Sonic and the Secret Rings Q&A: Yojiro Ogawa

When 1UP sat down with Sonic and the Secret Rings producer Yojiro Okawa during TGS 2006 to talk about the blue streak, the latter gave so much info that it’s possible to generally define how the game will look and play when it’s released.

There are about 50-60 missions in the single-player campaign, and the player will be running almost throughout all of them. And with the Wiimote, Secret Rings will also be all about the simplicity of control – sort of. Ogawa and the rest of the team wanted to create a game that could be controlled with the touch of one button – along with tilting the controller, of course.

The dev team will pack in a lot of missions and bonuses into each level to encourage players to explore in the rich world of Secret Rings. All of these will tie into “customizable” superpowers that players can use to power up Sonic. And then there’s multiplayer. Up to thirty four-player mini-games will be available, each using unique control schemes that are more dynamic than the steering-inspired single player control scheme.

Finally, with the Arabian Nights backstory to Secret Rings, and its fantasy-desert setting, 1UP asked Ogawa what homework he did to nail the look of the game. No trips to the Arabian Peninsula for research, though, but he did get to visit an Arabian pub in order to soak up the culture. You can definitely see the fruits of his research in the latest batch of Secret Rings screens we’ve featured from TGS.

When 1UP sat down with Sonic and the Secret Rings producer Yojiro Okawa during TGS 2006 to talk about the blue streak, the latter gave so much info that it’s possible to generally define how the game will look and play when it’s released.

There are about 50-60 missions in the single-player campaign, and the player will be running almost throughout all of them. And with the Wiimote, Secret Rings will also be all about the simplicity of control – sort of. Ogawa and the rest of the team wanted to create a game that could be controlled with the touch of one button – along with tilting the controller, of course.

The dev team will pack in a lot of missions and bonuses into each level to encourage players to explore in the rich world of Secret Rings. All of these will tie into “customizable” superpowers that players can use to power up Sonic. And then there’s multiplayer. Up to thirty four-player mini-games will be available, each using unique control schemes that are more dynamic than the steering-inspired single player control scheme.

Finally, with the Arabian Nights backstory to Secret Rings, and its fantasy-desert setting, 1UP asked Ogawa what homework he did to nail the look of the game. No trips to the Arabian Peninsula for research, though, but he did get to visit an Arabian pub in order to soak up the culture. You can definitely see the fruits of his research in the latest batch of Secret Rings screens we’ve featured from TGS.