L-R : Alex Hutchinson, Jenna Chalmers, Ocean Quigley, Chaim Gingold, Will Wright.
Will Wright and four members of the Spore team are on stage talking about their game. If any major news happens (you know, release dates, they announce that they're adding the Def Jam license, anything like that) I'll update after the jump.
On Planet-Building...
What you're seeing here is a single procedurally-generated planet in Spore, in various stages. A planet in balance is in the middle; the atmosphere is okay. But in the middle of an ice age, or if the planet is too close to the sun or something, it might burn up and become a dead celestial body. There's a whole atmosphere system that you can see there.
They run a batch program every night and generate 100,000 - 200,000 planets, just to test out the procedural system. They're also working on a whole galaxy-generating program, working backwards from Hubble telescope photos.
On Spaceship Building...
Will Wright: We can't make the Enterprise, but we want to make sure that everybody else can make the Enterprise.
Jenna Chalmers: We had a contest to try and make the top ten sci-fi vehicles with the parts we had.
Ocean: It's pretty satisfying to fly around in an X-Wing and blow up the Enterprise.
WW: You can end up in an interstellar warfare between the Care Bears and the Klingons.
On Players Designing Characters...
In gameplay, you want a certain amount of abstraction. Players want to understand what the boundaries are. Players want to know what the function of something is, but also they want it to be beautiful.
Ocean Quigley: We have to make the systems that give the players the illusion of competence. Content in games is really good now. If you look at state of the art characters, they're really good. We have to do something that's cleanly stylized, but that doesn't require the player to be a rigger, or a modeler, or a painter. An early problem we had was, do we want this game to look like a science book, using plausible illustrations of real aliens? Fundamentally that turned out to be really hard.
Will Wright: We had the team split up into the cute team and the science team.
Ocean: I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the cute team. Let's make it cute to cover up our flaws. It focus tests really well, when you put big eyes on something. We made this problem our friend, by making the parts deliberately simplified, cartoonish.
We can also export these creatures into Maya, fully rigged.
WW: One of the problems we came up with was Ocean Versus The Player.
Ocean: I don't mean to be too WASPish about it, but you have this sense of an art director directing a million incompetents.
