Kirby, Meteos Designer Creates Indie Studio

Edge Online reports that Masahiro Sakurai, designer of the Kirby series of games and the recent DS hit Meteos has launched his own game studio named Sora. In an interview, he talks about the design process behind Meteos. From the article: "It was created by one designer, one graphic artist and one programmer, and took three days. Design documents were written by myself alone and took me three days to finish. When I designed Meteos, we didn't know it would be released on the DS platform. That was decided after we saw the hardware at E3, in May 2004. And at that stage, we didn't have a dev kit or any real hardware information."

Comments

Good news!

[pureseth]

Meteos is one of those fun yet simple games, very kool. I personally love the DS and think this is awesome news. Hopefully they continue to produce quality games and help the lifespan of Nintendo. Nintendo is quite Rapidly loosing support from other game developer companies, and this is something that will help.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I was 99% sure that this game was by Mizuguchi, the same guy that did Lumines for the PSP and Rez for Dreamcast/PS2. Google thinks so too...what's up with that? Was Sakurai-san also on the project team, or does someone not have their facts straight?

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sakurai is credited as the game's designer and Mizuguchi as the producer.

Just a little bit of extra info...

[Satorian]

Sora means sky in Japanese if I'm not mistaken.

Promising allegory.

Re:Just a little bit of extra info...

[VJ42]

Not really, the first think "Sky" Brings to mind is one mr R. Murdoch

A breath of fresh air

[jessecurry]

It's so nice to see comments such as "I am still not satisfied with the quality of the game." after being bombarded with interviews with all of those PR departments.
I don't think that a designer should ever be completely happy with a release, if that's the case then there's no room left for innovation. Some games have seemed to move to the "almost perfect" level, but the features that were added in later versions or similar titles show that there is always room for improvement.

Re:A breath of fresh air

[cowscows]

Designers, in general, almost never are completely happy with a finished product. Even if you think everything is working well, plain old curiosity will keep you tweaking things, hoping to discover something that you hadn't noticed or thought of before. Deadlines suck for so many reasons, but without them, nothing would ever be finished. There's just this huge hazy area between "good enough" and "excellent", and figuring out where along that line you want to be is probably a big part of any particular company's philosophy.

Re:A breath of fresh air

[SetupWeasel]

I've always said that any artist who is satisfied with his or her own work is either a liar or a hack.

Nintendo games?

[Castar]

Masahiro Sakurai is also the guy behind Super Smash Brothers Melee on the GameCube, the deepest fighting game I have ever played.

Rumor has it that he left HAL Labs because he didn't want to keep working on sequels, but I hope that he keeps working with Nintendo to make DS and Revolution games. Meteos is a very addictive puzzler, and obviously Kirby has had some great games over the years.

SIX Days!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd hope that a game that takes 6 days from design to completion would cost substantially less than $30. Maybe I'm just cheap.

Re:SIX Days!?

[wed128]

They said that was before they even saw (or chose) the hardware...which leads me to believe that the design documentation took 6 days, not the whole game.

Re:SIX Days!?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're both wrong. The design docs took 3 days to write, and they were written before they even saw a DS. The prototype was finished in 3 days. So from design to a prototype stage took 6 days. A lot more work probably went in from the prototype stage to the finished stage (not to mention some Q&A).

Re:SIX Days!?

[Haeleth]

I'd hope that a game that takes 6 days from design to completion would cost substantially less than $30. Maybe I'm just cheap.

Personally I'd prefer the price of a game to reflect its quality rather than the amount of work that went into it. If you offered me this for $30, or something like Daikatana for $3, I know which I'd choose - and my choice wouldn't be influenced by how long the games had taken to write!

Re:SIX Days!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doh! QA (as in Quality Assurance) not Q&A (as in Question and Answer).

/Stabs self in the brain with a q-tip.

Re:SIX Days!?

[KDR_11k]

The 40 Euro pricetag looks even worse when you place the game next to Castlevania DoS, which costs 35 Euros and is probably the best game available on the system.

Re:SIX Days!?

[Jakeypants]

You're just saying that because you're a DS fanboy.

Re:SIX Days!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, some people will tell you that god created the entire universe in 6 days... and that we should STILL be thanking him and continue to thank him in perpetuity. $30 seems quite the bargain in comparison.

Re:SIX Days!?

[cableshaft]

Yeah, when I saw that it claimed it took 3 days total to make in the headline, I choked and said "There's no possible way a game like that can be completed by 3 people in 3 days. Hell, Proximity took me a full week, and it's one of the simplest, ugliest web games I've ever made!"

But prototype. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. He should have been able to prototype it even without an artist in that time. In fact, for my game Proximity, only 6 hours after I came up with the idea I had the prototype up and was playing my brother 2 player, tweaking the ruleset.

But coming up with a solid, fun, well polished game to sell at retail in just 3 days? That's just not going to happen.

Birders have another meaning

[ianscot]

Birders also know Soras as a quirky sort of rail. You can see them out in daylight sometimes, if you're hiking in a wetland area; they're a little less reclusive than other rail species.

Wouldn't make a bad starting point for a company logo of some sort.