Kirby at 30: Looking at a game's anniversary through lens of new games

gamedeveloper.com:

As the legendary Kirby game series approached its 30th anniversary in 2022, its executive director at HAL Laboratory decided to celebrate the occasion by "taking on a new challenge." In a GDC 2023 presentation that he co-hosted, Shinya Kumazaki led a packed audience through a two-game retrospective, to explain how the simultaneous production of a brand-new 3D game and a 2D remake took different paths to fulfilling the same Kirby series imperative: "approachable, yet deep."

The presentation began with a revealing look at the 2022 game Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which began development shortly after the launch of 2018's Kirby Star Allies. But a mere four-year development window betrays the work HAL put into the series' biggest transformation in its history.

"The process went beyond the development of a single title," Kumazaki said while standing beneath a slide that featured various 3D modes and mini-games through the series' history, ranging from the 2003 racing game Kirby's Air Ride to select sections of Star Allies. "We accumulated experience little by little."

While those experiments helped HAL's staff tiptoe into 3D-related development challenges, Kumazaki knew they paled compared to those that a team would encounter while crafting a feature-length 3D game. And such a game would have to appeal to newcomers, just like every other major Kirby game over the series' history. Thus, before HAL began plotting any levels or art design, then, they needed to nail down a fun concept that would take the series somewhere new, whimsical, and accessible.

One idea that stood out during the prototyping phase was an extreme extension of the squishy, malleable animations that Kirby had showcased as far back as the N64 era. "We