Level-5 aren't an incredibly well-known developer in the West, but in Japan they're a hit-making machine responsible for the Dark Cloud series, Dragon Quest VIII, the upcoming Dragon Quest IX, the Inazuma Eleven soccer RPG (really!) series, the Professor Layton series, and the spectacular-looking upcoming DS collaboration with Studio Ghibli Ni no Kuni (The Another World). So, logically, Level-5 head Akihiro Hino's GDC talk was about how to generate hit games, with a big focus on Level-5's DS projects.
In the game industry, we have a lot of artisan types of game creators. Sometimes when we think about how to sell games, that's seen as evil – but I don't agree. We need to sell games so that they'll have a wide audience so more people can enjoy games. From the start, we need to be thinking about how to sell the game.
Level-5's method is not to issue a trailer until the title is about 20% done and to focus on making trailers as spectacular as possible. For Professor Layton they did this with the fully voiced anime cutscenes that built up the basic gimmick of solving the puzzles by asking friends for help. With Ni no Kuni they've got the Studio Ghibli animation and the gimmick of using the touch screen to cast spells from a magic book you find in the story. Of course, Hino emphasizes all of this is in vain if you don't make the game basically fun to play once you work out how to sell it.
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