Work on the game began with the idea of gameplay involving a water pump. However, at first the developers thought that the world was too daringly out of character with Mario. Therefore, they tried using a man-type character, but thought this was too odd and that ""if there was a man next to Mario, there is a sense of incongruity."" There were ten candidates for possible water nozzles, and FLUDD was chosen because of fitting in the game's setting, despite it not being one of the favorites. Some preliminary gun-like water nozzles were removed due to all the controversy in the United States. They also stated that several Yoshi features were omitted, such as Yoshi vomiting juice fed to him.