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WILL WRIGHT, INVENTOR OF SIMCITY, THE SIMS, AND NOW SPORE Not only is Will Wright one of the most prominent game designers out there, but he’s also been prominent for a length of time seldom found in the game industry. His latest game, Spore, allows players to explore life—like, ALL of life, from single-cell organisms to galactic empires. It was originally going to be released under the title SimEverything. It’s been in development for eight years and was initially slated for release in 2006, but the team elected to keep it in testing for an extra two years to ensure the correct level of polish. I’ve been watching Spore since its media debut. I’ve always liked Wright’s games, and the idea of one game with so many different play modes has always intrigued me, but it’s not just the game’s premise that holds my attention. Spore makes heavy use of procedural content, a relatively new approach to gaming that’s been picking up steam for the past few years—the Havok physics engine’s procedural methods of determining the behavior of objects in space has been wowing gamers since Half-Life 2’s first previews hit the internet. But Spore uses procedural content for far more than just animation. I’m not normally one to say a particular game will change everything, but with luck, a lot of other games will take cues from the way Spore handles itself. I caught up with Will Wright over the phone recently to hear his thoughts on Spore, procedural content, and a bit of the future of the game industry. Vice: Could you talk a little bit about Spore? Will Wright: Basically it’s a game about life in the broadest possible sense. You start as a single-cell microbe at the beginning, the origin of life, work your way up through evolution, onto land, you become intelligent eventually, start forming primitive tribal societies, then civilizations, cities, technology, and eventually, you move out into space and you start actually exploring the entire galaxy. That’s kind of the theme of the game. In every level the player is creating the stuff, creating the species, the cities, the buildings, the vehicles. Eventually, the user makes entire planets and biospheres, and when they make the stuff, it’s actually used to populate other players’ worlds automatically. And then eventually after that, you go out to space and you’re exploring millions of unique worlds, and these worlds are populated with creatures and civilizations that other players have made as they’ve played the game. This is what you’ve been calling pollinated content, right? Right. It’s kind of a hybrid between a single-player and a multiplayer game. Multiplayer games have a lot of design limitations, where you can’t let the players cheat, you can’t let them pause the game, you can’t let them get very powerful relative to other players, so we didn’t want to have all these limitations. Plus you usually have to charge a monthly subscription fee, so we wanted to give the benefit of a million players collectively building this universe without all the design limitations you get with a multiplayer game. Now, this is a very broad game in terms of the number of platforms it’s appearing on. It’s just starting on the PC, but you’ve also got versions for Mac, Wii, iPhone, and DS. Does pollinated content work across platforms? Right now it only works across Mac and PC. Going into the future and looking at other platforms, we’re going to try as much as possible to make the pollinated content cross-platform-compatible. Right now the DS is different, it takes a very different kind of style than the PC version, so it’s not compatible or from the same library. But I think going into the future, we’re going to try to utilize the same database across platforms. We’re seeing a lot of procedural content in video games recently. Obviously everything uses Havok physics nowadays. Grand Theft Auto 4 uses Euphoria for animation, The Force Unleashed uses that plus Digital Molecular Matter for terrain deformation. And Spore is based entirely on procedural content. How far do you see this going? What do you think is the future of procedural content? You’ve been up to your elbows in it for seven years now. I think we have enough CPU power now to where we can apply it more much broadly than we would have in the past. For Spore there were certainly things we could not have done without procedural content. For instance, since players can create whatever creature they want to in the editor, we could not pre-animate these things, so the computer basically has to procedurally animate these things. Same with texturing and the mesh construction and a few other things like that. In Spore, it’s a combination of procedural content plus user-created content, because you can also use procedural content to make it easier for players to make content, and it’s really the synergy between those two that’s powerful. Some other instances in Spore, like the planets, are procedurally generated, which means that we can have millions of unique planets, because they’re not having to be stored, they’re just stored as a seed value. An entire planet in Spore compresses down to about 32 bits of information, and that gives you a huge variety of planet cells as well. So you can use procedural content for different things, but I think probably amplifying the player’s creativity is going to be the most valuable thing by far. TO BE CONTINUED SHEPPARD'S VIDEO-GAME PIE | 1 | 2 | See all articles by this contributor
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