Final Fantasy creator sees room to grow in mobile game design

- Mistwalker founder and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. The man who led Square to build the first Final Fantasy is gearing up to launch his debut free-to-play mobile game Terra Battle in Japan next month, and as part of that effort he sat down with Kotaku recently to talk about what he's learned in thirty years of game development. It's a far-ranging conversation, but the most relevant bits for developers include Sakaguchi's defense of his decision to focus Mistwalker's efforts on games for the lucrative Japanese mobile market ("I looked at the [market] landscape, and this is what I came up with,") and his insight into how mobile platforms demand fundamental changes in the way developers approach game design. "Making something for a vertical screen is completely different. You don't have as much real estate, you have to worry about the layout, how it's gonna look," Sakaguchi told Kotaku. "Also, you're playing with a single hand. It has to be easily accessible. You need to worry about people playing in their spare time instead of that 50-60 hour experience that you're gonna get out of console." It's an interesting interview, one that's worth reading in full over on Kotaku.