Will Wright's 2006 Keynote: What's Next in Game Design?

[Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage chris pecker uh welcome so one of my favorite things about will wright besides that he's [ __ ] brilliant is that uh he's so approachable and how uh humble and and mellow he is uh even in the face of his obvious popularity and so he doesn't want to be in this room for example like he has no interest in being a keynote he just wants to come to the gdc and share information and every year we put him in a bigger room and then it fills up and people complain and then we put them in a bigger room and then it fills up and people complain and so next year i think we're going to have to get like the oakland coliseum or something it's not exactly clear what to do here but even in the face of all that he still is all about just sharing information and being really approachable and being really cool about just like the free flow of information so help me welcome will wright

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everybody let me go to my powerpoint here okay so uh every year they kind of asked me to come give a talk and um every year they kind of then ask me what my talk is about and i procrastinate and so they just assign a title to my talk and uh oh by the way the images that you may have seen coming in were all from the hubble you know which in the hubble i love it's like one of these things that appeals equally the scientist and the artist you know and there are very few tools of humanity that i think kind of have that amazing balance both ways at any rate uh so this is not the title of my talk at all in fact i mean uh people are always saying oh come give a talk at our school or this or that

about game design and so i talk about game design and game design games um i can kind of sick of talking about game design actually uh so i thought i would talk about something quite different here today instead but then about a month ago i saw jameel that runs the conference and he said oh by the way we made you the game design keynote i thought uh oh this isn't about game design at all and i'm the keynote so i kind of scratched that plan so i kind of reworked it a bit and thought you know well you know what i really enjoy is you know the obsessive research stuff that i get into when i just really get fascinated with a subject and then kind of want to turn it into a game so i kind of reworked the thing into this uh you know for me you know i start a game idea and usually there's this concept at the beginning something that sparks an idea then i go out and do a lot of research get really involved in it uh then of course you know kind of the standard modes of you know pre-production

production testing marketing it seems to me at gdc that um we cover these last four sections pretty well you know with the topics that are covered at gdc but i've seen very little stuff um kind of done in the very early phases you know the research phase of how you start with the very core of an idea usually one person kind of doing background research and doing the very early formulation of that idea and that's really my favorite part that's the part i enjoy the most by far so you know just kind of tinkering around in your lab doing stuff so i started thinking about okay what can i say about game research but then you know i had this nagging thing where i really still wanted to talk about this other thing you know um and i thought well okay maybe i'll just do both of them you know uh what should i do first let me do the gamer search astro you know it it felt kind of weird to have like half a talking another half talk so i decided i would actually interleave the two for maximum confusion so we're gonna be going back and forth a bit here um in some sense you know one is an example of the other

starting on the research side um typically you know when i start researching an idea involves talking to people going on interviewing experts in the field reading a lot of books uh searching the web for whatever i can find uh books really seem to be my primary inspiration most of the games i've done you know were kind of directly inspired by one particular book i read that got me interested in that subject uh and it's not like the entire game was really it's not like the blueprint for the game or anything it's actually more like that book will kind of spark additional interests and i'll start reading other things and it'll start pulling me off in these different directions that i find interesting as i'm at the same time kind of formulating what this thing might become in my mind as a game and then later we kind of bring the prototyping um the japanese have this great term called otaku uh how many of you have heard this before um yeah it kind of usually refers to a 14 year old you know kind of socially dysfunctional guy who collects little anime dolls um it's rather derogatory

but you know i kind of embrace that philosophy you know in the early stages when i get interested in the subject you know i just get you know obsessed with it and i'll speak to everybody i can can about it and tell them how cool it is and in some sense that's my very early stage of prototyping how can i take that idea of that subject why do i find this cool and how can i communicate that to others and i'm doing that all the time from the very early stages last year i came here and talked about spore a little bit kind of you know where that was going you know uh how the content battle that we were fighting in game development seemed like a losing battle to me and because of that it kind of drove me to generative systems uh the project i was working on just before that was the sims online and you know we basically had to fight a lot of those battles it kind of brought me to the idea of spore uh this is roughly the development team for the sims online it's about 140 people largest project i had ever worked on and uh it was just a huge amount of inertia you know not just with like the server client issues but the design issues a lot of content we had to bring in a lot

of content had to be reworked from the sims uh and once we got it working you know in a multiplayer environment there were a lot of things that were fundamentally different in the films it kind of broke the sims idea first of all we couldn't control time and if you you know when i play the sims always have one hand on the speed control and you always speed through the boring parts and when all of a sudden you're stuck in real time in the sims it is a pretty boring game uh custom content which was one of the big you know kind of leverages of success we had for the sims offline you know we had aspirations for the sims online to have that but it was just unmanageable the amount of bandwidth the size of the data in fact you know made it hard for us to kind of bring that in effectively into the sims online and we find that it's like 60 of the players playing the sims use cheats you know they'll play it as a game part of the time they'll use cheats and play it kind of as a dollhouse freeform design your mansion the other time and of course you can't have that in game instead you have to have these incredibly tall advancement ladders um you know spanning these different ranges of skills now meanwhile while we were building the sims online actually around the same time over in germany they were building this

