Zeusmonomon
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2026
1:02:24 · 65K views · Aug 27, 2020
A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content. He covers procedurally generated content and the ambitions of the game, with gameplay demo starting around 12:30.
HN points to it for Wright's ideas on procedural design and as the source of the huge expectations around Spore.
5 comments from Hacker News
He then went on to do Spore. Here is a pre-release talk from 2005: this video The final game got nerfed by EA but this talk is great fun and a continuation of sorts.
Will Wright Discusses the Demoscene: [LINK] >You can take any piece of content in the game, and imagine an algorithmic solution to it. Or also, you know, a way that the player could customize that object of thing. >There's this group in Europe called the Demoscene that make these very elaborate demos for a computer that fit into very tiny little memory blocks, you know like 64K of memory, and you run the thing, and in fact it algorithmically generates about 100 megabytes worth of data, you know these rich 3D environment, generated music, generated wave files, generated animation. >And they're developing techniques to generate, you know, huge amounts of interesting data, with very very simple, elegant, compression algorithms. >And this is a skill that game developers used to have, back in the 8-bit days. That was the only ways to do a game like Karateka(?), was to find all these little tips and tricks to compress things and generate them algorithmically. >But since the CD-ROM came out, and very cheap hard drives, storage is cheap, so basically we've lost that skill set, and now we attack all those problems with brute force. I think we've lost something by dropping that skill set. The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005: What I learned about content from the Sims. …and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. …And what I now plan to do with them. Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005. [LINK] >Algorithmic compression. >Games consis
>"I definitely have mixed feelings about this," he wrote about his retirement. "I mean, there are three games in particular I’d still like to make. One is very big, one is very small, and one I don’t know how to make, which scares me." -Warren Spector I hope he figures out how to make it once it finally becomes possible, and comes back! Will Wright said this at the closing his 2005 Spore GDC talk: >A lot of the games I've worked on, I've always had obstacles -- usually trying to convince other people it's a good idea, or it'd be sellable, or whatever. When I look back on this idea, the biggest obstacle I truly had was making myself believe that we could build the game. My own imagination was the biggest bottleneck. Once I truly believed that this game was buildable, it proved to be actually quite easy to con- I mean, to persuade the rest of my staff and the executives and everything that we could do it. >So I'd encourage all of you: if you've got some totally weird idea that is just so far outside the box that you think there's no way that would work -- go back occasionally and revisit those ideas. Because you just never know where they might lead. >-Will Wright, The Future of Content, GDC 2005, 1:00:57 this video
The Farbrausch demo and a talk by Will Wright on the (originally planned) procedurally generated design of Spore lives rent free in my brain every time I see the list of 100's of gigabytes of queued game updates in Steam nowadays. this video
> as you may inadvertently set expectations higher than you can possibly achieve The expectations were mostly from the GDC video, I believe? Gameplay starts around 12:30: this video