GDC '09: Sega 'learned lessons' from Super Monkey Ball iPhone development
Follow this yellow brick road to game design success
There’s a lot of back slapping going on at this year’s GDC, but, to be fair, there’s a lot of useful information coming out of it.
Normally game companies like to remain as tight lipped as possible about the design techniques, but for some reason even the big ones are keen to go into intimate detail about their iPhone projects.
Sega’s Ethan Einhorn and Chris Sharpley of Other Ocean just got down from the stage after talking up the audience about ten lessons each company learned during the development of Super Monkey Ball on the iPhone - one of the platform’s most successful titles to date.
Both developer and publisher happily chatted about ten lessons each one had learned from this early foray into iPhone gaming, that led to a quick, yet prolonged success for Super Monkey Ball.
Among them were the benefits of releasing Lite versions at opportune moments, resisting price wars, listening to feedback from the end user and keeping things super simple.
It’s well worth any fledgling developers studying Sega’s and Other Ocean’s top ten development hit lists in full over on Gamasutra. Many of them sound obvious, but make a lot of sense when laid down on paper.