thing this thing is cool this is the bagger 288 um and it is immense um it's actually a land vehicle it actually drives across doing mining in germany uh it's just got a billion treads it's about the size of kind of an oil platform uh they're actually these large veins of coal that run through germany and they're actually through these machines and they actually disassemble highways to let this thing buy but just to give you a sense of the size of this thing this is a jawa sand crawler in comparison and the sand collar doesn't even exist but the reason i bring this up is this is basically kind of how the sims online felt to me um basically i was driving this thing right you know and we'd make a design decision and two weeks later what happened with that oh it's in process oh we're getting the server code working now the client's you know getting in sync with it maybe two months later we might see this minor little design decision actually trickle into the product

um so when i left the sims online and started spore it was basically kind of like getting out of the driver's seat of that thing into a ferrari and zipping away i mean we were going pro typing making design decisions and you know i was seeing progress hourly rather than once every other month and i was really reluctant to kind of grow spore back in that same direction which drove me to this idea of like the procedural content and stuff so but there are a lot of still cool things from the sims that you know i really kind of didn't want to lose in the next project i worked on you know primarily the idea that the players are surprising us that they are actually even going beyond what we think the boxes that we're giving them to play in and exceeding that box in weird and interesting ways um and this gets to kind of the question of the advocation of authorship you know so you're gonna you know pour your heart into this thing and you're gonna create this you know lovingly crafted world and you know you have aspirations for that it has meaning that you want to convey and once you give it to the fans you just don't know what they're going to do with it so

okay now we switch to the other talk okay so spore you know uh originally was kind of uh came to the idea through the my fascination with the seti program and i talked about this a little bit last year kind of drake's equation um which led me to the science of astrobiology which is the study of possible life in the universe and it's you know an interesting subject because it only has one data point and that's life on earth um everything else has to be inferred you know so everything we know about aliens we basically imagined you know we've never seen uh one of the early concepts for spore was that um each one of these terms and jake's equation you know these are things like how many stars how many planets uh how many of those have life one of the early concepts of the game is that the player would play a level to set those sliders and then you would have the resulting galaxy to play in but it turns out that most of the combinations of those sliders are incredibly boring so that didn't really feel like it was kind of going in the right direction another kind of very early concept for spore was that it was kind of a greening the

galaxy thing you were going around you know seeding and promoting life throughout the galaxy and then kind of seeing what arose and then trying to nurture it uh this is actually if anything for the few people that read the book 2001 um that was the backstory for why the aliens were dropping monoliths on earth is that they were actually trying to kind of farm mine in the galaxy um at the same time there was of course this powers of 10 idea kind of learning the background after doing a little bit more research i found out that the powers of tinting actually the eemses didn't do the first version of it the first version was actually done by a dutch schoolteacher in the 50s named case boca and he got his students to draw the pictures it was actually a remarkably cool book although very weird in comparison to the eames he actually starts like with a little lady holding a baby in a chair and then as he zooms out there's a whale and she's in the middle of the street and cars are going by and i've been to holland and i didn't see that but but anyway i'm going back to drake's for a second uh the really interesting term in here the one that we know probably the least about is the probability of life occurring you know what is the chance life can spontaneously rise somewhere

so then that drove me down in a totally different direction you know the origin of life and there are all these convoluted theories about how life might have started um they basically usually resolve down to this but uh then we looked into it um and this really was part of the powers of ten thing it was drawing us down into the microscopic world here and so i thought okay initially this is kind of a space thing maybe it's a microscopic thing too um now a little bit of overview here 14 million years ago billion years ago big bang here we are now um the earth remarkably formed about four billion years ago which is a significant fraction of the age of the known universe and the fact that the earth has remained fairly stable over that period of time is pretty remarkable another remarkable thing is that evidence of life on earth was very soon after the earth formed uh and they're still trying to refine that every time they find an older one it gets a little bit closer to the cluster to the time of the earth finally cooled off now we see that it took about two billion years for life to go from very primitive prokaryotic microbes to more advanced eukaryotic microbes and another 1.5

billion years to get to what we consider kind of macroscopic interesting life so it was about uh three billion years before life you know got kind of large multicellular um and it's only been there for about 500 million years so far uh one of the early trips i took researching score was to the scripps institute down in la jolla and met uh this guy stan miller who back in the 50s did the very first original life experiments where he would take these flasks fill them with like you know methane and spark them and see what would come out of it you know just he was trying to recreate the early prebiotic atmosphere of the earth and he actually was creating amino acids and it was the first kind of idea that maybe this stuff could have risen naturally these chemicals um one of my prized possessions is this that he gave me that he actually signed says stan miller and it's like sitting on a shelf in my house and every now and then somebody will come and say oh you should throw this out it's ruined and i was like no i also met david brinn down there he's one of my favorite science fiction authors um you know one of his best-known series is the uplift series which is a concept that we kind of you know or bring into sport where you can kind of uplift unintelligent animals to

