Ask the Developer Vol. 21: Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream — Part 1 – News

• This article has been translated from the original Japanese content.

• This interview was conducted before the game was released.

In this 21st volume of Ask the Developer, an interview series in which developers convey in their own words Nintendo’s thoughts about creating products and the unusual details they hone in on, we’re talking to the developers behind Tomodachi Life™: Living the Dream, a Nintendo Switch™ game that launches on Thursday, April 16, 2026.

First, could you please briefly introduce yourselves?

Ryutaro Takahashi (referred to as Takahashi from this point on): Hello, I’m Ryutaro Takahashi. I’ve directed the Tomodachi Life series since its first installment, and continued to serve as the director for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

Takaomi Ueno (referred to as Ueno from this point on): Hi, I’m Takaomi Ueno, one of the programming directors. I was previously involved in the development of Tomodachi Life (1) for Nintendo 3DS as the programming lead, and Miitopia (2) as the programming director.

(1) A Nintendo 3DS™ game released in April 2013 in Japan and June 2014 in North America and Europe. Players create original characters called Mii characters, which resemble themselves, their family, or other people close to them, place them on an island, and watch over them as they go about their lives.

(2) A Nintendo 3DS game released in December 2016 in Japan and July 2017 in North America and Europe. Players create a cast of their favorite Mii characters and adventure in a world filled with their acquaintances. A Nintendo Switch version was released in May 2021.

Naonori Ohnishi (referred to as Ohnishi from this point on): Hello, I’m Naonori Ohnishi. As another programming director, I collaborated with Ueno-san, while also serving as a member of the planning team. Before that, I was the programming director for the smart device app Miitomo (3), but this is my first time participating in the development of the Tomodachi Life series.

(3) A smart device application released in March 2016. Create a Mii character that looks like you and communicate with your friends. The service ended in May 2018.

Daisuke Kageyama (referred to as Kageyama from this point on): Hi, I’m Daisuke Kageyama, the art director. This is my third project as an art director, following Wii Sports Resort (4) and nintendogs + cats (5).

(4) Released in July 2009 on Wii™. Set on the tropical resort, Wuhu Island, the game offers 12 activities such as Swordplay and Air Sports.

(5) A Nintendo 3DS game released in February 2011 in Japan and March 2011 in North America and Europe. A simulation game in which you enjoy everyday life with puppies and kittens, playing with toys, going for walks, and training them.

Toru Minegishi (referred to as Minegishi from this point on): Hello, I’m Toru Minegishi. As the sound director for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, I organized the development of background music, sound effects, and Mii character voices, while also composing much of the background music myself. I’ve been involved in the sound development for series such as The Legend of Zelda and Splatoon, but this is my first time working on the Tomodachi Life series.

Thank you very much. Let’s kick things off with a brief introduction to the game from Takahashi-san.

Takahashi:Tomodachi Life is a series in which you and those around you, such as friends, family, or people you admire, live inside the game as Mii characters, as you take care of them and watch over their island life. While keeping faithful to the series’ style, we’ve rebuilt Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream from the ground up and developed it as an all-new, reborn Tomodachi Life.

So, what sparked development of this all-new Tomodachi Life game?

Takahashi: I believe development started around 2017, after things had settled down on Miitomo. The producer, Sakamoto-san (6), and I both have a special attachment to Tomodachi Life and have been playing the previous game on Nintendo 3DS for many years. But we’d already squeezed all we could out of that game, and Sakamoto-san said to me sadly, “There’s so much that I want my Mii characters to experience, but there’s nothing more that I can do for them.” (Laughs) So, we talked about our desire to create a new Tomodachi Life game.

You sound just like a loving parent. (Laughs)

Takahashi: Yes, I know. (Laughs) That said, if we’d simply continued with the existing development style and added new items because we wanted them to experience new things, it would’ve inevitably turned into a quest for quantity. Besides, once players had seen everything the game had to offer, they’d have eventually tired of it again. So, we started development with the direction of leveraging user-generated content—also known as UGC—a system that allows players to create their own content to play with in the game. The concept of Tomodachi Life is to be “the ultimate inside joke game” that can be enjoyed among people who are close to each other or share things in common. We felt that UGC, which lets players create whatever they want, fit well with this concept. We thought that combining the gameplay provided by the development team with what players themselves create would open up infinite ways to enjoy the game.

