Creativity and the Creature Editor: An Interview with Spore's Dan Moskowitz

Will Wright's Spore features an unusually rich content-creation and content-sharing component that encourages players to design game creatures, vehicles, and buildings, and then share those art assets around the Spore-o-sphere — unleashing their beasties into other player's games.

Even before Spore's launch in early September, three million creatures had been created using the game's Creature Editor (released as a free standalone tool a few months earlier). I was curious what the people behind this tool had learned about how you get people to make stuff, and Senior Software Engineer Dan Moskowitz was nice enough to take a little time to chat about, among other things, the importance of file size, keeping things simple, and the first few clicks.

What's your role on the Spore team?

DM: In Spore, players build basically everything that they see in the world. We have these editing environments that they can jump into that let them make creatures, buildings, and vehicles in just a few minutes. I was the Lead Engineer on the editors, as well on an in-game browsing place where you can look at everybody else's content, called the "Sporepedia."

For people who haven't played Spore yet, could you talk about how the game encourages people to create?

DM: In the beginning of the game, you're a single-celled creature. As you evolve, you unlock new parts. What we've found is that people take a lot of time when they get to this point — the creativity tools are so much fun that people get involved in making this creature, spending a lot of time painting and tweaking the aesthetics of it. Some of the aesthetics don't even really affect the gameplay at all but people just get emotionally attached.

When you were developing the Creature Editor, were there any paths you went down that turned out to be dead ends?

DM: There were a ton actually. It went through years of iterations and user testing before we had something we were really happy with. One of the things we first stumbled on was that we were giving the player too much power. With one of the really early prototypes of the editor, you could move these globs of clay and limbs anywhere you wanted — we have artists who could create perfectly realistic looking animals with them. But what we found was that there was too much freedom and when you put those editors in the hands of someone who isn't familiar with 3D modeling tools, they wouldn't be able to make anything they were happy with — they'd usually end up with this blob or a couple sticks pointing out of the center body. It just didn't look very good.

So we dialed back the amount of freedom that we give you in the editor. For instance the creature-body is a spine — it's really just one long chain of vertebrae and you can sort of pull and push it. But [now] we don't let you do things like branch it off or split it in half, whereas with the old editor you could do that sort of thing.

In the very beginning, when we had arms and legs in the editor, they were separate pieces. For instance, a human arm, is made up of two pieces — a forearm and a shoulder piece — and we put those each in the palette separately so you could pull one single forearm out and stick it on your creature. Now in the editor's palette there are ten or twelve different fully constructed arms and legs you can pull out. They have three segments, and those can still be pulled apart by expert players, but we found that [initially] all people want to do is, "Okay, now I want to add a leg to it." And if you make that process hard for them, they're not going to get into the creative aspect of it. They hit a brick wall right away.

So we gave them the option to just pull out an entire constructed leg and put that on a creature, which gives them this sense of accomplishment. And that encourages them to go the extra step of tweaking that leg, pulling it apart, seeing what they can make with it.

So giving them a good first step was key?

DM: Right — you want to encourage someone to make something that they're happy with in just a few clicks. And they can put a mouth and some eyes and a leg on their creature in about four or five clicks right now.

A big part of what's motivating people to create with Spore is the way they can show off their work. Can you talk a little bit about the thought that went into that?

DM: Sure. At first, the original design of Spore [had] you just kind of playing the game — other people's creations would pop into the game without you even choosing them. About halfway through, we realized that it was really fun to browse what other people had made, a lot more fun than we had originally thought.

So we ran with that concept and built this thing called the Sporepedia. There's an in-game version and there's also an online version that you can check out. It's a browsing system that shows you a little card for each creation that's been made in the Spore universe.

For example, if you're in the Civilization Phase [of the game] you can choose to build your own buildings and vehicles. But if that's become too tiresome or you're not that kind of player or you just want to explore what other people have made, you can bring up the Sporepedia and search for other people's buildings and vehicles.

You can also comment on stuff people have made. So if you see a helicopter in your game that's attacking your city, there's a way to click on it and write the creator of that helicopter a message. "Your helicopter just attacked my city, I hate you," or, "This is awesome." And that fosters a sense of community — you log onto your game and all of a sudden you have ten messages waiting for you from people who have experienced your content inside their game

Have there been problems that the team has encountered since launch associated having so many people creating and sharing game assets?

DM: Our assets are so small — they're only about 25K each — and that allows us to send them back and forth across the server and to all the other players pretty easily. So we never thought hard drive space on our servers would be a problem. But since we first launched the creature creator back June, people have been making assets like crazy.

[At first] we were kind of joking, "There are a million assets on our server, but they all sit on a simple hard drive." But now that Spore's launched, there are 25 million creatures, and we're approaching some serious hard drive space.

Wow. Is that the real number right now?

DM: Yeah. You can go onto the Sporepedia online and actually see the number increasing in real time. [it's gone up nearly 15 million more in the time it's taken me to post this interview. -db]

That's a great motivational tool — to show people what how much they're creating en masse.

DM: Yeah, exactly.

Is there anything else driving people to create all these critters?

DM: It's the feedback, it's the fun. There are many different types of people who play Spore. There's the gamer who just wants to play as efficiently as possible and make the best creature they can regardless of what it looks like. They're interested in the stats and getting through the game as fast as they possibly can.

And then there are creative people who really don't even care much about the game itself. They just use it as the sandbox to build whatever they want. These people spend hours and hours on one single creation. What they make is just a thing of beauty. I mean there are some real artists out there using our tools.

Other people create Sporecasts, which are basically a collection of assets. One person can create a collection — they can search on the Sporepedia and find the best UFOs that everyone's made, for example. And then you can subscribe to that collection so that as you're playing your game you'll tend to see those UFOs more in your game than random UFOs. So people can become meta-authors of content — even if they're not the most creative users of the editor, they can be this scavenger-style player where they go and find the best content on the Sporepedia and expose it for other players.

What's surprised you most since Spore's roll out?

DM: During the three years of development of the game, the team and about 100 people had been using the editors every day. And we found a lot of cool hidden things that you could do with the editors. For example, someone had made a creature that looked like one creature riding another creature — sort of like a mounted horse. It took us two years to find that. And then the first day that the Creature Editor was released, people on the Internet were doing that kind of stuff right away. Once you release it to the public and you go from hundreds of thousands of test man-hours to millions and millions of hours, you get some amazing bursts of creativity.

Are there any nuances to the way people share assets that people who aren't familiar with the game might be surprised by?

DM: Do you know the PNG graphic file format?

Sure.

DM: Someone can be posting on a forum somewhere and they'll post the PNG of the creature that they're talking about. And then people can drag that PNG right off their web browser and into the game and start checking it out. Any asset that you see the PNG of, it's just a little thumbnail and you can just drag it directly into the editor and then load it up. The data itself for the creation is encoded inside the image.

When you look at [the previous Maxis game] The Sims 2, a complete character was about 40 or 50 megs. And that just raises the barrier on how you can share it, how you can talk about it, how you can have other people view it.

So the data files for characters and creatures have dropped from 40 megs down to 25K?

DM: Yeah.

That's pretty good.

DM: We're happy with it.