intelligence um in describing explore to him he basically said oh it sounds cool but i want this game i want the game where i can change the fundamental consonants of the universe and see what emerges uh and aside from being kind of a difficult thing to do even in comparison to spore uh it turns out that most of those things if you move them like one percent one or the other the universe lasts about five nanoseconds or something so um that had the same problem where the combinations of sliders you know was very narrow range where you had an interesting kind of play experience uh diving a little bit deeper into the series of the origin of life one of the leading candidates is this thing called auto catalytic sets which is roughly the chemistry over time will involve more and more elaborate you know chemicals in a given environment um we actually did prototypes of this and it to be honest it wasn't very compelling um so we moved up the level to the cellular level and started looking into cellular processes and metabolism and stuff and we did a pretty nice simulation of this and again you know it just wasn't going to kind of reach the same numbers as the sims

i thought so another kind of intriguing theory is the panspermia theory which is the fact that maybe life didn't start on earth at all but in fact came here from somewhere else maybe an asteroid or a comet landed on earth um this is a rock we found alh 8401 uh came from mars um and we know that you know pretty well just by analyzing the chemical composition of it uh and we found these little weird things on there that you know we've never seen before they look like they could be you know maybe fossils of living organisms i'm the jury's still out on that they probably aren't because they're so small but still the idea that material could have traveled from mars to the earth is pretty well known at this point and there's a surprising amount of material like when an asteroid hits the earth all little pieces of the earth go out into orbit around the sun some of them will fall back in other planets like mars for instance and so there's this idea of planetary crosstalk that if there is life in a planetary system chances are it will spread to other nearby planets because it's a matter of tons per year that will fall like in the early stages of this so there's a huge amount of

crosstalk happening between the planets and not only that but it's looking more and more probable that there's the possible possibility of interstellar crosstalk which is some of this material could actually travel to another star because some of these bacteria can last for millions of years in a desiccated form and they're very radiation resistant so uh we'll get back to this a little bit later there's actually now what i'm talking about so far is undirected panspermia um there's this other idea of directed pancreamia in fact a society i found that is promoting this that let's start sending spores out into space and you know five million years from now they might land somewhere and start you know growing on the other planet and it's cool that people think that far ahead you know okay back to the research side um one thing that i have to confront a lot especially in the early stages is you know where i fall kind of on the fact versus fiction side of things um frequently we simulate things not the way they would occur but the way people would expect them to occur or you know for entertainment value in simcity when a nuclear power plant um catches on fire you know it just goes nuclear you know it just blows up in this big crater

where it used to be and of course nuclear reactors don't really do that but you know a lot of times in games we will purposely basically break reality for the player expectation um and i'm not against that at all in fact i think you know fiction is a very interesting way to kind of approach reality uh one thing that rod sterling said when he was doing the twilight zone is he said that was the only place in television where he could do real issues and this is back in the late 50s when he started the twilight zone and he could actually do things about gender equality or racial uh issues by making you know one guy an alien one guy in earthling where at that time on tv if they tried to deal with these racial issues with blacks and whites they would never get it on the air so it was a way for him to get a message out there that at the time was very hard to get out as far back as mary shelley writing frankenstein you know she had a very deep message embedded in this work of fiction you know that she was hoping to have some impact on society um so really you know in some sense i wanted to interact with lots of interesting aliens in this game um and the idea of having to deal with protein folding and cellular metabolism was kind of a little bit at odds with that and you know we'll you'll see a little bit later kind of how we fell

on the side of the you know which side of the fence we fell on different issues a lot of times the research you know we'll start doing prototypes um i don't know if any of y'all saw the excellent prototyping talk this morning by hayam and chris uh yeah it was a great talk and as they were mentioning you know we do a lot of simulation prototypes you know the very best ones we will actually kind of bring the more extensive gameplay prototypes originally we're just simulating dynamics of a simple system but then we'll start adding user interaction and is this fun you know to manipulate and kind of interact with um a lot of times we'll uh kind of iterate those prototypes oh i think would be better if we tuned it this way or that way but frequently some things will come out in the prototypes that will go all the way back to the fundamental research and say oh we should you know go off in this direction and the gameplay will actually suggest it over this longer loop so when we do research for games or when i do research i end up reading a lot covering a lot of topics but really i know that at the end of the day only maybe 10 of what i research is going to end up in the game you know the art of this is figuring out what 90 to leave out uh

this is kind of another view of you know the design tree um you know each one of these branches is a decision point you're going to make at some point in the design the leaves of this tree every little leaf on the outside represents one potential product that you could end up at and how you navigate this tree is going to kind of determine what product you end up building you know a kind of more close-up view of this is you might start reading a book get you inspired maybe you go out and do a prototype of it um maybe have a conversation about it then you change course and say let's go do user test this way that doesn't work out maybe go all the way back to the original source and then you see a game that kind of reminds you of it you play that game and then maybe talk about that and this is kind of what the internal structure of that tree looks like it's you know a lot of different kind of forms of media interaction conversation tests that you're doing to make decisions at each branch in that tree um but usually at the very base you know where i even kind of start climbing down this tree i start by asking some very early questions about what i want to you know do as a designer um and i've kind of reduced those to like four major areas here innovation risks fun and messages on the innovation side

