*Deep breath*


Hello Sporum and Maxis, I want to introduce myself to the community and spew my thoughts on Spore.

Since I've long since left Maxis and have pretty much kept my mouth shut before the game was released, I feel safer now to talk about the game without risking any sort of NDA breach. If someone at EA is really uncomfortable about this, I won't be upset if this is C/D'd and I'll shut up

Pre-development
I worked on Spore for four months in summer 2004 as an intern and worked on several prototypes and concept art during the prototyping part of development. My work included the creature part selector (which surprisingly turned out exactly the way it was prototyped, though I'm sure it went through numerous revisions later on), built early prototypes of creature and building parts (with draggable widgets for re-shaping your parts or blocks), and spent countless hours messing with an early version of the creature.

First I'd like to dispel the rumor that the 2005 demos were "rendered" or "heavily scripted". I'm not 100% certain to what extent the demos were "scripted", but at the stage of development when I was there the builds of the game already had most of the mechanics that we see today.

The creature editor that was available at the time had some of the most amazing procedural animation work I've ever seen anyone develop. Perhaps, somewhat more innovative than what we see in the game today (more on this later).


After stalking this forum for about about a week after release, and reading all the reviews and reactions, then having played the game myself for about fifty hours, here are some of my opinions.

Creature creation seems over-simplified
This was a big deal for me. In the extremely early versions that I toyed around with, I was able to make creatures that shifted under their own weight. Creatures that exploited the length of their arms or legs for greater reach. Creatures that behave and move true to how they were built. A short bunny-creature would definitely be out-run by the long-legged dragon-giraffe. That was very neat, and it implied several exciting possibilities in gameplay.

For instance, creature morphology actually mattered. This implied deeper strategy to creature creation. You have a small inkling of this in the Cell stage where placement of parts somewhat mattered. For example, spikes placed behind your creature saved you from being bitten when chased. But, the strategy that earlier prototypes implied went beyond placement of parts. The length of limbs or spine felt like it mattered. If you had a forward-heavy animal with legs placed in the back, it would run poorly as it tries (and fails) to counteract its own weight.

I can see the reason why Maxis shifted the design from a "morphology matters" philosophy to a "every design works". Somewhere along the line, someone must have decided that it wasn't good to build creatures that could fail. This emphasizes (hopefully) people to experiment with different looking creatures, rather than focus only on creatures that perform well (or perform at all).

The problem with this is that within "friendly" game design, all creatures became a bland, unified "idea" of a creature. With a game being so inspired by evolutionary design, the game takes so little advantage of the exciting things that could be done with the ideas its selling. I have a strong feeling that this is the main reason why people feel the game-play to be "shallow".

Imagine for a moment that morphology does matter. Less surface area would mean less area to be bitten (or perhaps, less mass to carry around). Longer necks would mean eating better fruits found higher up on trees. Bigger and stronger arms could let you pick up and use larger and larger objects (pick up other creatures, or throw rocks and boulders). Longer legs (including legs that end up in a tentacle-like spiral fashion) would mean faster running, but legs might tangle up with each other if poorly designed. Less protrusions from the body might mean better aerodynamics, and thus more controlled flight.

This leads to a tight feed-back loop more true to "evolution", and I would think, leads to more fun gameplay. You're forced to consider whether or not you could afford that longer arm or that longer tail. You're forced to decide whether to put those spikes on the head so it hurts another creature as you're biting, versus hurting someone only from a tail-strike. Even with this setup I would imagine there's would still be a huge space for creature designs, making it a challenge to build creatures that both perform well and look awesome.

These ideas got off-loaded to the responsibility of creature parts, which IMO is sort of disappointing. By the way, none of the above ideas s impossible. It was by sheer design choice that Maxis, for whatever reason, avoided altogether.

I'll give a few theories on why the above design was avoided. Perhaps there is fear that the Sporepedia would end up full of creatures that were insanely fast, or impossible to kill (ruining other people's experiences). There might be glitches found in the skeletal system allowing some creature exploits. Perhaps there was fear that eventually some "optimal" creature design would be found, and that every creature would end up being some variation of that "perfect creature".

However, I think that's why having a user-policed system (creature scoring) is useful. Players can simply subscribe to creatures that are tastefully designed and non-exploited. In addition, this type of "morphology-based" gameplay would perhaps transfer to tribal weapons, vehicles, and spaceship (which is 0% performance-desgn association). This way the game can be as challenging as what other people make. That is a true massively-single player game.

I'm not sure what can be done at this point to even do anything about it. That vision of Spore, the one I described above, exists now in some parallel universe which we can only dream about.

Glaring flaws in the rest of the game
Some things that have been posted elsewhere, but I've also experienced.

