In a rare interview opportunity with GamaSutra, Takeshi Shimada, who's the manager of development support and platform engineering at Nintendo, recently spoke about his involvement in creating tools at the Big N for use by its creative teams, and external parties. He also discussed the challenges faced when creating tools for the Nintendo DS and Wii, as well as the new approaches taken with the duo.

“Very generally speaking, people tend to expect somewhat of a linear progression in terms of the graphical and sound capability of machines like [Wii], but the Wii really represents a departure in that way of thinking in this evolutionary line,” Shimada said, when asked how different the graphics chip within the Wii is compared to the GameCube's, and consequently why an entirely new one was created.

“One of the things that we have tended to consider in the development of this hardware is that we might consider producing games with lower processing needs, and so as we were thinking about that, that actually went into our hardware development,” he said. “It wasn't so much that there was like a stall in progress between GameCube and Wii, but rather Wii is a totally different kind of system. We were just thinking of what the needs would be eventually in our development cycle. So, we approached it as a completely new platform with a very different scale.”

And therefore, Shimada said, “When thinking about our graphics and audio pipeline on Wii, we needed totally new development tools. This time around, there are so many new features - things like wireless, the way the remote works - that it basically meant starting over with new dev tools as well.”

Asked what the biggest challenges as far as creating these new tools for Wii has been, Shimada continued, “Whether we're talking about the Wii or the DS, what I take as my personal challenge on all of these projects on an ongoing basis is how to help developers bring their ideas to life as easily as possible. When you think about the Wii and the DS, they both have a lot of devices embedded within them, so they're actually both very complicated pieces of hardware. But, if you're going to help a developer bring an idea to fruition, you need to give them tools that are as easy to use as possible.”

He concluded, “My constant challenge is to not make anything harder than it needs to be, because every time you do that, it's going to act as some kind of barrier in these developers' otherwise unlimited creativity in their projects.” 

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