GDC Panel: Fulfilling the Massively-Single Player Promise – How’d We Do?

 

Spore producer Caryl Shaw had a session at GDC earlier today entitled “Fulfilling the Massively-Single Player Promise – How’d We Do?”.  In the session, Shaw quickly changed the session’s title as not many people showed up (due to Suda 51′S presentation across the hall) to talk about the online development for Spore.

She shares her mistake of buying the servers for Spore too early in 2005 when the online aspects started to kick off.  By the time of the game’s release, the servers aged a little, but it didn’t cause any conflicts.  In fact, Caryl goes on to tell how it benefited the team with time to do load testing so the Sporepedia wouldn’t crash, which is something i have to give credit to the Spore team for, as with nearly any other big Internet release, the website nearly always goes down.

She also listed the stats of how well Spore’s online community is performing:

89,505,660 total uploads since June
1.5-2m uploads per week (1m per day the first week)
2.6m registered users
3500 new users a day
500-600k uniques a month to Spore.com
4.45 minutes (average time per visit)
5 – number of Web Engineers at Maxis (plus Ernie, the part-time database guy)

Source:  Kotaku

Chris Hecker Discusses User-Generated Content

Hecker split his talk into three sections: what user-generated content is, how to use it, and why to use it. He began by setting up a partial taxonomy of axes for UGC, including aesthetic content versus behaviorial content, parameterization versus raw creation, as well as a more vague axis of accessibility.

As examples of UGC interfaces that demonstrate various combinations of these descriptions, Hecker went through a number of screenshots — Wii Miis and City of Heroes for parameterization and aesthetics; Spore creatures and mods for aesthetics and creation; Final Fantasy XII‘s menu-driven battle queue system for behavior and parameterization; Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and the Flash game Fantastic Contraption for behavior and creation.

The “edit/test” cycle, Hecker says, is an ongoing loop that users cycle through when creating content — which occurs in gameplay as well as players try different mechanics and approaches, but on a much faster scale. With user-generated content, that cycle can end up lengthening to the point that it approaches game development. That can limit accessibility and shrink the potential audience for such content.

Read here for more.

4 new official screenshots for Galactic Adventures

Here are the latest for screenshots about Spore Galactic Adventures, to find more screenshots, go to the screenshots page.