In an interview that Toby Fox conducted with the Chapter 2 development team, Taxiderby, one of the game's programmers, stated that the Spamton cherub that appears when pressing F1 during the Spamton and Spoiler:Spamton NEO fights was a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. According to them, Spamton's line "[Press F1 For] HELP" was already written, but it was originally a meaningless non-sequitur. After Fox suggested the idea of giving F1 an actual function in the fight, Taxiderby came up with the Final Fantasy-inspired Easter egg, putting it in singlehandedly after Fox gave his approval for the idea. In the same interview, they stated that they were surprised by its popularity, having made it purely as a throwaway gag.
MultiVersus lead writer Eric Stirpē has stated that he writes each fighter as a "Multiversus version" by picking a point in a franchise's history for them to be chosen from by Reindog, in an effort to keep their dialogue in line with the source material. Some fighters from a single franchise are chosen from different time periods within it, but the points when they are chosen are not canon to the source material or the game's plot. It's unknown how every fighter fits into this writing guide, but it creates some inconsistencies with their designs in the game:
• Stripe and Gizmo were chosen just before Stripe's death in the first Gremlins film. • Finn and Jake were chosen during the events of Adventure Time: Islands, though the lack of Finn's prosthetic arm is not explained, and Fern was chosen before he became a villain in Season 9 of Adventure Time. • Steven and Garnet were chosen during Season 2 of Steven Universe. • Bugs Bunny was not chosen, but rather emerged from hiding since the 1940s through a hole in his animation cel or film reel, with him being referred to as a "timeline hopper". • Taz is from the 1990s (presumably tying him in to Taz-Mania). • Marvin was chosen during the events of Space Jam: A New Legacy, and LeBron James was chosen two days after the end of the film. • Tom and Jerry are from the 1960s, but are portrayed with a modern art style that does not resemble either the Gene Deitch or Chuck Jones runs of theatrical shorts from that time. • Shaggy was chosen one year after the end of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, while Velma was chosen from an unspecified "cancelled 2000s reboot". • The Iron Giant was chosen while returning to America after he re-assembles himself at the end of the film. • Arya Stark was chosen during either Season 6 or 7 of the Game of Thrones TV series. • Stirpē considers the DC Comics heroes and villains to all be original interpretations of the characters created for Multiversus.
The American entertainment and browser game website Newgrounds originally started as a fanzine called "New Ground", focusing on SNK's Neo Geo hardware and games, and being named after synonyms for "Neo" (New) and "Geo" (Ground). It was first circulated by founder Tom Fulp in 1991 in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, before being registered as a website in 1995.
In regards to the game's visuals, director Ryan Vandendyck opted to avoid using a style that was considered common among indie games, stating:
"Basically we felt that the retro pixilated look and the anime-look in RPGs were way over-done, especially in the realm of indie RPGs. Plus, we felt neither of those two really fit a modern setting that well. So we went with a more cartoony style that we think fits the modern, Westernized setting, as well as being something quite unique. As you may guess by the fact that I made Waveform, I like making things not seen in other games! And as soon as we saw Robin’s character designs and the characters brought to life through animation, everyone on the team was sold."
In 2012, Toby Fox posted several Yume Nikki fan songs to his Tumblr account. One of these, "waltz of seccom masada" (named after a fan nickname for the piano-playing NPC in the spaceship area), bears strong similarities to the Deltarune track "Man" (heard in the hidden rooms where Kris can obtain an egg from an invisible NPC behind a tree), indicating that Fox repurposed and rearranged the song for his own project years later.
In Volume 5 of his Famitsu column "Toby's Secret Base", creator and director Toby Fox revealed that Ralsei's name came from a period in elementary school where he and his brothers constantly experimented with RPG Maker, having long had a shared interest in game development. Fox's oldest brother spent years working on a game called New Genesis, which featured a protagonist named Ralse; Fox simply appended an "i" to the name when incorporating it into Deltarune years later.
