Spore’s Magic Crayons

GameSpot has posted a recap from the GDC 2007 speach by Spore’s design lead Chaim Gingold. The speach revolved around the challenges the Spore team faced when trying to make the editors as fun and easy to use as possible.

Spore’s design team quickly discovered that there were myriad challenges with an emergent editor that embraced open-ended creativity. It had to be easy and fun. It had to satisfy a broad range of fantasies and expectations. The output had to work in the animation system and with the game’s rule sets. And how do you intuitively design a 3D object editor with a 2D interface for non Maya-savvy players?

The speach also touched subjects as current trends in game design and how the information age has brought back elements from humanity’s past into today’s society.