FEATURES: Takeshi Shimada's GDC 2007 Presentation
Introduction and Background
March 11, 2007
Digg this articleNWR has a summary of the challenges in developing handwriting and voice recognition for Brain Age on a tight schedule.
On Friday, Takeshi Shimada of Nintendo presented "Rethinking the Development Timeline: The Reason Brain Age was Developed so Efficiently." Whereas previous Nintendo presentations on Brain Age focused on why the game was such a fiscal and popular success around the world, Shimada explained how the game could be developed in only three months.
Shimada started by explaining that while he worked on Brain Age, he was not part of the Brain Age development team. Tim O'Leary of NOA introduced Mr. Shimada as one of Nintendo's ninjas working invisibly in the dark: he directs three development teams dedicated to development tools and software libraries for both Nintendo and its third parties. He is in charge of the Software Development Kit (SDK) & Wireless Libraries, Graphics & Audio Team, and Various Technological Element and Middleware teams.
Were the technologies within Brain Age not already under way within Nintendo, developing Brain Age would have been an overwhelming task. Fortunately, Brain Age was the catalyst, not the inspiration, for the technologies involved. Shimada's middleware team was already hard at work on handwriting and voice recognition technologies around the DS launch, even though it was not clear what games may use them in the future. Brain Age justified the research's usefulness and provided the incentive to mature the technologies.
To develop its handwriting and voice recognition tools for Nintendo DS, Shimada's team looked to experts outside of Nintendo for their experience. Nintendo talked with many companies and evaluated many different third party libraries, narrowing down the trade space based on compatible languages, required memory space, cost, processing power needed (power consumption) and overall performance. By the time the Brain Age team approached Shimada about incorporating handwriting and voice recognition, Shimada had decided upon two or three competing companies' libraries as Nintendo's best options. He provided the Brain Age team with a work-in-progress software package and was told it "worked pretty good." With initial results looking promising, and a target Brain Age release date of Spring 2005 in Japan, Shimada had three months left to decide on and polish one package.
