So, we really can't get enough of Accordion Hero creators Schadenfreude Interactive, the Black Forest's leading game development force, and are delighted to see that sister site Gamasutra is running an exclusive Accordion Hero postmortem as part of the continuing 'Schadenfreudian Slips' column.

Among the gems revealed within is Schadenfreude's 'unique' method of game controller prototyping: "Although most of us had played the accordion, we had never designed a game controller before! I quickly threw together a prototype made of dryer ducting, two cheese graters, tape, buttons, and a few Werther's Originals. It took a great deal of imaginary accordion playing to determine where the buttons should ultimately go, and the cheese graters scratched Crispin's hands up pretty horribly."

In addition, there are some genuine development insights, leading us to suspect that the Germans have been reading the Guitar Hero postmortem in Game Developer magazine's February 2006 issue, even though the game is CLEARLY COMPLETELY UNRELATED.

In particular, there's this practical gem on translation issues: "Naming your band is an important part of the game (your band's name will appear in newspapers, on banners above the stage, and, at the highest levels, engraved upon beer steins), and any proper band will have at least two umlauts in their name. Making sure all these special characters are correct can be difficult. Luckily, Otto has written an umlaut-checking script called Diacritical Path, which smööths the process considerably."