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Kirby, Meteos Designer Creates Indie Studio

Posted by Zonk on from the more-innovation-for-the-money dept.

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."

6 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. Just a little bit of extra info... by Satorian · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sora means sky in Japanese if I'm not mistaken.

    Promising allegory.

  2. A breath of fresh air by jessecurry · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:A breath of fresh air by cowscows · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --

      One time I threw a brick at a duck.

  3. Nintendo games? by Castar · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  4. SIX Days!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:SIX Days!? by Haeleth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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!