In the same column, Fox stated that the prolonged development of New Genesis discouraged him from making games for a long time. When he finally returned to the field in his teenage years, he sought to temper his expectations from the outset by making smaller-scale titles and preemptively planning out his approach to development to avoid biting off more than he could chew.
In an attempt to make the game more accessible and add more depth to the series, Sega opted to focus more on the game's plot compared to previous titles, which primarily focused on the gameplay, to try and take the series' characters "into the next sort of iconic level".
Cassette Beasts' plot is inspired by isekai, a subgenre of fantasy that revolves around a person being transported to and surviving in another world. However, the game changes normal conventions of the genre by having everyone the player meets in the game also be transported to the island of New Wirral in a similar manner. According to writer Jay Baylis, this was done to allow the team to put focus on the people who are present in the game.
The character design of Purlo, who runs the STAR game in the thoroughfare of Castletown, was directly based on Tingle. According to Eiji Aonuma, he is what Tingle would look like if he was made with a realistic design.
Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights features many similarities to the Professor Layton franchise by Level-5, namely in regards to the aesthetics and story. Noriaki Okamura, the game's designer, admitted that he was inspired by the series when making the game.
Finishing the match with any Blockbuster attack will cause the background to change and display a portrait of the defeated character with a pained expression on their face. This is a reference to the Capcom fighting game JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which features similar portraits for when a match is finished with a Super. The shaders that Skullgirls uses for its portraits in-game are also internally labeled as "JojosDeathPortrait" in the game's files.
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In the level "NSFW Island," there are several enemies that are references to different suggestive media as well as suggestive fan creations from the Five Nights at Freddy's fan community, including:
• Flying Freddy Fazbear heads with helicopter propellers, but their faces are replaced with the Lenny Face emoticon: "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" • Giant spinning blocks reading "RULE 34" • A take on Toy Chica that makes her more suggestive with heart eyes, commonly known as "Love Taste Toy Chica." • A feminine Toy Bonnie, which is a reference to the fangame series "Five Nights in Anime" originally made by Mairusu Paua, that took the animatronics and gave them feminine features. • A take on Freddy, depicted with a more muscular physique, pink shorts and a small black top hat. This appears to be a reference to a teaser poster released for Freddy in Space 2 that depicted Freddy as being extremely muscular and having a pronounced bulge. Soon after this teaser's reveal, series creator Scott Cawthon took it down and posted an apology on Reddit for it being "over-the-top". • The level's boss fight "Foxy Coming for your Booty", a reference to an early meme within the community about Foxy running down the hall in the first Five Nights at Freddy's game with the caption "Swiggity Swooty - I'm coming for your booty."
In an April 15th, 2024 interview with the director of the game's DLC "The Rising Tide" Takeo Kujiraoka published on Push Square's website, he revealed the development team believed that they achieved one of their initial goals to successfully attract players of all ages to play Final Fantasy XVI and become fans of the series. He claimed that Final Fantasy games in recent years had "tended to skew towards a higher age range", and they believed they were able to break that trend to a certain extent as evidenced by "survey results" showing that more people in their teens and twenties played the game. Kujiraoka clarified that this did not mean all future Final Fantasy titles would follow in the direction of this game, but that with a younger fanbase on-board it would allow future development teams to explore new possibilities when working on subsequent installments.
The expanded version of myPOPGOES has a challenge named "Mini-P," which makes pizzas cook faster, but restore less hunger. This is a reference to one of Scott Cawthon's characters from the 2015 troll game FNaF World: Halloween Edition, also named Mini-P, which has the appearance of William Afton's "Purple Guy" sprite, just smaller and with red glowing eyes.
While Mario's mustache, red shirt and blue overalls were described by Miyamoto as the result of technical limitations, there's a possibility that they were also inspired by an issue of the Japanese men's fashion magazine Popeye, named after the fictional character that Mario was already partly inspired by. The March 1980 issue of Popeye magazine features cover art of a man with a mustache wearing a red shirt with blue overalls.
