PC World's Lucy Bradshaw Spore Interview, Final Slice

Check out this final extended slice of my interview with Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw, in which Lucy talks editing cosmetics, why asexual reproduction was dropped, whether Spore's a game or a toy, and plugging Spore into The Sims.

PC World: One of the great debates you'll hear when a game like this comes along is "Is it a game or is it a toy?" When you came onto the project, where was it at, where did you take it, and in terms of the final product, how do you feel it holds up as a game as opposed to something that's more novelty?

Lucy Bradshaw: When I came on the project we had the editors and there'd been some user testing. And it was really funny, because we'd bring people in and let them play with the Creature Creator, and you could tell they were having a hard time working with it, they didn't quite get it. They'd toy around with it, but you could tell they weren't all that happy with their results. At that time, the team came together and had this idea of putting the spine in the torso and making that almost the central element you work with and then start putting parts on.

When we made that change, we brought players back through to play with it, and they just had a riot. They immediately interacted with it as if it was a creature. Even though it was a blob with a spine in it, they understood exactly how they would begin to form their creature. It was also the first time players named and saved their creature, and the naming itself was ridiculous, everyone coming up with silly, crazy names. I think that was the spark, the driving creative aspect that really became the center of the entire game.

The creator tools are such a central part, and figuring out how the game ultimately took advantage of those thing, that the creators end up playing a very strategic role in the tactics of the gameplay, was something that was part of that initial vision. It really shaped up at that time, along with how much creative breadth we wanted to give the player in that space.

So you asked is it a toy or a game. Players come in with a lot of different motivations, and I think Spore has a very strong toy-like quality to it. But most people, myself included, when I get a toy, I want to play with it. Getting that environment to really put it into a space, play with it, challenge it in different ways, destroy it, make it succeed, really is that kind of loop. And I think if that game wasn't in there, and there wasn't pressure to achieve and acknowledgement when you do, if the toy didn't come to life, it wouldn't be as fun. It's a balancing act, and just as important to Spore to have that, as well as that very toy-like, very tactile kind of quality that we get you in the editors.

PCW: My sense of the game so far is that the editors in the cell phase have attributes that impact gameplay, but some of the later stage editors, which have dozens more pieces and parts, seem almost cosmetic.

LB: That's again another part of the balancing act. Each time that you take and evolve your species during the physical evolution, that's where we emphasize the really deliberate meaning and abilities to each one of the parts that you add. Are you going to take sort of a sneaky and social approach. Are you going to be very aggressive and large and so on. So you really have a opportunity to play different strategies out based on the parts that you get.

When you move on to Tribal Stage, while we still bring in advantages to the different outfits that you might get, they really emphasizing that you're already a physical developed species. There you start to diversify and look more to the cultural evolution, which is represented by the tools we give you. So yeah, it moves to different emphases as you move through the game. With the Vehicle Creator, the vehicle stats are actually quite meaningful in the game in terms of how fast can you maneuver to a different position. Are you going to favor power or speed. So they really do play a role, particularly as you play on the harder difficulty levels. If you're playing "Easy" and to some degree even "Normal," they're not as emphasized.

Once you get to space the emphasis really is about terraforming. It's about guiding your spacecraft and using the tools you acquire through interacting with other alien races. What we wanted to do was make the emphasis "How are you manipulating the planets?" as opposed to just some of the individual assets. And yet we still want you to play with those other creations. So for instance, one of the tools you can get in space is one that allows you to "epic-ize" any of the other creatures that you see on land, say giant Godzilla-like creatures. You can beam one into an "epic" and you can sick it on a city or a colony and take it out, which plays to those kind of cinematic space opera stories that you might be familiar with. So really in that way you can still play with the toys you've created throughout the game.

PCW: The five stages you move through in Spore are Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space. What was the hardest to work on and why?

LB: I've got to pick two, and here's why. Tribe, because it sat right between two game stages that needed to be a natural evolution from Creature and set up what we were doing with the Civilization phase. That one took a lot of maneuvering in terms of where we were going to take the controls, how we were going to evolve that Tribal Stage. So that was hard because of where it sat in the context of the overall game, particularly transitioning from more avatar style to controlling a group.

