Slashdot Mirror
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."
Promising allegory.
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.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
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).