Miyamoto has revealed that the developers behind Splatoon are taken from the core Animal Crossing team. Miyamoto says the developers are all very young and energetic and have allowed him to step back from the project and let their own creative juices flow.

“The team that’s designing Splatoon is actually taken from the core Animal Crossing team, so some of the younger staff within the Animal Crossing team, we pulled about 10 of them together and we decided to begin working on Splatoon with that small team.”

“We’ve also then added the director who did the StarFox 64 3D remake for Nintendo 3DS, and then one of the directors who worked on NintendoLand. They’re all very young team members for us, so they’re very energetic.They’ve been working on music and the design and everything for Splatoon.”

“It’s allowing me to not be heavily involved in the project — they’re able to work on their own. But the overall design is taking a very Nintendo approach, where it’s very gameplay-focused. We designed the gameplay and the features of the game first, and the characters themselves were born out of those features.”