Computer Graphics World

October 2008 22 n n n n Gaming To this end, Hecker says the biggest obstacle on Spore was making the soft- ware robust enough to give users carte blanche to create creatures of all possible combinations, sizes, and shapes; the soft- ware also had to support the complexity of a game that enables players to simulta- neously be one another's best friend and worst enemy. Although a single-player game, Spore al- lows users to share creations between their respective galaxies, as well as explore and play within a nearly limitless number of worlds. Once a creature has been created, it can be taken online via a network con- nection or by trading alphanumeric codes manually. Each choice that is made rever- berates across generations and decides the fate of a user's civilization. Some folks will be content to build thriving civilizations, while others will want to climb aboard an intergalactic starship to rule other worlds. e game's designers tried hard to bal- ance the appeal of playing an innocuous social game versus engaging in fierce com- bat. e interactivity of this game allows people to express themselves through the type of creatures they make and their style of play, Hecker notes. Spore's chief designer, industry guru Will Wright, considers his creation a mas- sively single-player online game that allows friends and foes alike to trade art assets and creatures they can befriend or destroy. It's an apt description of the game's attempt to fold user-created content into each distinct single-player game. One of the more challenging technical is- sues for the engine team was to establish an intricate enough level of detail that would allow players to continuously zoom out from, say, the nest of a small creature, to view the entire galaxy. at meant render- ing nice sweeping views of water and rocks, or millions of other creatures and nests on nearby planets, until they eventually disap- peared beyond the user's line of vision. In short: promote smooth animation. "You want to be spending all your time on stuff the user can actually see, whereas once you're out in an orbit around the planet, you can't see that nest anymore," ex- plains Hecker. "So it's kind of complicated to set it all up to continuously zoom way out without jerking and having pops. We had to be aggressive about the level of de- tail and generate everything on the fly. You don't want to run into the back side of a planet that can't be seen." Texturing Challenges Game artists created nearly 230 drag- and-drop, flexible body parts from which players can build their unusual characters. Players can choose from 20 to 80 bodies, meshes, and textures. First, they manipu- late a clay-like torso when creating their characters, before choosing from a palette of limbs and anatomical parts, including mouths, eyes, graspers, feet, spikes, and armor. With the robust game editor, users then can alter the size, shape, and color of each creation in seemingly unlimited com- binations. e editing feature also enables users to add tails, eyes, and mandibles with unique abilities designed to help overcome the challenges they're expected to face dur- ing visits to far-flung places. When bringing the game's animated crea- tures to life, the developers paid close atten- tion to how their skin and the polygons that form the skin on the torso, arms, and other body parts would be designed and stretched, while particle-painting techniques made the mesh skin look like it was professionally textured. Hecker collaborated on these pro- cesses with his EA colleague Henry Goffin, while the original prototypes were done with Ocean Quigley, the game's art director, who suggested Spore as the game's working title before the name finally stuck. Whereas a game artist normally would create a character's textures in Autodesk's Maya and Adobe's Photo- shop, and lock down those design details before a game ships, the user-created con- tent in Spore requires that those details be dynamically generated on a player's ma- chine after the fact. So rather than work on the textures directly, the game artists wrote One of Spore's biggest attrac- tions—the ability for players to create totally unique charac- ters—was the biggest challenge for the developers.

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