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« on: September 10, 2004, 05:49:52 AM »
Rehash or not, neither this game nor mario party games are cheap or easy to make. They are easy to play.
The critical part of making a game is the control mechanism. Most games have one fairly elabotrate control mech, and a simple one for menus.
Both warioware and mario party have a great many different control mechs, and each of them may have completely different logic driving the display, rules and collision for each mini game.
If you have a long game that follows the same rules over it's entirety, then making levels for it becomes second nature for the designers, but if you have loads of smaller games, each with different requirements then you never get into a rhytm, and have to do a lot more thinking.
Don't underestimate the skill required to pull one of these titles off. If it was easy, everyone would be doing rip-offs - like with driving games, fps's and third person cookie cutter yawn inducers tied to films.
Just look at the credits for either game and you'll see how many people are required to make these games, then multiply that number of people by an average salary for a year. You may also notice that the ratio of programmers to artists falls much more heavily towards the programmers than usual. Things that seem technically impressive in the games world are often not, while things that seem simple are often very sophisticated.