and supporting new writers, and co-hosted Turnabout Breakdown, a podcast about the Ace Attorney series. He’s most likely playing a rhythm game as you read this.