More Spore: An interview with Thomas Vu

BT: What about the art style? Spore has a very distinctive look with lots of bright colours and a cartoony appeal. Was that a restraint of the engine or a deliberate choice?

TV: It was a conscious choice. Our art director, Ocean Quigley, is a really great guy and he worked closely with us. With our engine we can make the game look very dark or even brighter, but we chose the art style which we thought would have the most appeal to the most people.

Importantly though it also gave us the leverage we needed to use the usual Maxis humour. We wanted the game to feel like you could use it to make a joke, but at the same time you can make a dark and evil story with it – mini-devils running around and so on. We didn’t want to dictate too much.

BT: You mention the typical Maxis humour and one of the funniest things I’ve seen is when someone spends hours building a city in Sim City only to have it all wiped out by a tornado or a UFO or whatever. Are we going to be seeing random events like that in Spore?


TV: Yeah, there’s randomness, but I can only talk about some of them though. One is that, because when you’re in the Space Stage you can visit other planets, when you’re in the Creature Stage other player’s stuff will come to you sometime. It isn’t controlled by them, just taken from their game.

We talked for ages about what it would be like if they abducted you and if there would be probing (laughing)…and there’s lots of things we could have done with that. The humour is something that we tend to add very late though. One of the things we only just added is, when you’re in Tribe Stage and you dance in front of other towns to socialise with them, they can score you and hold up scorecards. It’s always fantastic to see people sit back and be like “A four? A four sucks!”

To be honest though, a lot of the humour is for the players to make. We’ve seen everything from flying snails to flying toilets.

BT: With that socialising stage, is it…well, is it possible to be completely peaceful all the way through the game?

TV: Yes, yes, very much so. People may attack you but there are ways out of it. Each game stage has its own unique way of enabling players to run away or evade combat.


BT: What about the technology beneath the game – is there any swanky DirectX 10 content or anything like that?

TV: I actually don’t know the exact answer to that. I do know that we have some DirectX 10 things we’ve done somewhere, but we wanted to make sure we had the broadest audience possible. There’s a lot of optimising, so the game should run on nearly all mid-range PCs.

BT: Can you tell us the minimum specs?

TV: Nope. We’re not ready to announce that just yet. We’re still seeing how far we can push it.

Unfortunately, that’s all the time that Thomas had to spare for us and he soon after had to return to the development team to continue weaving new tools into the universe of Spore.

Still, if that isn’t enough for you then you can always check out our full hands-on preview of the game and let us know what type of alien you want to create when the game launches!