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The Seeds of Spore

by P. R. Boudreau

Alex Hutchinson speaks on the design challenges of Spore.

The SAT was ripe with fertile minds as the Montreal IGDA held its final autumnal gathering for 2008. The big draw this evening was a public post-mortem on EA’s Spore, delivered by Lead Designer, Alex Hutchison.

Although Hutchison is a relative newcomer to Montreal, he is nevertheless a seasoned gippy(game industry professional). He got his start in game journalism for magazines such as Edge, Games™, Official PS2 Mag and PC Zone. Alex worked his way up, level by level, to game design and into the Sims family.

As Lead Designer on The Sims 2 and later Spore, Alex learned that in order to look beyond design, one had to first look to the designer. How can designers create something truly original when drawing from all the same sources? A new model was needed and Hutchison found it in the Sim Daddy himself, Will Wright. Working with Wright, Alex came to expect the unexpected. Yet for all his quirks, WW was clear in his vision, laying it out in no uncertain terms in his original title: SimEverything.

Alex recounts the overwhelming nature working alongside the legendary Will Wright.

In the beginning...

Spore never really strayed from its original goal: the convergence of creation, sharing and gameplay. If this weren’t a tall enough order, the design team also wanted to make a widely accessible game whose appeal would extend well beyond hard-core gamers. And generate a sense of wonder in games and, perhaps, science without being overly scientific. The solution was simple: make the player God.

Some challenges became clear immediately with the collision of expectation and reality. The promise of a gameplay paradise where Pac-Man fans frolic with Civilisation aficionados was bound to generate some buzz. Heavenly aspirations were quickly brought down to earth as rumour, speculation and anticipation began to develop critical mass, otherwise known as the internet posters. A universe is not gently born.

And then there was the quest for a functional controller that could convey the feeling of divine omnipotence, ‘God’s Joystick’ if you will. After a series of increasingly complex systems culminating in a fairly user-hostile keyboard/mouse interface, a simple point-and-click method was devised.

Another crucial issue was that the game tended to accommodate editing over play. So what about the wider market that Hutchison and his crew were hoping to cultivate? How to entice rather than intimidate?

“Spore is creation!”

In order to turn Everyman into Auteur, Spore needed to offer more while demanding less. The UI was simplified, stats were streamlined to the bare minimum and abilities too numerous to manage were instead distributed throughout the various levels of the game. Yet even as they chipped away at the emerging form, Alex strove to not only remain true to the Sims brand but to build upon it as well.

Like any other project, Spore encountered some unexpected bumps along the way, but it was the pleasant surprises that Hutchison found most rewarding. A built-in ‘save as you edit’ feature unwittingly provided users with the means of capturing images while tracking their creatures’ evolution. Before long, a number of these time-lapse ‘documentaries’ began popping up on community sites.

It’s more fun to share...

Sporepedia was created to allow players to keep track of their creatures’ history as well as check-in or check-out premade and user-generated content. Over one eight-week period, some 42 million creations were added to the Spore community. Various content delivery methods have been implemented such as ‘Sporecasts’ which offer creation sets by specific editors, or the ‘Buddie’ system where friends can form a more exclusive content sharing network.

But there remained the challenge of integrating pollinated content into the world. It soon became clear that a certain amount of filtering was necessary in order to ensure a satisfactory gameplay experience. Based on the developmental course set by the player, the game seeds the environment with suitably appropriate co-species. As an added control measure, players determine the diversity and complexity of their interaction with the world by the distance that they are willing to travel from their nests. Also, it was determined to be more plausible and more challenging to have the world and its inhabitants evolve along with the players’ creations.

You can make anything, but can you do everything?

Hutchison believes that a game about self-expression and exploration should be about more than killing and violence. A great deal of importance was placed on social mechanics and the role they would play in shaping the world. The Sims have traditionally demanded the player make active decisions regarding relationships and, by extension, the narrative direction of the game. However, in an environment where the two primary options are hunt or befriend, gameplay risks becoming somewhat repetitive and creatures could easily become just another currency. The hope is that as the players develop their worlds and shape their history, a more satisfactory user-directed win-state can be achieved.

Alex wrapped up the presentation with some Q&A where he dished out a bit more insider info, a couple of coy nondisclosures and a cautionary tale on the use of penis jokes at press conferences. And then the drinking began in earnest...

On Fire: Kudos to Patrick Redding, Clint Hocking and Pierre-Yves Savard from Ubisoft's just shipped Far Cry 2.