Many of the games objectives are actually chores. This recalls some of the worst design-choices from *bad word* Sims Online. It's ironic that MMO-style grinding somehow showed up in a single player game. "Your quest is to kill 5 creatures over that hill right there." This doesn't seem to get any better in space "Your quest is to kill 5 infected creatures over that hill right there."

Tribe stage and civ stage feels like it had some hope of being more than chores, but the lack of unit variety, formations (using flocking developed from creature phase would have been really beautiful), and an additional type of resource to defend makes both stages feel hollow.

This could potentially be made much more fun with patches or (with more money ) expansions.

Picking up spice and defending your colony is a real chore. Defending pirate and grox attacks are like fires in Sim City. Imagine you had fires breaking out in your Sim City, but instead of the camera going directly to the disaster area and one-clicking to send a fire truck, you actually have to use drive-mode for your fire truck, manually drive it there, then spray water to put it out. Then imagine if you played Sim City like this and fires broke out every five minutes in any random city in your region, and placing fire stations don't really help; in addition the fire stations get destroyed in the process. I'm the mayor, not the fire-truck driver. Like-wise, I'm the "omnipotent", but I still have the responsibilities of a lowly ship-commander.

Piloting and directing dog-fights are fun for the first few fights, especially when you get better weapons and meet stronger (but no more sophisticated) enemies. After gaining such incredible ranks as "The Revered" or "The Omninpotent", these fights should only be directed to the player only if one fight requires your god-like powers (raising volcanoes, using terraforming to destroy ships, things that only I, not other ship commanders, could do).

Placing colonies is surprisingly repetitive. The colony planner allows you to place buildings, but there's only a few optimal ways of placement and after you've figured that out, you have to attempt and re-produce three times for every-single-planet you colonize. For those who wish to take over the galaxy, this becomes somewhat of a show-stopper.

Your awesome land-air-sea military becomes drones once you take off into space. They do nothing to help defend against invaders, despite the fact that they previously helped take over an entire planet.



Finally, the game seems to impose many unreasonable limits on what players could do, despite giving us the "idea" that something may be possible. For a game so heavily influenced by science-fiction, Spore seems to not want players to actually play those out. Here are some ideas I want to throw out to Maxis. Some of the may already have been stated by other players.

Fleets - Every space-opera had cool fleets of ships. Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars. We have a space empire after-all!

Planet to Planet wars - Currently the game does not allow two types of sentient life in one Star System. Why? This seems like a really artificially imposed limit. There's no UI / gameplay reason I can possibly think of that would require this limit. Having wars fought from planet to planet (two planets home to two space-faring species) is a staple of science fiction (War of the Worlds), and it allows some early introduction of alien races, early space flight and battle (instead of inspecting some random artifact), and produces some cool dynamic.

Space battles - Currently the player has no control over weapons in space, but your allied friends seem more than happy to open fire. Is Space a no-fire-zone for only your empire?

Playing as creature in Tribe / Civ / Space stage - Yes, I would like to play as Alien, from the movies. For a sandbox game... we seem like we're -almost- allowed this but "not really". What's to stop the engine from having tribes when you are in the creature stage? I think hunting down more intelligent species with axes would be extremely satisfying.

Star / Planet creation, Dyson Spheres - Where "Type II" civilizations harvest ALL energy from their star by building a giant sphere around it. Where I could create or destroy planets, planetoids, and asteroids at a whim. Actually directing asteroids a'la Sim City 4's meteor disaster.



That's pretty much all the main criticisms and suggestions I have with Spore. Some of you will probably say "well, if you don't like it don't play it!" Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the game. I really wish the best for it, for it to improve over the next few years and fulfill its maximum potential since it feels like so much of that "magic" has been lost.


Some last words in this extremely long post, thanks for Chaim, Brad, Lucy, Michael, Ocean, and ofcourse Will for giving me the best experience of my career Seriously guys, the people working on this game are the most talented, intelligent, and sophisticated people I have -ever- met. Congratulations on the big release, and I hope you all take a long, well-deserved vacation. And once you're back, you can take a long, fresh look at the wonderful game you've built and make it even better.

Ah, the "insider comes to bash the game" troll gambit. Classic.

Wow.

Just - wow. If he is who he says he is, then... that lends credence to every single post made about 2005, and destroys ever "pre-rendered" argument on the matter.

If anyone beleives you, they fail at life.

Screen-shot or it didn't happen.

...

Usually I bash threads like this, but since you were part of the creative process, I RTFA and decided the best reply would be from this article (to give you an idea of what happened between your prototypes to now).


Most relevent:

RPS: How did you decide upon the effect of customisation. As in, deciding that each part would have a specific effect rather based upon something in the design of the creature itself?

