I was reading the latest update on Ace Armstrong on the developer's blog and saw an interesting comment from Al:
I’m someone who gets bored easily and I constantly need new problems and challenges, so for me, the best thing about working on Minis is that you’re so limited with what you can do and how long you can spend working on a game due to the limited returns you get back. This puts you under a lot of pressure to deliver things quickly and in a way which matches consumer expectations, which are invariably very high, even on these faster turnaround products. Even with these restrictions in place, Ace has worked out pretty special (IMHO). :-)
Rather than be a hinderence, it seems that (a) the technical constraints, (b) the timescales, and (c) the consumer expectations that all come with the Minis platform can actually act as catalysts for high-quality, focused creativity by talented development & production teams (resulting in awesome games such as Young Thor).
I remember reading some article once by John Carmack (Technical Director, id Software) where he was discussing why he enjoyed his mobile side projects, developing quality games for small resource-constrained mobile devices. Not only did he enjoy the technical challenges, but he also enjoyed the ability to control all aspects of a game development himself (compared to the larger teams necessary to produce a modern triple-A title.
In the development of a major AAA title for a PC or high-end console, one engineer might work solely on particle effects and nothing else. On a comparatively low-end environment such as iPhone, NDS or PSP, especially with additional contraints such as those that come with the PSP Mini platform, a single person can have a much greater remit.
Perhaps that's a key part of the appeal of Mini game development, compared to PS3 or even full PSP AAA game production?
