More Spore Details from DICE Summit

Will Wright and his team at EA put together a presentation for the DICE Summit, giving folks more details on the much-anticipated Spore . Gamespot reports on the talk, which sounds like it must have been highly entertaining to view. The entire presentation centered around the development process for the game, which has been a platform for smart people to talk about making games since Wright first announced the project. Designers from the team talk about making the space ship creator flexible ("It's pretty satisfying to fly around in your X-Wing and blow up The Enterprise."), and Wright mentioned their habit to run a batch process creating thousands of planets every night. Stephen Totilo at MTV also discusses the talk, and fleshes out a few more details from the event. Looking this over, what do you think? Still excited for Spore, or has it been in development too long?

Spore Wii?

[Shayneisgreat]

I want to play spore, but I want to stick with my inexpensive Wii.

Re:unlikely to be a nice game with this hype

[bstorer]

Wright's gone on record as saying this was the game that he longed to make when they did SimEarth.

Re:Sure I'm still excited.

[milamber3]

Might I offer up Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana as examples for a counter argument.

Re:unlikely to be a nice game with this hype

[SimHacker]

Spore's structure is a lot different than SimEarth.

Will Wright gave a talk to Terry Winnograd's user interface design class at Stanford in 1996 (before he made The Sims), which I sat in on and took some notes about Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games [donhopkins.com]. In that talk he discussed post-morta of some of the games he designed, including SimEarth.

Post Morta:

After designing SimCity Classic, then SimEarth, then SimAnt, then SimCity 2000, here's one way Will compares them: With SimCity Classic as the standard against which to measure, SimEarth was too complex, SimAnt was too simple, and SimCity 2000 was just right.

SimEarth:

SimEarth and SimAnt did not support the same level of creativity and personal imprinting that SimCity does. With SimEarth, anything you do is quickly wiped out by continental drift, erosion, and evolution; you can walk away from it for a while, come back later, and it will have evolved life or shriveled up and died without you, looking pretty much the same as if you had slaved over it for hours. It was too complex a simulation for people to grasp or effect in a satisfying way.

The time scale slows down as the game progresses, from geological time, to when life appears, to when intelligence appears, to when technology is developed. There was some trouble conveying this to the users. One thing that supported the notion of time scale is how the view controls along the bottom of the global map were ordered in a temporal progression, in the order you'd need to use them, from the continental drift display, to the technology display.

Spore is actually designed as a "T" shaped storytelling based game: the levels of scale that you go up through, from plankton to spacefaring civilization (the vertical base of the T), are actually a sandbox tutorial that teach you to play the rest of the game (the horizontal top of the T), which is a collection of science fiction story genras, that take place on top of all of the lower levels.

From the notes I took at Will Wright's Game Developers Conference demo on 3/11/2005, The Future of Content [donhopkins.com]:

Meta Games
Meta games around different genras of science fiction.
Invasion (war of the worlds). Adult supervision (Day the earth stood still. Uplift (2001). First contact (Close Encounters). Abduction cross breeding (X-Files). Diplomacy (Star Trek).
Most of the narritive will come into the game through the space game.
Broad variety of different worlds to visit.
Cross-pollination of content created by different players.
Going to another player's planet.
You can abduct creatures, and go back to populate zoo planet.
T shaped game.
The base of the T is a goal oriented gaming.
The player first goes through a tutorial and sandbox to learn editing tools and game play at each level.
Player can eventually surf down to the lower levels.
Goal oriented game trains you to use all the editors and teaches you the simulation dynamics at every level, from bottom to top.
Once you get to the top you can surf vertically down into the other games, that you've learned to use on the way up.
At the top of the T is a collection of science fiction story genras, that take place on top of all of the lower levels.
Once you make your way all the way up from unicellular life to intergalactic civilization, the storytelling begins.
Pull out to galactics level, 10's of thousands of worlds.
Like the movie Powers to Ten. Always wanted to roll this into a game.
SETI: Drake's equation: N = R fs fp ne fl fi fc L. Each term of the equation correspond to different power of scale.

-Don

Re:OM.... Care Bears vs Klingons fight mechs

[SimHacker]

You hit the nail on the head there. Will Wright is fascinated with Care Bears [gamingsteve.com]. He had several slides on the topic in his GDC 2005 talk [donhopkins.com]:

Pokemon, Neopets, Care Bears. Give kids a sense of ownership and mastery over the facts and details of the characters. Loved dinosaurs as a kid. Knew the rock-scissors-paper of different species of dinosaurs, which was something his mom didn't know. Mastery of facts.

Care bears. Started as greeting cards. Found a web app that categorizes your personality: Which Care Bear are you? Each care bear has special abilities. Care bear have cousins, that aren't even bears. Care bears live in a star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called "Care a Lot". If they fall out of the clouds, they land in the "Forest of Feelings" (Kindom of Caring). Forest of Feelings is over the earth. So the Earth must be the "Kingdom of people who don't give a shit".

-Don

Content Filtering

[MeanderingMind]

Excluding the game being actually fun and awesome, my only concern is how Spore deals with filtering of content.

The fact of the matter is, when this game is released someone is going to make one or more rather obscene creatures. Whether it's a perfect model of a Playboy bunny, or a disturbingly humorous creature based off of our naughty bits, there needs to be a way for someone to say 'I don't want that in my game'.

While there will be people who will welcome these things into their ecosystems, there will also be people who will not. For them, the entire experience will be ruined if their creature they have lovingly crafted can not be played without encountering a race of Fidel Castros.

It shouldn't be too difficult to have an option where you right-click a race and select them for replacement.