As always, Will Wright gave a highly entertaining and informative presentation. And, as always, it's damn hard to summarize.
So I won't. You missed out. Ha!
OK OK, I'll take pity on you. Some. Slackers. You should get to GDC sometime, yourself.
Will gave two talks, actually. One on how he conducts research for his games, and another on the fundamentals of astrobiology. He would jump back and forth, using lots of cool slides, many of which were on the screen for only seconds before they disappeared forever.
A key point he made several times is that he does a lot of research, though only a fraction of that research (he estimated 10%) might be in the final product. The same went for prototypes: only 10% of the prototype work might make it into the final game.
He also gave the somewhat depressing estimate that there may be only 1 intelligent species per 1000 galaxies. It suddenly feels very lonely here in space...
Here are some pics, including a couple pics of slides:
-David
PS For the Really Curious, here are my complete, largely unedited notes:
Abdication of authorship (similar to the Jesper Juul talk)
Panspermia
Planetary crosstalk - parts of planets being scattered to other planets in the solar system, caused by collision with asteroids.
Fact vs fiction...we simulate things the way people expected them to aoocur, reality isn't the priority. We purposelyfully break reality for player expectations. Fiction is an uinteresting approach to breaking reality.
The art is figuring out what to leave out.
Innovation...need to innovate somewhere...you know when you see it...but no guarantee of success...helps gets you aboe the signal to noise ratio.
Goals for Spore: Inspire player creativity, unbounded world, social currency, thematic diversity, epic scope and familiarity
aliens and robots represent views of humanity.
Human intelligence...we thought of playing chess as complicated and tying shoes as simple...we're wrong.
We aspire to become these gods we imagine
Project risks - techonology, design, production, marketing, political. Front load the team to solve the major risks. Prefer a tightly focused small team over a large average team.
Used old, current games for prototyping. Cheap prototypes.
Observe nature with a scientific eye and deconstruct it, abstract it, and regenerate.
Jupiter is a big shield.
Every game starts with "why am I doing it? What's fun?"
Fermi Paradox, colonization argument. Fill the galaxy in less than 5 million years.
John von Neuman, von Neuman Probes, self-replicating machines.
Side rant: How valuable robots in space are. Robots are getting cheaper, humans are not.We get more science out of robots. Price of the Hubble telescope == 1 week in Iraq. For what we've spent on war in Iraq, we could give every country in the world their own Hubble telescope, and have enough left over to give 150 Hubbles to Antartica (because they never get anything).
Lifeless galaxy, microbial life, intelligent life.
Anthropic Principle...it's hard to infer from where we are how improbable we might be.
Answers to Fermi: quarantine, hiding, looking in the wrong place, don't spread. Unlikely to be real answers.
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire...W. B Yeats
Wanted players to discover principles in the game as they played.
Anyone can be creative.
Russian Space Minute Soyuz 23, 1976. Almaz...manned spy satellites. First armed battlestations in orbits. Risk of de-orbiting the station when shooting the gun.
Science team versus the cute team.
Whimsical equals rarity
One alien species per galaxy?
Take your time at the beginning, and don't commit to anyidea too early. Cast a wide net. You need to figure out which 90% of the material to leave out.
Enjoy being obsessive.
Cultivate your obsession in your team.
Things well understood are explained well.
Change your players. Shouldn't take lightly, shouldn't squander.
Do you see now, why it was hard to come up with a coherent article from this mess? Educational? Yes. Fun? Damn straight. Coherent? Expressible? Less so. :)
Unite 2010
