Splatoon

Just over a year ago I was contacted to work on a NES game for a pitch to Nintendo, using the Splatoon IP. Sadly this game never made it to the full commision but we did have a working prototype that was demoed to the Splatoon team.

Initially the idea was to layer sprites so we could get more colours per character but the workflow was just too intense, what looks good in theory doesn't always make for the smartest route in a production pipeline. The idea of the game was to shoot ink on all the grey surfaces and colour them.

Finally I can start to talk about this project and show some graphics from it. I took reference from the Splatoon artbook, the game on the WiiU, and some Amiibos we had.

All of the following graphics are formatted to work an actual NES with colour and memory restrictions, animations were done in Aseprite, tile maps in NESscreen Tool.

Inkling:
fall


shoot


idle


jump


run


transform


Squid:

fall


idle


jump


walk



Level:


tilemap:

Boy, don't I know it.

These graphics look pretty neat, though the slope implementation looks a little glitchy. It would have been nice to see something like this instead of the other smaller mini games in Splatoon, though.

Thanks, yeah there were quite a few unfinished bits, would have been nice to make the final polished thing.

Those Inkling girl graphics are seriously beautiful. Your project reminds me of when I was seriously considering trying to do a 1:1 port of Splatoon on the SNES. Didn't get very far!



Were you ever planning on having more characters onscreen, because this would totally shred through the 8 sprite per scanline limit. It's difficult enough to even consolidate the characters down to 15 colors on the SNES.


Except this kind of just is Splatoon downported to the NES, so I think it would be kind of weird as a mini game. Certainly beats screwing with the music in Splatoon 2 though; God damn that game makes me sad.

Looks great! Would be cool if it was included like a minigame, but on the other hand playing the game on an emulator kind of defeats the purpose of making a game for Famicom hardware.

Do you know how the game was going to be used? A free download or something?

You could still drop any IP related content, change some things up and make a more than decent NES platformer out of it, by the looks of it. Still, a bit of a shame they didn't go ahead with it.

It looks really nice. Some interesting gradient techniques used on the background, too.

That beautiful, can download the roms?

It just appeared to me that they'd be colored just by changing the 16x16 tile's palette? Because this would probably look terrible to be honest.

I figure you could actually make ink appear as it does in the game if you were to make every surface visible to the camera. (Everything is undetailed because I'm too lazy.)


The part of the floor that would be "inkable" would be 16 pixels wide and tall, as it would use its own palette (and is why the slope does not have a while line, unfortunately). However, this would probably take more than 256 tiles, (especially with different tiles for inked surfaces) which I think would severely limit your options on what mapper to chose. (MMC5 only? Hopefully not.) Additionally, while it's not too apparent in that shot, the perspective doesn't really make sense. However, the perspective on the Donkey Kong Country games never made any sense either, for example:

I could never tell if the walls on the left side were supposed to be ripped wall paper, or a painting of mountains and clouds.

Yeah it's really no different from games like DKC or top-view 2D Zelda games. I don't know what it's called but there's a style of art where you combine multiple perspectives in the same drawing to make it more lively. Classic Japanese paintings often used something like that.

In Zelda a Link Between Worlds they made it intentionally so that it looks like in A Link to the Past by having everything being slanted (something which may be seen when going into a wall) while the camera is placed straight from above.

Take a guess. I don't think it's supposed to be ripped wall paper as much as it's supposed to be chipped paint. The number of colors there is noticeably lacking compared to the rest of the level. (Color balance is too centered on light colors.) One thing I never realized until I got into SNES programming is how all the poles and the doorway in the foreground fall in line with the 8x8 tile grid so they can appear in front of the player. How did they get it to line up like this if it originated from a 3D scene? I imagine there was a significant amount of editing done by hand afterward, but this is a given due to how the perspective doesn't make sense yet all the tiles have no visual breaks between them.

(I noticed these posts after my other one:)


The beautifully animated Inkling is the best part though.


I'd like to know more details about how this project came to be.

It's definitely a picture of mountains. **guitar music plays**

Cheers!



Theres an article here that might answer these questions

Cool mockup, it might eat into the tile budget heavily though, the level only barely fit in the tileset. Theres a few NES games that use this quirky double perspective isn't there?

For the gameplay, one has to get away from the idea of painting the floor, and make it about painting the walls, then using the walls to traverse to higher parts of the level. The tile colouring was intended to use a sprite overlay that dripped ink on the tile. (we never got this far though)

Thats the thing really, the Splatoon characters are so nice to work with. Repurposing the sprite would be difficult. Thanks btw!

I would have legit preferred this over Splatoon 2.