you know i think it's important you know with every title that we do to try to innovate somewhere you know to some degree um you know innovation is something that you kind of know when you see it it's hard to define exactly and uh it doesn't always lead to success you know so you can have something that's very innovative but not necessarily very successful um but what it does do is it does get you above the signal to noise you know in the marketplace you know you wanted to be that signal getting above the noise because we are living in a very noisy marketplace you know every year thousands of titles are released and you know if you have an innovative title people will talk about it because it stands out it's a signal and uh that's just kind of like one of the very first things i try to think about you know as almost a prerequisite for a game that i do um in spore you know the innovations i decided would be the procedural content you know well actually i've been being teased a lot about this procedural content thing i heard about this like drinking game every time i say procedural somebody takes a drink so i decided actually here i'm gonna let you all vote on what i'm gonna start calling this instead

okay so so these are the candidates um look him over for a second and i'm gonna put this to an audience vote for from now on i'm just going to start calling it something else so how many people think i should call it algorithmic content okay okay parametric content that's cool okay generative content okay we have a winner okay so the generative content um what's going to buy us player creativity uh you know an unbounded world potentially since we can generate so much um the pollinated content uh by the social currency of players kind of having some value people getting to know the best creators in this world thematic diversity because people are going to just do all sorts of weird things in different directions and then this kind of multi-genre gameplay um which gives us epic scope and some familiarity approachability okay now back to the aliens uh

okay now the panspermia thing was interesting but um really at some point i realized it's all about the aliens right you know that's what i really wanted to do in this game was fly around and meet lots of interesting cool alien creatures especially for players creating them so um and it could have been almost you know this talk almost was about robots instead of aliens because aliens and robots to me represent you know very similar things you know they kind of represent views of humanity uh you know you don't really realize how amazing the human hand is until you try to build one once you try to build one you go back and look at this in the dexterity and the strength and the flexibility it's just an amazing amazing thing so in some sense robots give us a better understanding of who we are and you know what makes us tick now you can hear me talk about this movie a lot my favorite movie of all time 2001. i am completely operational and all my circuits are functioning perfectly so when i was seven years old i saw this movie and i met hal and had a deep impact on me you know the idea that there could be this machine that felt like a person and you could

interact with and it just fundamentally you know just blew me away as a kid um what's interesting is you know people saw that movie and they came out and you know this is right at the dawn of ai really right and they were amazed that the computer could beat this guy at chess and they weren't amazed at all that he could have these conversations do all this common sense reasoning and that was a very interesting insight into human intelligence you know because we had thought of you know playing chess as being you know something that required a lot of intelligence and tying your shoes as being simple and we're finding out that's not the case you know and we found that out through trying to recreate those abilities and machines um you know the lip-reading stuff he did uh so in some sense um aliens and robots both represent kind of boundaries or aspects of humanity uh you know we have you know nice aliens friendly aliens we have really mean scary you know vicious aliens we have really smart and really stupid aliens you know so they're kind of building this boundary but they're all still in the same dimensions that you know humans are built out of so really both of these things are kind of i think a window in humanity and as we you know look at

imagined aliens and as we build robots we're actually coming to understand ourselves more thoroughly now the idea of aliens isn't really new you know they're examples from way back in art of things that they might have called demons or angels um more recently uh there were a few sightings in the 1800s there were these things that they saw during world war ii called foo fighters but it was really after the advent of nuclear weapons that the kind of whole modern alien craze started uh the roswell incident seems to be like ground zero for where a lot of the kind of modern mythology around aliens spread um and initially you know these aliens were things that uh were probably very hostile probably gonna come and hurt us they were scary um in some sense i think there were personification of this power that we certainly had to destroy ourselves um in other contexts they were also this yearning for adult supervision you know we were hoping that somebody out there were smarter than us and might actually come and help save ourselves or even provide an example that maybe we could survive this period in our time um and this is just one kind of cultural response to kind of

the sudden ability to destroy humanity different cultures had different responses in japan it was godzilla which is a little bit different it was more of a personification of what would nature say if she could see us doing this and so godzilla was kind of like the revenge of nature you know after we had been playing with these weapons but the aliens in fact weren't like godzilla they were very vulnerable um we could almost empathize with them what made them powerful was their technology and that was something we could aspire to we could aspire to become these gods which also made them very different than like the old greek and roman gods that we could not aspire to become okay so back to the research um we covered innovation project risks um is something that you really have to take seriously you know at every stage of the project all the way from beginning to end i divide most of the risk that i think of into these categories technology design production marketing political um i'm lucky that most of the ideas that i want to do you know i have a freer path i think most people here that have a really cool innovative idea you know the very first battles they're going to be fighting is the political battle how do you get a green light inside your company