Ueno: One thing that triggered the use of the UGC system was that the Mii characters’ sphere of influence had expanded from the previous game.

Now that the Mii characters could move around freely in a larger space, we wanted to take care of them in more ways.

Takahashi: The Nintendo 3DS version was also set on an island, but due to the processing power limitations of the time, we couldn’t give lots of Mii characters free rein of the island, as much as we’d have loved to. The increased power of Nintendo Switch allowed us to expand the Mii characters’ active environment, and we thought we could replicate a wider variety of inside jokes with UGC. So, in the early stages of development, we focused on verifying those two points.

I see. So, the hardware’s processing power impacts those areas. You’d think that more powerful hardware would also allow for more sophisticated graphics for the Mii characters. Was that considered?

Takahashi: When we decided to create a new Tomodachi Life game, we wanted to make Mii characters’ visuals more appealing, in line with the current generation of game consoles. But after adding all sorts of new elements to the Mii characters, something began to feel…off.

Kageyama: Normally, as hardware resolution increases, so too do the possibilities for character design. So Mii characters’ expressions have evolved little by little alongside technology. However, after speaking to the producer, Sakamoto-san, as well as Takahashi-san and the previous development team, it seemed to me that the Mii characters in Tomodachi Life are treated differently from those in other titles. The fact that they don’t see Mii characters as mere avatars, rather they pour affection into them as living beings, came through strongly. Since the characters are filled with the emotions of many people, I didn’t think we should randomly alter their design just because the resolution had increased. So, although we tried out a lot of new things, we decided against changing things that define Mii characters’ identities, such as their existing facial features and the shape of their limbs. With that in mind, we re-examined each part’s structure and design from the ground up to ensure that they wouldn’t feel outdated, even with today’s more advanced graphics. On top of that, by adding new custom features and increasing the level of freedom for players, we aimed to bring a sense of newness unique to this game.

Takahashi: We didn’t make any major changes to the part designs, but we did brush up the appearance of the Mii characters.

Kageyama: We updated their appearance based on a simple, anime-inspired toon-style, allowing players to immerse themselves in the drama between Mii characters in cutscenes, for example. As we were reviewing the toon-style, I heard that the direction matched what Sakamoto-san had envisaged for the first Tomodachi Life game, and I thought to myself, “Yes, nailed it!” In fact, the Mii characters on the packaging of the first game have more of a toon-style design, unlike how they look in the game.

Minegishi: We had a similar discussion about Mii characters’ voices too. By implementing a new text-to-speech engine for Nintendo Switch, the voice that serves as the basis for Mii characters is now very realistic, with a high level of accuracy and a human-like quality. However, if we express that realism too directly, it doesn’t sound like a Mii character anymore. So, I intentionally processed the voices to sound robotic. But I had a hard time finding the right balance. We wanted to preserve the existing Tomodachi Life feeling, while making suitable updates to adapt to the times. It was challenging to strike the perfect balance. However, I don’t think that was limited to the voice—it’s something every team has had to give a considerable amount of thought to throughout the project. There was a lot to consider in terms of adjusting the Mii characters’ movements, too.

Kageyama: I often discussed with the animation staff members as to whether it was too realistic.

Whenever movements look too realistic and cool, it stops being Mii-like. We shaped the Mii characters’ movements through trial and error―deliberately omitting the wind-up motions that usually serve to make movements appear smoother, and adding more bold, memorable movements.

So, making the character designs more elaborate, or voices and movements more realistic, in line with improved hardware performance, was actually creating a sense of inconsistency with the series?

Takahashi: That’s right. The development team had numerous discussions on this topic, pondering what makes Mii characters in Tomodachi Life unique.

Ueno: This goes not only for appearance, voice and movements, but also for actions. As the Mii characters became more capable, they started to come across as too mature. The opinion gradually emerged within the team that these characters—who were so cute in previous games—had started to feel a little off.

Takahashi: We were all like, “Hmm, it just doesn’t feel like a Mii.”

Ohnishi: We wanted them to be lovable characters that you can’t resist taking care of. (Laughs)

This desire to take care of them reminds me of the “loving parent” topic from earlier. Speaking of which, one of the game’s new features is the ability to pick up Mii characters. Was this idea there from the early stages of development?

