Hopefully by now you've had the opportunity to play A Boy and His Blob for Nintendo's Wii from Majesco and WayForward.  The charming, highly rated game is easy to fall for (it has a dedicated hug button, as you'll recall), but not everything about it was a peaches and cream jellybean.  Gamasutra has an in-depth postmortem article from the game's director, Sean Velasco, in which the game's strengths and failures are discussed for our benefit.  There's even a little history behind the project mentioned early in the piece:

We got the idea to pitch a new A Boy and His Blob game after spending some time playing the original NES game. I was getting frustrated with the mechanics of David Crane's quirky puzzle platformer, mostly because they were so brilliant! However, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.  We began to brainstorm new transformations and mechanics, and a seed for a pretty cool Blob game was planted. This sort of thing happens all the time at WayForward -- but this time, we knew the owners of the IP.

Majesco acquired the rights to A Boy and His Blob when the original owners, Absolute, went out of business. WayForward and Majesco had been talking about working together for a while, so we simply put together an awesome pitch and sent it their way. We met to discuss in person at E3 2008, and the rest is history.  Originally pitched as a small WiiWare title, we instead turned the idea into a full-blown boxed Wii game. Pleased with our fortunes, we were quite excited as the realization struck... how were we going to pull this off?

For all that held up development, the final product feels exceptionally polished.  I can see where some of the rough patches were now in hindsight, but I'm glad that the development team learned from their mistakes and improved their skills while bringing the Boy and the Blob to life.  I'd expect to see them take things to the next level if they ever create a sequel.