um electronic arts it actually i found a very simple trick it turns out that all the execs play worlds of warcraft and so all you have to do is say oh it's gonna be like world of warcraft except it starts in a tide pool and you end up in space and it's not quite multiplayer but it works so the top risks i saw for spore you know in sorted order were the perc uh animation system editor usability design scope of the project quality content and content pipeline uh two of these are technology risks you know which kind of involve one approach two of these were design risks and the last one was really kind of a production risk so what you really want to do in this case is front load the team get the very first core members uh in positions to solve those early risks i knew that if we couldn't do the generative animation system that the whole idea was sunk and so one of the very first people i brought on the project was a guy named case one potion um who oh people know him

he's a great guy and he was like my deep researcher and he actually i had him look at all the procedural or generative systems out there um you know we found some really cool examples they were very hard to use but they kind of gave us some indication of the direction to go um later we had ken perlin come in and do some consulting on it you know showing his stuff his generative stuff um then later chris hecker is now kind of building the tool out for our animators and so basically it was getting a very qualified team of specialists to come in and attack that risk and i find that these risks are best attacked with a very small number of very sharp people rather than a giant team of kind of more average people um in which case they'll never solve it but the very tightly focused team usually can if especially if you say i don't think you can solve this there's no way and make it a challenge film now the pollinated content that was something where uh we actually had a lot of experience to draw from we have the sims websites and a lot of um fans are uploading stuff to our sims website and sharing it and tracking the creators and the popularity and stuff so i brought over uh two of the people that actually had architected that

system called sean colin andrews to run the pollinated content side yeah they're great and they back started building prototypes very early on of this system and capturing all the stuff that we were in development making in the editors and starting to sort it and aesthetically figure out what the categories were and the fact that they got that prototype going so early lowered that as a risk factor tremendously right off the bat you know whereas the generative animation system was kind of a long ongoing battle we kept fighting it kind of stayed at the top of the list for a long time design scope you know games used to be like about that complex you know back in the 80s or so uh now they're more like this and so i knew that i wanted to do a game across all these different scales and i kind of reasoned that well if i didn't make any of those skills too complicated um the whole set of them still would maybe be about the same complexity as a modern game and so that was like kind of step one for mitigating the design risk uh another one was bringing in again people that uh jason shankle was the lead programmer for cmrs which is a project that we worked on but we never released but jason did a huge number of

prototypes of planetary ecosystems and whatnot that we drew from and so his experience he was actually like my first prototyper on sport uh then playing a lot of old games that were just great like sun dog on the apple ii has anybody ever played this game this is way back this is a great game i had multi-scale gameplay flying around the galaxy elite of course um cosmic osmo which might seem like an odd choice but that was a great game too in a different kind of a toy sense uh and then kind of more offbeat things microsoft space simulator which was not a great game but it was a really fun toy if you were into space the kind of more recent version of that is this thing celestia which if you're into astronomy you really should download this it's a free download and it's got great plugins and it's really cool uh homeworld of course the visuals the gameplay these are basically free prototypes by the way you know i didn't you know i made 50 buck prototypes but uh we learned tremendous amount just kind of going back into those libraries of things that had been done and you know a lot of games have been out there and you can learn tremendous amounts just by going and doing basically game archaeology um on the

evolution side we dug up every evolution game we could find you know board games you know all the way up to like carnivore or cubivor on the nintendo and of course we did a billion and half prototypes now the prototypes are kind of like the books where you end up doing lots of prototypes all over the place and only very few end up actually kind of dealing with the actual dynamics in the game and really that's okay because that's what they're for one thing that i found that works great for prototypes are interns and i've had really good luck with interns uh generally the the balance i'm trying to strive for on a team now is about one-third veteran one-third kind of interns young blood and one-third mid-level and that seems like a really good kind of chemistry on the team the typical thing is that when we have a lot of people coming in we're trying to filter for hiring is we have thousands of resumes the hr people don't quite know exactly what we're looking for because they're not experts in the field they try their best and sort and give us a pile of resumes and then we kind of choose from those and it's a very ineffective filter in a lot of cases you know what i'm finding is a much more

effective filter is a few programs in these universities that are teaching you know interactive design now um we have a few students come in and do very in those programs and then i let the professor recommend to me you know knowing exactly what i'm looking for and they've known the student for years and so in some sense these students are kind of like the salmon swimming upstream and i'm like at the top of the stream you know waiting for the best salmon to get there and that's turned out to be a great filter for me um and like i said like three schools in particular that in fact we're getting our best interns from and i'm not going to tell you what they are because i don't want to have to compete for them um but on the editor usability in fact i have interns working on this you know from very early stage uh we looked at all these other games that involved constructing things ridge builder magic ping gel um this is very interesting one in fact it was based upon the work of this japanese computer scientist takeo hirashi and he did a lot of other basically constructive systems like this that had a lot of embedded intelligence in them uh so we're dealing with this with user content and this is kind of what we're trying to the curve we're trying to

