We had people who had done biology and physics, there was even a former nurse – people would just come to us and bring their ideas, and since we were making a game about “everything”, everything could come in handy. So we had all sorts of different prototypes, from a very clever ocean simulation to using the Drake equation to calculate how life spreads through the universe.
Kate Compton, artist
Several developers at once claim that Will Wright was more interested in watching all these talented people interact with each other than actually making the game.
We had an amazing “vision,” but there was no strong game design behind it. That is, it wasn’t very clear what the player was actually supposed to do.
Stone Librande, Lead Game Designer
The team members kept throwing in new ideas, and the basic principles of how the game works kept changing. For example, at first the developers wanted to make the low creatures unable to reach certain fruits, but then they thought it would restrict the player’s freedom, and gave up all such restrictions at once.
At some point it was also decided to abandon the Darwinian principle of evolution: if the fittest survived in Spore, there would be no room for all those stupid creatures that users created.
The development process wasn’t built around a clear idea of what we wanted the game to be, but around lots of ideas and suggestions about which direction we could go.
Dave Kuliba, Programmer
However, the game designers still had to restrain their ambitions. According to the original plan, more and more “cool things” were to be added to the game in each new era, but the budget did not allow to put this plan into practice.
The developers decided to focus solely on those elements that were easiest to transfer from era to era. According to the original idea, claws and claws of the creatures should have influenced their fighting style throughout the game – most of these small details had to be sent under the knife.