May 25, 2005 by sean.

“Ultimately we’re talking about creating characters, worlds and systems that have the flexibility and generative power of simulations, but are designed to temporally progress at a good pace, perhaps integrated with drama management, to keep the pace of the experience moving forward and avoiding play that devolves into repetitive, rote labor or long stretches of inaction.” /Grand Text Auto/

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May 21, 2005 by sean.

In Will Wright’s new game Spore, “You start off as this insignificant bit of bacteria and you grow and evolve through advantageous mutation that the user determines through an engine that Wright has designed that has different parts (depending on stage of development) that you can add on and manipulate, like size for example. As the slide states, you go from being bacteria to a galactic god.” /Cool Hunting/

“When he fantasized about Spore years ago, Will Wright admitted, ‘My own imagination was my biggest bottleneck.’ He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right. The demonstration of the ’stellar zoo’ that is Spore might have given hope to a new generation of game designers.” /GameSpot/

“The whole concept was dependent upon this technology that did not exist, what I’m calling procedural animation. The fact that the player can create any creature, and then we figure out how it would walk and move and behave.

“We went through all the research work in that field that we could find, and we ended up having to go several years beyond it to get to where we are, to where we felt confident that we could solve this problem to the level to where we can base a product on it.” /Wired News/

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