fight with the editors is you know we get a lot of of content that's a low quality you know it's basically crap um we get a fair amount that's kind of you know a good effort um a little bit that's pretty good in a very small amount that's great you know and what we really want to do is we want to pull up this curve and this is kind of why we're focusing on editors how can we make players be creative in the game but also have that stuff be good enough to where other players get value from it i mean if they want to just sit there and make you know crappy stuff and it's in their game i could care less you know but if we want to redistribute it to other players and add value you know to their world we want to kind of bring everybody up on the quality bar here um and so we did a lot of early prototyping the editors and usability tests because this is really kind of a usability issue now the content pipeline was a last risk um electronic arts is moving over into where's the framework a lot of randomwear is really about you know uh the pipeline for animation and modeling stuff that we're all doing generatively so we pretty much had to kind of roll our own pipeline in some sense you know looking at the art staff you know i was

finding that the artists are already getting extremely technical they're writing you know pixel shaders um working in maya and uh it wasn't that far of a jump to kind of go toward this idea of a generative artist yes generative artist um what i found uh in looking at kind of the skill set um that works well is you want somebody that can kind of uh observe nature or observe whatever and from that you know with almost a scientific eye um and deconstruct what they're seeing and when they can be constructed they can kind of bring it into a larger conceptual space and abstract it out into eventually data structures and then we use those data structures to regenerate you know through algorithms you know new content and so this is kind of the process that um i i'm trying to train our artist into thinking this way and there's really we have one prototype of this um and we're also trying to build tools that will allow artists do this more easily and eventually our players because eventually this is kind of what we want the player to do on a little bit uh simpler higher level um so this is my lead artist ocean quigley

uh and he's like the first generative artist that i've ever met you know he's kind of trained himself in that process i just showed you he's proven remarkably difficult to breed in captivity but uh on the other hand we've found that we've gotten extreme leverage i paired him up with one of our best programmers andrew wilmot and andrew developed this custom language for ocean and you know they worked very closely together and you know whenever ocean had a limitation language andrew would go back and add a few more things and he made a very comfortable editing environment to where ocean was basically scripting and writing programming um and because of that you know we got probably 10 times the efficiency out of ocean so this is an interesting experiment where we can get extreme leverage out of certain people in these you know roles but then this might become the template later for bringing people into these roles and training them okay back to the aliens okay so uh copernicus came up with this idea that maybe the whole universe doesn't revolve around the earth you know maybe the earth is just one kind of place out there like a lot of other places uh and because that people kind of

abstracted the idea okay well if we're just like everywhere else maybe there are people like us everywhere else and it was almost a given that there were aliens out there somewhere maybe even nearby on mars you know back in the 1800s they thought they were actually observing canals on mars and um they were waiting for them to come attack us basically you know and it wasn't really considered that out there of an idea it was you know highly plausible um more recently this new theory has come around called the rare earth theory um and it basically says that maybe we're a lot more unique than we thought at first and it's a little bit different than the copernican principle for one thing we have this amazing moon which um has a lot of impacts on keeping the earth more stable for a lot of reasons uh the leading theory of how we got the moon was this big thing hit the earth kind of sloughed off and then went into orbit around us it used to be much much closer the moon used to be about 14 000 miles away from us if that was true now that would have been really cool you know to be back then and see that because it would be this huge thing up in the sky um it also would have caused one kilometer land tides which is that the land would actually go

up and down a kilometer twice a day you know and that would have been really cool to see another kind of unusual thing about our situation is this thing jupiter um jupiter is a big planet it turns out uh in fact it's not only the heaviest planet in our soil system but it's twice as heavy as all the other planets put together uh what that means is that most of the crap that comes flying into our solar system gets eaten by jupiter it's a big shield if jupiter weren't there earth and all the other planets would have been bombarded many many times more than they were so it's actually protected us quite a bit we actually saw one of these impacts um about eight years ago the shoemaker levy comment hit jupiter and we actually got photographs of where it hit so it was pretty cool to see something like that in our lifetime now if we pull back a little bit away from our solar system at the galaxy level the galaxy is a very thin flat disc spiral galaxies we're about halfway out from the center of the disk and these spiral arms aren't exactly what you might think you know you look at these and you think oh that's where all the stars are that's not really the case that's where the bright stars are they're really

young stars they're lighting up the dust around there the actual stellar distribution is pretty even through this disc stars form in these dust clouds and once they form they ignite and depending on the mass of the star you get you know like a blue giant or a mainline star or maybe a red dwarf the bigger the star the shorter lifespan so these large blue giants actually go supernova very rapidly so they only last a few million years and so the spiral arms are actually those supernova lighting up and the blue stars lighting up these regions of high dust now what that means is these arms really are governed by hydrodynamic principles it's like pressure waves moving around so they actually maintain their structure as they revolve around the center otherwise they would kind of dissolve they orbit with a period of about 200 million years you know for one revolution now the stars and planets are actually governed by gravitational you know forces so once closer to the center go faster and when further further out go slower that means the ones closer to the middle

are actually going through these arms very often you know every 10 or 20 million years ones that are further out are actually being overtaken by the arms because the arms are going faster than them um now these arms are actually very high radiation zones both because of the supernovas going off and because of the blue giants and the dust a lot of other things they're actually pretty um disruptive areas for like a sun to go through and there's actually a very thin zone here where the stars are pretty much in sync with the arms and they are not passing through the arms very often at all and it turns out that we actually live in the exact center of that zone so this is you know one other possibility that maybe we're in a kind of more unique situation than we think that there's this habitability zone in the galaxy um there's another one the early stars were almost entirely hydrogen and helium over time they blew up made dust dust came back collapsed back into kind of proto planetary disks and the new stars were formed but these new stars had higher metal content and in this case anything you know above helium is considered a metal uh so that would be a second generation star on the bottom a first generation on the star on top