Alex Hutchinson: This was a really interesting, and ongoing debate on the team – early on there was one faction on the team that fervently believed creativity should have no impact on gameplay – that playing and creating were two totally separate activities, and that players should be able to create anything they wanted and then play any way they wanted. The second faction believed that creation and play were integral to each other, and that each editor should directly and powerfully impact each game.

There are many challenges with this – first, there’s just the basic argument that in a storytelling game like Spore (and our core aim was always to enable people to tell their own stories, not to ‘win’ per se) limiting people’s creativity is an essentially catastrophic decision and the more gameplay you bond to editors, the more you remove the player’s ability to tell their story of a mushroom headed toilet bowl who terrorized the earth, or the evil looking fang toothed monster who struggled to befriend the universe. If this was based purely on physical parts, both those stories are impossible, or at least terribly hard to communicate to players.

Also there’s a challenge with granularity - we originally had a formula for speed which was basically a curve that said that getting more legs made you faster until you had more than four legs, after which is it made you slower, but never made you as slow as someone with one leg, all of which was modified by the level and type of feet that you had and the mass of the entire creature. What we found however was that even people who thought they wanted that sort of calculation both didn’t understand it and didn’t like it when they were actually playing - the problem switched to ‘my guy looks like he should run real fast but he doesn’t, why?’ and we’d say, well, you put five legs on him and that bulbous tail is actually really heavy, and people were both disappointed by the result and didn’t understand it and they thought their creativity had been crushed.

Also, we originally had very fine grained stats for Creature Phase, down to a few decimal points, but we kept hitting issues where people would be .1% faster than their prey or .1% slower than their predators, so the interaction of chasing your lunch would eventually resolve but someone would be chasing the other creature across the planet for hours which obviously isn’t very interesting or fun. It all comes down to what intellectually sounds brilliant but is practically painful.

We also had stats that I really liked such as ‘cuteness’ which looked at size and type of eyes, overall size and proportion of hands and feet etc but to be honest when you’re making a casual game, it gets complicated super fast and as much as I am a hardcore gamer and would love to have semi-inscrutable stats smothering the game it just doesn’t appeal to that many people and I really like making games that actual human beings can play and enjoy.

In the end we decided to cross streams basically, and begin with games that had a direct relationship between the act of creation and the in-game results, but end with games that allowed people to make whatever the wanted and then play separately. This also matched the aim of making the games themselves more complex as we moved forward, so that people who were perhaps not as familiar with games could begin with simpler games that were easier to digest before progressing to more complicated games that were more difficult to play on a conceptual level if you weren’t familiar with RTS conventions for example.

My personal position on this was that the editors are the heart of Spore, and that we should bond them as much as possible to gameplay, but the boon and the curse of games is that they’re giant collaborations. In the end I think it’s an interesting spin on creator based content – other developers who are interested in it as a theme can look at essentially four or five different implementations of the idea and hopefully move forward from that learning and make other great games.

Oh boy here we go with the "prove it" post

I'm in the credits as Michael "Flux" Chang. Go check it in the credits section of the options menu.
And here's my old website from college (2005) users.design.ucla.edu/~mflux along with resume and all of that jazz. Anyway, take it or leave it. Those are my thoughts.

Nice turn of phrase, well laid out .......
Utterly pointless. Whether you were an intern or not is, in fact, irrelevant also.

Never cross the streams? Haven't we all learned that by now? Only cross when threatened by Gozer.

It doesn't matter if you believe him or not. The posts were excellent points on gameplay, as well as being well thought out. Personally i found that very interesting concepts for the game were dropped for whatever reason, and i was disappointed in the execution of the original concept.

Anyway! Tell us more about working at maxis!

Utterly pointless. Whether you were an intern or not is, in fact, irrelevant also.

Doh... sorry you feel that way. I guess you're right, it's possibly irrelevant. I was directing that at the poster above me (pics or it didn't happen).

Didn't think I would get this sort of reactions within -3- minutes of posting. This is probably why Maxis developers are never allowed to post.

I'm going to try out the interactive stuff at his site tomorrow. The cell division looks very very interesting.

mflux wrote:

Utterly pointless. Whether you were an intern or not is, in fact, irrelevant also.

Doh... sorry you feel that way. I guess you're right, it's possibly irrelevant. I was directing that at the poster above me (pics or it didn't happen).

Didn't think I would get this sort of reactions within -3- minutes of posting. This is probably why Maxis developers are never allowed to post.

I was parodying the one above mine.

Even if he weren't who he said he is (and I believe that he is), his points are extremely valid and well put. Kudos to you for sharing them. After all, many, many of our own posts have pointed out some of these issues already.

Cheers.

I'm just happy to know that the whole '2005 was pre-rendered entirely!' thing was as I thought.