Ueno: Picking up Mii characters was originally implemented as a debug (7) function. Since the setting has changed from an apartment block to an island with this installment, the Mii characters have much more space to move about in, making it more likely for them to stray apart. So, we added a function that let us relocate Mii characters by force so we could perform various tests. However, as we tested things out and observed how the Mii characters reacted, we started to get greedy, hoping for specific outcomes like, “It would be nice if these two characters played together.” (Laughs) So, we thought it would be more interesting if we made the ability to pick up characters an actual part of the game.

(7) The process of playing in-development games for quality assurance and investigating program issues.

Takahashi: In the previous game, even if you wished for certain Mii characters to get along with each other, all you could do was wait and hope.

It’s very intuitive and easy to understand. It seems to have ended up being an important aspect of this title. At what point did you decide to make it the essence of the gameplay?

Kageyama: It was in the latter half of development, wasn’t it?

Ohnishi: That’s right. We were able to implement the ability to pick up Mii characters, but for a long time we struggled to decide what would be exciting to see happen after you drop one Mii character next to another so they could meet.

Minegishi: We made prototypes of things like string telephones to let characters interact with each other. Players could offer characters advice, such as, “Why don’t you try discussing this over the string telephone?”

Takahashi: You could, like, choose advice from four different options. But that led to Mii characters just doing whatever the player told them to, and losing all sense of agency. The whole appeal of the game is that Mii characters act of their own accord, resulting in outcomes the player doesn’t expect. If the player forces a relationship, the game loses the element of genuine surprise, which is the series’ true charm.

Ueno: It didn’t feel right to have players dictating Mii characters’ actions, so we settled on letting them pick up characters and drop them wherever they like. But what happens after that is totally up to the character.

I see. So the degree of influence players have over Mii characters was seen as important.

Ueno: I just remembered something that left a strong impression on me during testing. One time, a character that was picked up and dropped next to another character didn’t interact with them—they just stood there, staring at them. Seeing that piqued my curiosity. I thought to myself, “Are they not interested in the other character? Or maybe they’re just hungry?” and so on. It reminded me that the real fun comes from not knowing what the Mii character is thinking, or what’s going to happen next.

Minegishi: Mii characters occasionally act the fool, don’t they? When the development team revisited what it means to be a Mii character in the context of Tomodachi Life, the description that resonated with us the most was “an innocent being, akin to an adorable child.”

Kageyama: If they make smart-aleck or witty remarks—even just a little—they don’t feel like Mii characters.

Takahashi: There are times when you can’t really tell what they’re thinking, or they’ll blurt out whatever’s on their mind. While having that kind of innocence, they’re not just childish. Sometimes they’ll come out with a surprisingly mature comment that hits you suddenly. We were conscious of putting this kind of depth into their characters. This sparks your imagination and makes you wonder, “What kind of reaction will I get if I show the character this?”

That’s true. Conversations between Mii characters can be a little spacey, and while it seems like they’re talking about the same topic, they also seem to be talking past each other. Yet they might suddenly make a very sharp comment that results in something unexpected. When I see things like that, I can’t help but smile.

Kageyama: The Mii characters aren’t grounded or logical, and that’s been important throughout the series. They’re just silly and eccentric. (Laughs)

Takahashi: Mii characters already serve a silly role, so if we also have them point out the absurdity of what other characters are saying, the joke begins and ends inside the game. That’s why we want players to take on that role. They’ve got to be the ones to say, “What are you on about?!” (Laughs)

Ohnishi: I think seeing the relationship diagram between Mii characters gives players another perfect opportunity to do this. You might see the relationship diagram of one Mii character saying, “I bet that character likes me,” only to find out the other character is actually thinking, “We’re so not compatible.” (Laughs)

Or while observing Mii characters wandering around freely, you might see some characters eating and chatting together at a restaurant. Watching good friends dine together is heartwarming, but sometimes you’ll get two characters who don’t get along sitting together and talking. The characters are doing the exact same thing—chatting in a restaurant—but this time you feel unsettled, and it stirs up the imagination in a completely different way. In this way, we deliberately refrained from over-organizing things, aiming to strike a balance that would allow unexpected things to happen.

Takahashi: The Mii characters in Tomodachi Life are living beings that inhabit that world, with a will and personality.

Kageyama: What it means to be a Mii character in Tomodachi Life… The fun of observation because each character has their own personality… I think it was really important that the whole development team was aligned on these concepts from the beginning of development.