IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 34

then move to some position relative to
To do t hat, Ma x is dev ise d t he the code requires that certain values
the enemy's topmost nose." The code ana- Pollinator. This tool lets players easily or quantities be more or less randomly
lyzes the body in search of the parts that search through the buildings, vehicles, assigned. Algorithms embedded in the
match that profile. In short, rather than and beasts created by other gamers and game's software can generate those
directing bones to assume prescribed incorporate them into their own worlds. strings of seemingly unrelated numpositions, animators are using higher- They can also sort through the stuff by bers, but the starting value-or seed-
level directives to describe what the theme-whimsical or Wizard of Oz, futur- must vary so as to avoid generating the
bones should do. This strategy was key istic or "Futurama." This is what Wright same string of numbers each time the
to opening up a much wider field of char- means when he describes the game as "a algorithms are run. "We want the planacter types and activities-though it cer- massively single-player experience": it's ets to be 'random,' but we also need to
tainly didn't make writing the game easy. a one-person game that can draw on be able to re-create it exactly when you
The code can look for a limb by using a many sources. While the Spore DVD will come back later," Andrews explains.
description that may be satisfied by one ship with some ready-made creatures "Storing the seed lets us do that."
body part, several, or none. Coping with and buildings-so that a player's creaThe programmers also had to winnow
indeterminate results,
down the list to just the
while keeping the anicore guidelines needed
mation interesting by
to reconstitute a planet-
not simply ignoring extra
or building, creature, or
limbs, drives up the comspaceship. Sometimes
plexity of the game code.
that meant making tough
And then there are
choices that in effect curthe creatures that are
tail a player's creativity.
so weird they defy the
Originally, for instance,
game's generalized rules
Spore's Creature Creator
of movement. To catch
allowed players to design
those f reakish cases,
animals w ith looped
the code checks for cerspines. Unfortunately,
tain features: for examdoughnut-shaped aniple, does the creature
mals raised all sorts of
have any kind of paw or
exceptions to the animaclaw? If not, a separate
tion rules. The solution:
set of instructions will
bye-bye, doughnuts.
govern the creature's
To manage the flow of
movement, instructing
so many player-created
it to use its mouth as a composing creatures: an editing palette gives Spore players free rein
creatures and items, and
hand. And because the to create unique and curiously realistic characters.
to help players find concreature has no legs to
tent they like, Spore uses
use in calculating movement, it gets an tures aren't initially running around in the same kind of collaborative filtering
inchwormlike slither. Rather than try an empty universe-the rest of the con- that sites like Amazon and Netflix have
to write very complex algorithms that tent will come from the players, who can made popular, based on the preferences
cover every imaginable kind of beast, upload their creations to Maxis's game of other players who have chosen a certhe programmers instead identified a servers for others to access.
tain design. Players will also be able to
few exceptional creature skeletons and
To store and sift through such a huge subscribe to Sporecasts-a kind of RSS
wrote code that chooses different sets of amount of data, the Maxis team had to feed of content other people create for the
rules for them. "It just kind of ripples out compress the data files down to a man- game. As Spore spreads, stars of content
in a lot of different ways," Hecker says.
ageable size. Here, the hurdle became design will likely emerge, as they have
"how do we keep the data rate really low in Second Life and in other online gamt's one thing to create and animate so that even if I'm not on the Internet I ing communities.
a creature in Spore, but Wright and his can still have the local database with lots
"I can imagine so many cool possibilteam knew that players would also want and lots of content?" Wright says.
ities that we're just scratching the surto share their creations. "What we saw
With its detailed terrains and texture face of," Wright says. He envisions Spore
with The Sims was that people loved maps, one planet in Spore could occupy races centered around user-designed
downloading tools and creating stuff in 10 megabytes of space on a player's hard vehicles and f lying games featuring
the game," says Wright. Players routinely drive. "We don't have the disc space to users' spaceships.
surfed Web sites specially set up for trad- deliver a million planets," says Maxis
But Wright's imagination stretches
ing Sims add-ons, such as modifications art director Ocean Quigley. When a only so far. He anticipates the day when
to a character's appearance, houses, and player creates a planet, an instruction Spore players take charge and steer the
furniture. But the experience was a has- list for generating that world is saved game into unseen territory. "That's when
sle because players had to find and then along with certain seed values, which the fans become an even larger designer
import each item into the game one by one. are like keys that the software uses to [than us]," he says. "In some sense, we're
"We wanted to basically make that [pro- reopen the world later. To conjure up kind of codesigning Spore. Fans are going
cess] part of the game play," he says.
lots of different planets for each game, to drive its future."
o

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * SEptEmbEr 2008

www.spectrum.ieee.org

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008