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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."
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.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
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!