Hot on the heels of the announcement of Spore’s official release date, Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal sat down with project lead Will Wright, and asked him exactly why this game is taking so damn long to complete. Will responded, and then gamers smiled. He said:
"…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."
He later added some details about the way content would be shared between players, which is very much akin to social networking websites – and very cool:
"…there are some kind of broad concepts that go across the whole game that came in fairly late, after we got a sense of the entire thing, having to do with how we show your pollinated content. Every time you make something in the game you get a card; it gets pollinated to our servers so that we can get it to other players. …any time in the game [players] can hit a button, bring up their browser and browse the entire universe of content."
"I can make a buddy list, and it will try to put my buddy’s content in my universe at a higher priority. I can subscribe to Sporecasts, which are aggregations of content that players have decided to basically organize themselves. Also, when I get a card for a piece of content–whether it be mine or somebody else’s–at any time I can open that card and leave a comment on the card, and the person who made that content will get the comment. It’s like a guest book for every card. So the idea is that there’s going to be a running community discussion group based around the content where every piece of content is its own thread discussion. Then we add things like Flickr tagging of content and stuff like that so that people can search what is probably going to be a very large database of content."
Ahh, there’s the smile I was talking about. Head over to the Level Up blog to read the rest of Will’s interview, then sit and wait patiently for Spore to launch later this year. I’ll be right there with you.