In an interview with TechRaptor, lead developer Ryan Koons stated that the decision to make HuniePop a gameplay-centric title instead of a story-centric one like other dating sims didn't happen until months into development. The original intention was to make a traditional dating sim, only for Koons – who already had little interest in storytelling in video games – to overhaul the concept due to his growing ennui.
In the same interview, Koons stated that he deliberately sought to avoid many of the cliches associated with dating sims, particularly "the usual innocent waifu style character types." Consequently, the game's cast are based on people from his own life, and the writing is much more irreverent than other dating sims. In particular, Koons described deuteragonist Kyu Sugardust as a raunchy fictionalization of her voice actress, Jaclyn Aimee.
The Art of Fighting ending, which was a continuation from the ending from The King of Fighters XIV, features Khushnood from Garou: Mark of the Wolves. However, his name changed to Marco in this ending, which was his original name in the Japanese version of Garou: Mark of the Wolves. This was likely due to The King of Fighters XIV's director, Yasuyuki Oda, and art director, Nobuyuki Kuroki, asking on a livestream with SNK community manager KrispyKaiser if the fans would like his original name in future games. The chat overwhelmingly preferred the name Marco.
Spanish for Everyone!'s plotline has been noted for containing stereotypical characters and seeming to have innuendo alluding to drug smuggling across the Mexican border. According to a developer, this was intentional as a way to have fun making a budget title, and inspired by the double meanings in the Shrek movies.
The choice to give each room in Antonblast its own individual name was inspired by Commodore 64 single-screen platformers, particularly the bootleg game Snoopy by Radarsoft BV.
In a 2020 interview with the YouTube channel Archipel, series producer Toshihiro Nagoshi claimed that the decision to change Yakuza: Like a Dragon from an action game to a turn-based RPG came from a 2019 April Fools' Day video for Yakuza Online showing turn-based combat which was received positively by fans. However, fans and news outlets seemed to take this statement seriously, and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's head Masayoshi Yokoyama later had to clarify that it was a joke. The decision to shift to turn-based combat was made before production on the game even began due to it being too drastic of a change to make late into development.
In an interview that Toby Fox conducted with the Chapter 2 development team, Taxiderby, one of the game's programmers, stated that the Spamton cherub that appears when pressing F1 during the Spamton and Spoiler:Spamton NEO fights was a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. According to them, Spamton's line "[Press F1 For] HELP" was already written, but it was originally a meaningless non-sequitur. After Fox suggested the idea of giving F1 an actual function in the fight, Taxiderby came up with the Final Fantasy-inspired Easter egg, putting it in singlehandedly after Fox gave his approval for the idea. In the same interview, they stated that they were surprised by its popularity, having made it purely as a throwaway gag.
In 2012, Toby Fox posted several Yume Nikki fan songs to his Tumblr account. One of these, "waltz of seccom masada" (named after a fan nickname for the piano-playing NPC in the spaceship area), bears strong similarities to the Deltarune track "Man" (heard in the hidden rooms where Kris can obtain an egg from an invisible NPC behind a tree), indicating that Fox repurposed and rearranged the song for his own project years later.
Finishing the match with any Blockbuster attack will cause the background to change and display a portrait of the defeated character with a pained expression on their face. This is a reference to the Capcom fighting game JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which features similar portraits for when a match is finished with a Super. The shaders that Skullgirls uses for its portraits in-game are also internally labeled as "JojosDeathPortrait" in the game's files.
While Mario's mustache, red shirt and blue overalls were described by Miyamoto as the result of technical limitations, there's a possibility that they were also inspired by an issue of the Japanese men's fashion magazine Popeye, named after the fictional character that Mario was already partly inspired by. The March 1980 issue of Popeye magazine features cover art of a man with a mustache wearing a red shirt with blue overalls.
