GDC 2007: Nintendo’s Takeshi Shimada: development timelines

NintendoWorldReport has four pages of details from the presentation of Nintendo’s Takeshi Shimada at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007. Shimada presented “Rethinking the Development Timeline: The Reason Brain Age Was Developed So Efficiently” to explain how it’s possible that a game can be developed in only three months. Here’s our summary of the event.

Interesting insight for gamers. This isn’t just for developers. We share this info with you, our readers, because this is interesting stuff for gamers, too. You invest in a Wii or DS (or plan to buy one), so why not take a quick look at what lessons Nintendo developers are sharing with other first-party and third-party game developers?

Lesson #1: Invest in technologies before you need them. When the Brain Age project started, the developers realized that they needed handwriting recognition and voice recognition tools. Fortunately, it turns out that Shimada’s middleware team had already been scouring the market for possible handwriting and voice tools around the DS launch.

The lesson: even though it’s not obvious which games will need which development tools, a development team has to be willing to invest in technology and to “mature” or develop that technology. Because you already have the tools in place, you can work faster. And the “maturing” of the technology benefits the gaming industry as a whole!

Lesson #2: Game developers need to have massive sharing of vision. A big portion of game development is “simple” management: leadership, scheduling, communication, and planning. A significant portion of Shimada’s presentation looked at how different teams worked quickly on various tasks and sent in their results to the other teams. For example, for handwriting recognition for Brain Age, they needed as much test data as possible, so they created software to collect and analyze a large quantity of writing samples from DS touch screens, and this in turn led to the next step: making the handwriting software fast and able to recognize sloppy writing.

Future development tools for the Nintendo Wii. Shimada also talked a little bit about four Wii development tools for first-party and third-party game developers:

• NintendoWare, a tool developed by Nintendo and HAL that emulates Wii hardware on the PC. This way artists and developers can test what they’re doing instead of loading the code onto a Wii development kit.
• Fur-shading middleware. The need for this kind of tool is pretty self-evident: fur is not always an easy texture to incorporate into a game.
• Predictive input. Basically, the game guesses what you’re about to input based on your prior motion. This should make the intuitive use of the Wii controllers (Wiimote and Nunchuk) even more intuitive (many games, like first-person-shooters, would benefit from this).
• Text-to-speech. Just a little something they’re exploring for the Wii.

NintendoWorldReport has four pages of details from the presentation of Nintendo’s Takeshi Shimada at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007. Shimada presented “Rethinking the Development Timeline: The Reason Brain Age Was Developed So Efficiently” to explain how it’s possible that a game can be developed in only three months. Here’s our summary of the event.

Interesting insight for gamers. This isn’t just for developers. We share this info with you, our readers, because this is interesting stuff for gamers, too. You invest in a Wii or DS (or plan to buy one), so why not take a quick look at what lessons Nintendo developers are sharing with other first-party and third-party game developers?

Lesson #1: Invest in technologies before you need them. When the Brain Age project started, the developers realized that they needed handwriting recognition and voice recognition tools. Fortunately, it turns out that Shimada’s middleware team had already been scouring the market for possible handwriting and voice tools around the DS launch.

The lesson: even though it’s not obvious which games will need which development tools, a development team has to be willing to invest in technology and to “mature” or develop that technology. Because you already have the tools in place, you can work faster. And the “maturing” of the technology benefits the gaming industry as a whole!

Lesson #2: Game developers need to have massive sharing of vision. A big portion of game development is “simple” management: leadership, scheduling, communication, and planning. A significant portion of Shimada’s presentation looked at how different teams worked quickly on various tasks and sent in their results to the other teams. For example, for handwriting recognition for Brain Age, they needed as much test data as possible, so they created software to collect and analyze a large quantity of writing samples from DS touch screens, and this in turn led to the next step: making the handwriting software fast and able to recognize sloppy writing.

Future development tools for the Nintendo Wii. Shimada also talked a little bit about four Wii development tools for first-party and third-party game developers:

• NintendoWare, a tool developed by Nintendo and HAL that emulates Wii hardware on the PC. This way artists and developers can test what they’re doing instead of loading the code onto a Wii development kit.
• Fur-shading middleware. The need for this kind of tool is pretty self-evident: fur is not always an easy texture to incorporate into a game.
• Predictive input. Basically, the game guesses what you’re about to input based on your prior motion. This should make the intuitive use of the Wii controllers (Wiimote and Nunchuk) even more intuitive (many games, like first-person-shooters, would benefit from this).
• Text-to-speech. Just a little something they’re exploring for the Wii.