Interviews// Sonic Team's Yojiro Ogawa

SPOnG: Sonic and the Secret Rings has been created in a relatively short time for the Wii. What are your first thoughts for developing for the console and what kind of avenues do you feel it creates for those working on it?

Ogawa-San: Yes, usually for Sonic titles we have two years to develop, but this time we only had one year. Since we had two different game modes – Adventure and Party – we had separate teams working on each mode and the number of team members we had were three times the usual number. The size of the game means it is essentially two games in one, so it was a very big project. Directing the teams as a developer and as a director was very challenging, but I enjoyed it very much.

Particularly developing for the Wii I found interesting because for the first time I was able to design the whole game style. Usually when people develop games they only develop the game. They don’t really think about how players will use the controller or what kind of style they will use for gameplay. But this time we had to think about all these things so it was a very interesting experience.

Also, depending on the player, you might get some people who play games with their controllers naturally leaning forward the whole time, or with the pad towards them, close to their body. So the timing and actions of how to execute the commands in the game was also something I had to keep in mind.

SPOnG: How challenging was it to design stages that Sonic fans had never experienced before?

Ogawa-San: As the Wii remote was very unique, it was hard to design a new gameplay experience. One of the things the team had as a goal was to have players being able to play the game for a very long time. To do that we had to design a method of gameplay where the players wouldn’t get tired. This is why we used this control system: for example, if you were driving a car for a long time you would have to keep your foot on the accelerator.

For Sonic if you wanted to keep running we would have probably had to keep pressing a button, but that would have made players very tired, so that’s why Sonic moves automatically. From the outside Sonic is Sonic as you’ve always known him, but on the inside the system is completely different to what we have seen before.

SPOnG: You’ve talked a lot about the Wii remote, beyond that do any of the other console features, such as WiiConnect24 and Nintendo DS compatibility interest you for further titles?

Ogawa-San: I see a lot of opportunities in WiiConnect24, so I would like to have the feature implemented in the next title. For this title we had prepared some things but we could not move on them, so they are unfortunately not present in the game. But I think it’s a very interesting aspect of the console and it would be great to use it.