our sun actually is a pretty high metal star we think it's a second or third generation uh star which means that the original star blew up made dust another star was created back and forth to make our sun uh which means that there was enough metal in our protoplanetary disk to make things like terrestrial planets like the earth otherwise it would have just been probably gas giants uh we've also found correlations where the higher metal content stars definitely have more planet systems more planetary systems so there seems to be this idea that the milosity of your star is also maybe a requisite for uh life as we know it and this is actually kind of a map of the green is the uh the high metal stars slowly evolve spreading out further and further from the galactic center and we're just about the point in time when that green band is overlapping the other band i showed you so this is just stuff that we've you know fairly recently kind of discovered okay back to the game stuff no on the obvious fun um for every game you know you kind of want to start with why am i doing this i mean and when you start getting into game concepts it's always about you know what is obviously fun about

this what you know when i put this on the back of all the box why is somebody gonna think you know they don't want to play it what's the hook for the player um just give an example you know when we were doing the space stuff we thought okay suppose we had a ufo and we could go anywhere you know what we want to do all these worlds the players are created and then you know we kind of dove in and it depended on every level of the game you know we thought on a wild planet we'd probably want to do the uplift thing you know making them smart or maybe just kind of collect them you know like pokemon um on the tribal you know really it seemed like we wanted them to worship us maybe make monuments you know and be their god you know civilized you know maybe play first contact uh adult supervision or maybe just kind of mess with them and do crop circles um and then space faring you know obviously combat trading maybe building interstellar federations uh but definitely exploration because at that point the world gets so expensive but for every level of the game we would go through and just kind of figure out what are the obvious things that you know if i ask somebody in two minutes i describe the game what would you want to do in this game you know and would put those all down on a list and those became kind of landmarks that i talked about a couple years ago

okay back to the aliens now um they're setting with an s searching for aliens and they're steady with the c which is communicating with aliens uh you know we've in some sense already been communicating we've been putting plaques this is a plaque from voyager that's off on its way and it's gonna hit some other star in about 20 thousand years or so it's kind of slow um we're also radioing messages this is the message that was radiated from the arcebo telescope in 74 and i'm not going to go into what that means but it was badly badly designed even unintentionally we've been communicating you know with all the radio waves that have been leaving earth you know so for 55 years you know aliens out there can receive i love lucy and that includes 1400 star systems um 600 stars can receive gilligan's island and a lucky 150 stars can receive dukes of hazard now of course we've been listening you know a lot of you might have had this as your screen saver city at home um it turns out that the

study program is actually listening to quite a bit of the bandwidth and frequencies out there and quite a bit of space um this is a map of you know by size of civilization on one axis how far out we should have heard of them and in fact we've thoroughly searched you know fairly large civilizations in our galaxy we should have seen by now and um that's brought up kind of an interesting thing you know back in the 50s uh enrico fermi physicist was having lunch and they were discussing drake's equation and he had this simple question at lunch which is where are they you know by most of the estimates they were plugging into those numbers we should have aliens all around us they shouldn't be hard to find at all we should be overrun with them um and this became known as the fermi paradox or the colonization argument uh he reasoned that even if we went slow sublight velocities from our home planet um took hundreds of years to get to the next star stayed there for hundreds of years built you know maybe another ship and went to the next set of stars that really you know with this branching factor of us spreading through the galaxy we should be able to fill the galaxy in less than five million years easy you know which five million either

sounds like a long time but it put it in evolutionary perspective you know back to this map um here's the complex life you know that we've been for last 500 million years we zoom into that you know the dinosaurs have been around for about half that time they were around for a remarkable period of time several hundred million years until this asteroid came and you know killed them if we zoom into that like last 65 million years and if we'd just given the dinosaurs another 20 million years to evolve and they were every bit as biologically complex as we are um they would have filled the galaxy by then you know so that's a very short period of time you know that it would take any alien civilization to be just all around us uh and if that actually occurred it would actually turn out that star trek was right that all the aliens did kind of look like one species because it would generally be one alien species that would be out there basically filling this galaxy um there's this other guy on mathematician john von neumann that came up with this idea of von neumann probes this is the idea of a self-replicating machine and his idea was that you build these machines send them off they can take as long as they want to 100 000 years or whatever to get to a star

