Speaking with Gamasutra, lead programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi and producer Toshihiro Tsuchida over at Square Enix touch upon WiiWare, their popular title for the service Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, size limitations and how the limitation actually helped improve their title.

BS: I’m curious to know how difficult it was, or if it was a welcome challenge, to fit that game into a small file size. Was it challenging? I know when people saw the screenshots of the game for the first time, they were like, “How did that happen?”

FS: It actually wasn’t that difficult. I think we designed the game to fit in the memory space. It wasn’t so much that we had a game and had to squeeze it down. If anything, I think the size restriction helped us. I don’t think we would’ve had this game design idea if we didn’t have the memory restriction to begin with.

Once we had the restriction, we had… all our artists are veterans, so if you tell them the size, they’ll hit it right on. And once we started making it, in the beginning, a lot of people didn’t think we could fit this game in the given size, but we were actually quite a bit under. It uses a little bit of compression, and a little bit of techniques. You can fit a lot of game in a small size.

With my short time spent with Lost Winds, you couldn’t even tell there was a size restriction; the game is gorgeous. How games turn out will basically come down to how skilled developers and artists are. Now the Wii’s internal memory limitation, that’s a different story.

Gamasutra

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