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.

The annual D.I.C.E. Summit just ended and from it we gather presentations from the Spore designers and Will Wright himself. With him this time he had brought along well known faces such as Ocean Quigley, Chaim Gingold, Jenna Chalmers, and Alex Hutchinson - all core members of the Spore team. Each one got time to present certain aspects from the game and the design process behind them.

IGN writes: “A list of the top 10 most popular space craft went around the office,” Jenna told the crowd, “so we went into the editor to see if we could build all of them.” “Nothing is more satisfying than piloting your X-Wing fighter and blowing up the Enterprise,” followed Ocean.

GameSpot writes: “Games usually succeed by saying once you learn something, it sticks. You stick with this piece of information…we’re going to add more information to that,” said Hutchinson. “Whereas we’re saying, ‘Yeah 50 percent of what you learned sticks; the other 50 you don’t need to worry about [as you progress].’”

GameSpy’s coverage from the summit reveals an all new phase in Spore that preceeds the Cellular level, the Molecular level!

Brian Eno, by many dubbed the father of ambient music, has confirmed his involvement in the Spore project.

Generativity plays a role in many fields now, with gaming being no exception. Also built around this notion and probably one of the currently most eagerly awaited games is Will Wright’s Spore, for which Brian Eno, as he revealed, will be making the soundtrack!

Eno’s ingenuity will allow Spore’s in-game music to, just like the content, be procedurally generated. By using a combination of samples you will never hear the same tune more than once.

That is the question asked by a writer over at GigaOM. The article questions the belief among EA executives that the game will attract the same demographically broad audience that The Sims experienced and continues by saying that Spore will most likely not have the same appeal to a casual gamer as Maxis previous blockbuster.

…I’d have to say the chances of the game dominating are about as likely as a Spore creature with no teeth and stubby legs making it to the stars.

For future comparison The Sims sold 3.2 million copies in the US and SimCity 3000 Unlimited 1.1 million.

What do you think? Is he right?

A few weeks ago we reported about the article in The New York Times featuring Will Wright. Today The New Yorker published a 4-page article covering a big span of interesting facts and tidbits, talking mainly about Will Wright. His life, achievements and the journey towards where he stand today. There are some mentions about Spore there too, mainly on the fourth and last page.

The old dream of the M.I.T. hackers who came up with Spacewar—to re-create life on a computer—was coming true forty years later, right here in the Spore Hut, in the form of a spindly, striped creature that looked a little like Will Wright himself.

It’s a very extensive article. So put on a kettle and bunker up with some snacks.

The NY Times has posted a huge 5-page article with interviews with the Spore team, including Will Wright which is the main character talked about. Though long it’s a very well-written piece of excellence presented with lots of interesting tid-bits along with a few things surfacing related to Spore.

An entire planet in Spore — teeming with plants, weather and creatures — takes up about 80K of memory. By comparison, a typical song on your iPod is about 50 times larger. You could download an entire galaxy of Spore planets before you could download all the tracks on “Dark Side of the Moon.”

If your eyes still aren’t bleeding check out Synthesis talking about why Wright is insane. And a genius.

Spore made a debut in Europe at the 2006 Leipzig Games Convention in Germany a couple of week ago. GameSpot was fortunate enough to get their hands on the creature editor and fiddle around with it a bit.

IGN on the other was even more fotunate and got a complete walk-through at the hands of Designer Alex Hutchinson. Lots of good meat in that article.

While Spore has no real final goal per se, the game’s ultimate ambition is to encourage exploration. Since each of the millions of planets in the universe will represent the work of a real-life player in the game, Spore promises to be a nearly limitless sandbox to play in.

A sandbox full of toys and goodies. But wait! What about Will, wasn’t he there? Of course, and he got around doing a little presenting of himself, IGN got it covered as well.

It’s IGN’s and GameSpy’s turn to show us some of the goods presented at E3. Both articles focus on what GameSpot previously reported about, the video showing the different stages of the game, called phases in Spore.

Wright says that the galaxy in the game will contain a half a million stars, with millions of individual planets. Lava worlds, water worlds, temperate worlds, and barren worlds are all possible — as are really exotic places, with colorful spiral mountains and weird land forms. The massive galaxy would take hours just to fly across. “There will be millions of worlds,” Wright says, zooming his spaceship out to the edge of the cosmos. “More than you can play in a lifetime.”

GameSpy also published the Spore demo presentation with better resolution and overall quality.

E3 stuff just keeps pouring in. But who are we to complain? GameSpot is next up with their batch of Spore items. First there’s a Spore Creature Editor Hands-On, which is pretty much self-explanatory what that’s about. Secondly they have an updated impression called Conquering the Universe.

Spore continues to look even more promising and intriguing, and the fact that we were able to actually see so much more of last year’s hinted-at content for ourselves has gone a long way in quelling our natural skepticism. In fact, if the game actually supports just half of what Wright and his team aspire to create, it could be absolutely groundbreaking. Spore is scheduled for release in 2007.

Both of these are based on a 17 minutes long video released at both GameSpot and IGN (better quality) showing pretty much most of the important aspects of the game. Be sure not to miss the new screenshots as well. Check back tomorrow for more exciting things!

GameSpy has posted a sum up of Will Wright’s keynote speach from this year’s Game Developers Conference. Though admittedly, as the author says, it can be somewhat of a challenge to extract the most important parts, it’s nevertheless very interesting to listen to Wright when he talks about everything from Drake’s Equation to the choices the Spore team had to make between realism and fantasy.

Interestingly, a split formed within the core team of developers working on Spore. Some wanted the game to be realistic and cool, others wanted it to be fanciful and exaggerated. Wright explained that they ended up breaking down into the “Science Team” and the “Cute Team.”

I really recommend this four page article, it’s an interesting read to get an insight how the design process of Spore is coming along and what the overall aim of the game is for the developers.