The other stage would be Space, not so much because it was harder, but because that's where the game becomes extremely open-ended. Early on we kind of checked off the box that, you know, space is vast. It's pretty awe-inspiring, but at the same time, it's like "Uh, what do I do?" So bringing in some structure and backbone and some guidance to players, whether they want to be more exploratory or colonizing or terraforming, sort of aggressive or empire-building, we wanted to build in enough structure so players could really grapple with what to do there. It can be kind of daunting to stare at a million stars with a million planets to journey to. In that sense it was a really big bookend we needed to nail and give that kind of context to.

PCW: In early previews, it looked like cell-phase reproduction would be asexual, but now it's sexual. In the tribal phase, it looked like you'd be able to teach your tribe different kinds of dances or songs, but now that seems limited to pre-built music and city anthems. Any reason these were changed or scaled back?

LB: Originally you actually did just lay an egg without going through the little mating ceremony. I think the reason we made that change is that you want to build upon what a player has learned and you don't want to change the game roles, and because we were having mating happen in the Creature Stage, players had learned something differently, and we were watching as players, they were like, "Well I'm at my nest, why am I not laying my egg?" It created confusion and frustration, so rather than allow that to happen, what we did was say "Hey, let's teach this in the Cell Stage."

And you know, quite frankly, we did move it to a slightly developed cell rather than just a molecule. Originally, in Will's very, very original vision, there was a Microbial Stage. It would have been natural to have mitosis there. It just felt like this was more fitting, and resolved an issue where the player had to unlearn and relearn something.

PCW: Spore was originally called Sim Everything. Have you discussed the possibility of plugging Spore into The Sims?

LB: It is one of the things we're actually looking at, and our engineers because we know a lot of the engineering team on The Sims, we just goof around and stuff, and we do know that we could actually have one of our skeletons walk around in their game and everything. It's these kind of mash-ups that maybe we'll play around with. I mean, who knows, I can't speak to that, I wouldn't be able to promise anything. But I do know that our guys are constantly toying with stuff. If there's something that we thought could be a fun little one-off, we probably wouldn't make a product out of it, but it might make an interesting little toy.

It's similar to what we're doing releasing the early prototypes of the game. Will and the very small group of engineers that were on the project did a lot of exploration about how to for instance let a player navigate space, you know, that sort of time and space continuum. The other areas that you can tell were being explored were "How do you make it tactile?" Do we want to have players forming planets, and is that going to be an activity in the game. Long ago when Will did his original pitch for Spore I remember him talking to me about Neumannic evolution, and there's even a sense that there's an exploration in a cellular automata prototype of that. But those are things we're releasing on our website so that players can kind of script them and play with them themselves. That's where we have fun and experiment, and I think revealing that to the player base and particularly some of the fans who've followed Maxis games as long as they have, it's interesting to see where they take those things.

LB: That's not something we've announced or anything I can talk to specifically. The things that we have been doing is that we have a partnership with Zazzle where you can take your creature images and incorporate them into t-shirts and lunch boxes. We have a tool in the game where you can take pictures on a high resolution black background, which means you can integrate it with other media easily. So there's a Spore Zazzle store. We've got the Comic Book Creator, the YouTube partnership, and we're working with the group to potentially make little collectibles where you could get a 3D printout of your creature spaceship or whatever. That's what's in the works right now.

PCW: Will confirmed there were plans to do a Wii version of Spore, but are you any closer to green-lighting Xbox 360 or PS3 versions?

LB: Nothing we're talking about now.

PCW: What's Lucy Bradshaw playing these days when she isn't working on Spore?

LB: We're still pretty busy, but I've been playing around with the Warhammer Online beta, which is awesome. They just took it leaps and bounds in the last month, and I'm pretty excited for that team because it's such a big undertaking, and they've captured the Warhammer world so well. Beyond that, I play just a ton of Nintendo DS games. I'm constantly on the move, so I take it with me. And Rock Band. Definitely Rock Band.

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