03.13.07
Developing Brain Training
I came across this interesting article today – it’s about how the Brain Training game was developed. Made by a team of less than 10, it took them 3months to complete. It was so much of a big seller that in Japan alone, 3million copies were sold in total (both the original and the second sequel, which hasn’t been seen abroad).
People who hadn’t played games before, or those who recently weren’t playing games, had to be recaptured as a possible market. So they looked towards a book that had been selling well, titled 「川島隆太教授の脳を鍛える大人の計算ドリル」 which they basically turned into this best selling game, along with the voice recognition technology that the DS has.
Obviously voice recognition was going to be problematic. Although the base recognition was an adult’s voice, children’s voices (130 words, 20 kids) had to be put into the database. Then there were the accents… ‘kiiro’ is yellow, in Japanese. But some people would be pronouncing it as ‘chiiro’ or ‘iiro’ (especially when those people were fairly old), so they made sure that these little errors also would be in the database and therefore recognize that any of these possibilities were ‘right’. And then there was the writing. People when panicked or trying to write fast tend to have messy handwriting. So for that, more info was needed for the database to function.
Right from the outset, it seems the developers were thinking of other countries who could benefit from this… and so Nintendo America had the care of American English, while Nintendo Europe got an amazing 5 languages to cope with: English (UK), German, French, Spanish and Italian. Shimada, who ran the project recalls that they stuck to three main points: thinking of future steps, people concerned with the project had to be in tune with each other, and that it was crucial for them to always have an international outlook.