“A blanket of silence fell over everyone.”
Nintendo Switch Sports originally had players as robots instead of human characters.
That included having players inside robots designed to look like burgers, bears, skulls, and more.
We even made a prototype.
Adds director Yoshikazu Yamashita: “The player controls the character in the robot to operate the robot.
Then, the robot throws the ball.
There are too many steps in between.”
Another option the team experimented with was student characters with a theme of intercollegiate sports.
Says Yamashita: “The Mii characters inWii Sportsdidn’t have arms.
It did not look unnatural because of the lower screen resolution at the time and that character setting.
But I thought it would be difficult to incorporate it into today’s game consoles.
The team also discusses difficulties in designing the game to make it distinct from the previous Wii Sports iterations.
As a programmer, this required a lot of trial and error,” says program director Shinji Okane.
But the Joy-Con controller for Nintendo Switch is much smaller than the Wii Remote controller.
So it varies a lot from person to person in the way they hold and move it."
