If you enjoyed my interview with Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw, check out these extended cuts, in which Lucy talks about science, religion, procedural audio, and patrolling the universe in her UFO posse.
PCW: You've lived with this project for something like three years, right?
LB: Yeah, I've been on the project about three, and that's funny, because I was working on The Sims 2 while Will Wright [Spore's lead designer] was putting some scope and sense around his vision. I worked with him to build out the very early stuff he had, which was just to explore different prototyping stages. The next wave was hiring in key technical staff who were testing the ground for whether we could achieve Will's vision, which was part of the early stage exploring stuff like procedural animation.
So we brought Chris Hecker on, Ocean Quigley who kind of pushed and experimented with the ways in which we could do procedural texturing. A little bit later, a guy that I'd worked with on Sim City and The Sims and whom I was working with on The Sims 2 at the time, Andrew Wilmott, came over to work on the core engine capabilities. These people were helping Spore get off the ground during its concept stages, but when I came on it was really more asking questions like "What have we learned?" and "How do we allow this to take shape?" and move it from this inkling of an idea that Will has into something we can say, you know, here's where we're going.
PCW: Players have had access to the Spore Creature Creator for about a month now, but after playing the game, the building and vehicle creators seem even more intricate.
LB: Yeah, I've just been amazed by what people can do. The advantage you have when you're on the development team, is that I can even take creatures people are making using the Creature Creator and play with them in my game. So just being able to experience them as you kind of go over the creature game and see some of those things where, you know, you buddied a certain player and added stuff to the Sporepedia and you get to see their content and play with it.
The vehicles and particular spaceships, when you ally with somebody in space and that alien race then sends their UFO to fly with you in this sort of posse...that's one of my favorite things, kind of building that up and scooting around space with my little posse of UFOs that are all ridiculously different in terms of the direction that players took them. I mean, I've flown around with a football and a four poster bed.
PCW: Bedknobs and broomsticks.
LB: Yeah, there's even a witch on a broomstick and all kinds of other crazy stuff.
PCW: Let's talk about Spore in terms its Darwinian connotations. The game models some of the basic tenets of evolution in terms of inherited traits, gene toolkits, and species adaptability over time. Has there been any negative reaction from anti-evolutionary groups?
LB: We honestly haven't heard much from those groups. It was interesting, you know, while we were making the game, the way the team reacted at times to some of the directions we took, because not only do you have evolution, but you also have the religious cultural approach in the civilization stage. And our team became a little bit of a bellwether when we weren't striking the right chord in terms of treating these things in a more humorous fashion.
I think Will mentioned recently that we've actually heard more back from the sort of atheistic cadre than the religious groups. So it's kind of interesting when you do things like this that provoke those types of questions, and really I think that's where Spore shines. It's implementation is a game. It's fun. The dynamics you get into in terms of strategy and tactics are treated humorously. We really do leave it up to the player to interpret where in that space their "hand" takes a role. Are they God? Are they intelligent designer? Are they evolutionist? The mere fact that the game gets that question out there and provokes that kind of thinking, I think that's a good thing. The same can be said for the kind of undercurrent of science that's in the game. It's not heavy handed in terms of its educational value or anything, but I think it provokes those kinds of questions, like "What about evolutionary science?" "What about the atmosphere?" "What about how planets form?"
PCW: Aren't people who'd decry religion's presence in this game sort of missing the point? I mean, the game doesn't take a position on whether it's good or bad, just that it's a factor, right?. Wouldn't the game be less realistic without it in terms of the way societies and civilizations actually look?
LB: Yeah, that was our attitude. We wanted to provide the context and strategies that best lent themselves to the narrative. A lot of the games Will's worked on like The Sims and Sim City are about that kind of creative experience, that sense of ownership you have over your experience: making a city, creating a Sim household, and now with Spore, sort of evolving this species. Not just the "what" it is, but also the "who." We wanted to provide those key dynamics that allowed you to pour your own narrative into the game. And then we brought that a little more to the surface by adding a personal history with a timeline that helps you grasp what you've created over time.
We keep a lineage of your character that you'll be able to see on the website after the product goes live. We want to showcase stuff like the lineages that have been the most successful plus some of the telemetry that we've put in, like who's the most subscribed-to SporeCast or the most pollinated creature. Things that'll allow us to give achievements to players in the community space that are different from the achievements you can get just playing the game.
PCW: It's interesting, because with the timeline you really get a contextual sense of where natural selection has its say in terms of dying and dead end creature traits.
LB: It was really fun when we put that in, because it really did bring things into perspective. All of a sudden you're saying "Oh my gosh, that's what I did to get to this point?" And then the consequence abilities, which you get based on the choices you make in the game, they're part of the reason the Tribe stage became my personal favorite. The abilities you get during Tribe are just so funny and expressive. The audio team in particular brought so much humor and flair to all the various areas.
PCW: What about the game's implementation of music that "evolves" as you play?
LB: You've got to give the kudos to Kent Jolly and our collaboration with Brian Eno, because we listened to a lot of generative music, and I'm sorry to say, most of it doesn't sound like anything I'd want to listen to for any period of time. It was Kent and Brian who came together and rethought where we were going. We were really pushing it generative, and instead, they came up with a way of mixing pre-authored musical components that ultimately derived from something that changes all the time, but which can respond to the actions of the player and at the same time sound really good. They really one-upped themselves in the city-planner, where there's a national anthem tool you use to create your own melody, which then becomes your own anthem and follows you off into space. Brian was concerned that we were going to let the player be creative in everything but music, so they were insistent that we actually put that feature in.
