Released recently on the Nintendo DS, Okamiden began development back in 2009, after the game’s director, Kuniomi Matsushita, threw together a prototype build of the game, and convinced producer, Motohide Eshiro, to allow him to take the game into development.
In a post-mortem on Gamasutra, Matsushita and Eshiro talk about their experiences developing the game and what challenges they encountered during both the development and localization process. For instance, one problem, they reveal, was the game’s marketing budget, which was relatively small. This was dealt with by using Facebook as a marketing platform.
Team management, too, was an issue, and affected the game’s development schedule, extending it further than planned, as the various teams involved were too concerned with their own portions of the game, and not focusing on collaborating as a large development group.