The Wright Stuff

How long has the game been in development?

Depends on what you call in development. The first research I did on it was starting around 2000, and I spent a lot of time researching the SETI project, subscribing to journals, reading all the books I could, and it was about a year later that it expanded to become more the Powers of Ten thing. I realized how closely the Powers of Ten and the SETI actually map onto each other.

Can you explain?
SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which is conducted with large radio telescopes listening to nearby stars for radio traffic. A fundamental tenet of that is what's called Drake's Equation. A guy named Frank Drake was the first guy to actually listen to stars for intelligent communication and was the first person to propose actually communicating with them and sending out a message. He sent out a message from the Areceibo telescope back in the sixties. But Drake's equation actually tries to calculate the probability that there are intelligent aliens out in the stars. Its simply an equation that takes the number of stars in the galaxy †how many of these might have planets, how many of those might be habitable, how many of those has life arisen on, how many of those have that life been intelligent. You just multiply all these factors together and come up with a number. But if you look at these factors and what they represent, they actually represent aspects of chemistry, biology, sociology, cosmology. and so those sciences span all these different scales. So if you are actually looking at all the terms of Drake's Equation you in fact are looking at a Powers of Ten map. Some of the factors are very small chemical factors, other ones are very large astronomy factors -- how often are stars born? Others are sociological factors †how long is a society likely to survive once it has become intelligent? And so the two mesh together very nicely.

So spore has that sort of micro to macro span.
Yeah, there's small to large in scale, but there's also the distant past to the distant future in time, so in some sense it's a map as much of space and scale but of time as well, but life is kind of like the portrait we're putting into this frame. We´re looking at life from the very small to the very large and from the distant past to the distant future.

Nothing overambitious about that.
No†it's a very focused game.

How big a team is involved?
We're hovering around a hundred people or so.

That seems like a big team to deal with.
It's actually not that large compared to a lot of game development teams at this point in time. We actually have a very small art staff because the player will be creating most of the stuff in the game. The art staff is very unusual in that most of them do some level of programming. The team is unusual in a number of factors because we're doing this all procedurally. We have a whole team that's just dealing with pollinated content, moving content from player to player. We have another team that makes editors for the players to be creative, tools that the players create the content withâ€the Godfather team was like 300 people.

As this has gone on as a creative process for years and years, does it still pretty much resemble your initial vision or has it morphed in significant ways?
Actually it's surprising how close it does resemble my initial vision. Almost more so than I thought we would achieve. We ended up achieving more, especially with the editors, the player tools, than I thought we would, in terms of being able to create really cool stuff with a very small number of clicks. The different levels each have level designers that I work with very closely, and we have to coordinate. The really challenging part of this game is making these different levels feel like a singular experience, so that once you've left one level the next level doesn´t feel like we're changing all the rules underneath you, and the interface changes and the controls and the camera and all this stuff. So getting these levels into alignment, feeling like one consistent, sort of singular experience has been the real challenge on the design side.