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N'Gai Croal, that other game blogger extraordinaire, had a loooong interview with Will Wright on why it's taking so long to develop Spore. A bit hardcore, but fascinating if you're into that sort of thing:
Part 1: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/level...re-part-i.aspx
Part 2: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/level...e-part-ii.aspx
Croal also interviewed executive producer Lucy Bradshaw, on developing Spore for DS, Mac and mobiles:
Choice quotes:
On what was the biggest challenge:
On how long a game will take to play:
On building on existing genres:
Can Macs and PCs share content:
How will the DS version be different:
On the mobile version:
Part 1: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/level...re-part-i.aspx
Part 2: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/level...e-part-ii.aspx
Croal also interviewed executive producer Lucy Bradshaw, on developing Spore for DS, Mac and mobiles:
Choice quotes:
On what was the biggest challenge:
Oh gosh. It was so many challenges to overcome. A lot of them initially were technical challenges: procedural animation; can we do these levels of detail enough to have zoom on the models; etc. Once we nailed most of those, it became a very large design challenge. And probably the biggest design challenge was keeping it very accessible to players so that every bit of the game was intuitive, easy and approachable. At the same time, we were going to mix all these genres, so we wanted to have one kind of control scheme, camera scheme, feedback system, rewards, across these different game genres. That probably overall was the biggest challenge, I think.
On how long a game will take to play:
We decided that it when you select the planet at the very start of the game, you select a difficulty level, so players can surf that as well. That's going to influence not just difficulty, but also the pacing in some of these games. Some of them are like a lot of RTS games or empire-building games, where you start out very lean on resources and you're digging yourself out of the hole; on the hard setting, it's going to feel a little bit more like that. On easy, I think the pace will go a little bit faster through a level. So it's going to depend primarily on the difficulty level. And once you get to Space, that's the point at which you can sit there and play the thing for 30 hours if you want, and it feels little bit more like an MMO at that point.
On building on existing genres:
It is interesting because as you go through the game you're not just going through different genres, but the genres you're going through are almost in order of historical appearance. So you start with this Pac-Man like thing; then you go into what's more like a third-person shooter; then you go into the the RTS-like stuff; and then you end up in an MMO. So you're kind of recapitulating the development of games is a medium. But in some sense games are built upon predecessors, and they borrow concepts, and metaphors, and control schemes. So that actually served us pretty well. First-person shooters I think were influenced by things like Pac-Man, in terms of how you control your character. The feedback that you got from an RTS was based upon things that you got in the early first-person shooters, etc.
Can Macs and PCs share content:
And, yes, the content that players create on the Mac version can be shared with PC players as well as other Mac players. All of the building blocks that are available in Spore's Creature, Building, Vehicle and Spaceship Creators are the same for both the PC and Mac versions, so we can now populate the galaxies of both Mac and PC players with the content that other players create, which makes exploring your own personal galaxy always unique and surprising.
How will the DS version be different:
Spore for the Nintendo DS is an entirely unique design. We focused on delivering the core features of Spore: creativity, exploration, sharing and collecting, while taking full advantage the unique aspects of the DS platform such as the stylus and connectivity. The result is a completely specialized version of the creature phase of the game complete with a Nintendo DS unique creature creator that we are calling Spore Creatures. [...] We even decided to go with a custom look for Spore Creatures so the content is entirely unique to the DS. Our artistic inspiration came from Japanese flat rod puppets and shadow box art.
On the mobile version:
Just as Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS is an offshoot of the creature phase, Spore Mobile revolves around the first phase featured in the PC game: the cell phase. You'll start out in the primordial ooze and work your way up through the food chain as you head for land avoiding predators and adapting to your environment.
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