they assemble raw materials to make duplicates of themselves and then they'll send those duplicates off and then they can sit there and terraform those you know or drop life bring genetic databases whatever um so it's probably likely that in fact if we do meet aliens out there the first ones we meet will probably be mechanical because this is a far more efficient way you know i think somebody with the wealth of like bill gates um about 100 years from now we'll have the technology where somebody like kim could probably do this on his own it wouldn't even have to be a giant government program you could just go off and build a von neumann machine and send it out there nobody's going to stop him um now this is my little side rant just about how valuable the uh basically robots and space are you know robots are getting cheaper more efficient faster every year humans are not you know i love the man space program i think it's really cool amazing history but really for the dollars we spend we get so much more science out of the robots in fact what i was thinking about it i was trying to think you know what was the biggest scientific benefit of the manned space program and i think it was probably when they went up to repair the hubble um which is not to take anything away from the astronauts i think you know living and working in space is you know eventually going to be human

destiny but right now unlimited budget we're getting this tremendous kind of bang for our buck out of these machines um as a matter of fact if you just take the price of the hubble telescope um that equals about one week of the war in iraq right now and if you took the total cost if you took just what we spent in iraq so far that would buy a hubble for every member of the u.n and you'd still have 150 left over for antarctica because nobody ever gives antarctic anything right but uh i want to show you a little prototype here this is just a very simple prototype of um what would happen if you know there was panspermia where lifeforms can spread kind of undirected from star to star and how that might look this is a very

simple little galactic model um here we're seeing stars form this layer is actually the radiation those arms are causing these like the spiral arms of the galaxy now i can go into this and see life i can drop in a very simple life form like actually that was a star yeah that green thing now it'll start spreading you know this is taking thousands millions of years but still um over time well that one didn't so much from my point there uh i must have dropped him into a high radiation zone go back to our heat layer yeah i'm dropping them into a spiral arm okay now at this point we'll see it'll take some time but uh over time this microbial this represents microbial life being spread through comets asteroids whatever will spread out um and eventually kind of diversify there's a very low probability that this life can uh become

multicellular in this model and will turn yellow and the multicellular life cannot spread that way okay um and so they're stuck and if they get you know killed for whatever reason supernova nearby then they're gone and there's a very slight chance that if those yellow multi-cellular things last long enough they'll become intelligent now i'm gonna just kind of skip ahead here and force one of these guys to become intelligent if once we drop intelligent life into this model um the blue is intelligent life you know this is it's spreading to the galaxy um and this is in spaceships colonizing whatever um so from this you know i kind of played with a lot of parameters around this model and i kind of came to the conclusion that we're the most probable galactic states we would encounter would be either a lifeless galaxy like at the beginning one that had a lot of microbial life spread through panspermia or into a lot of intelligent life and the transitions between these phases would be relatively rapid especially between the last two so the rare earth thing kind of says that there might be all these preconditions that make it special

a high middle star being in the solar habitable zone having the moon to help stabilize our planet jupiter the galactic capital zone these last three things really brought us four billion years of stability which is a remarkably long period of time for one planet to be stable this also kind of bears on what's known as the anthropic principle this is kind of the idea that it's hard for us to infer from where we are how improbable of a string of events was required to create us you know if we're required as observers to ask the question so we wouldn't be here to ask the question unless those million improbable things happen it might be common it might be improbable we just cannot make a determination about it so we cannot assume that we are common elements in the universe which is kind of against the prevailing copernican principle that had been around for several hundred years before that um possible answers to the fermi paradox you know involve things like quarantine the prime director from star trek you know let's not you know upset the natives uh maybe they're hiding from us maybe the galaxy's very dangerous place and they don't want anybody to know where they are um maybe we're looking the wrong place maybe they don't use radio waves they use tachyons or something we can't detect right now um or maybe they don't spread don't

colonize but each one of these arguments kind of assumes that the aliens are applying one strategy and if anything we've learned from studying human history is that humans tend to spread and diversify in their behavior and uh with the distances involved in interstellar travel there's no way to maintain like a federation or enforce the prime directive so it seems unlikely to me that any of these things really are good answers to the former paradox okay back research um deep messages now early on in a project i'm always trying to figure out okay what do i really want to convey to the player you know we have this amazing tool and it's interesting because i always think of the player model as the model i'm building the computer model is really just kind of a path to get there it's an intermediate path and the uh the game really sums the compiler for the middle model of the player this is one of my favorite quotes education is not the filling of a pale with the lighting of a fire i think games are actually even more effective to motivate people than they are to educate people um i've gotten so many letters from people that played simcity and it motivated them to go off and you know do a career in civil engineering or

whatever i don't think they learned that much about civil engineering from simcity but the motivation on the subject is the introduction of the subject and giving them that front door to hey this really is cool is tremendous i think um montessori toys are kind of an interesting example of that like self-directed learning where you give them a toy and they discover their own principles there was an earlier example freuble this uh german kindergarten teacher that came up with this block set that people do architectural things with so we have this ability you know to basically change our players and at a fairly deep level i think now the messages i wanted to do in sport involved some of the things i just talked about the printing principle for new paradox i didn't want to you know beat them over the head with this i wanted these to be things that they roughly kind of discovered on their own after playing with the game for a while but after the game design evolved and we started doing more prototyping these messages started to evolve as well so the kind of more recent messages that i'm trying to embed in the game you know include things like life is diverse you know it comes in all different shapes and sizes um also you know look at the editors and what people have been building in them and how they feel about what they've built um to me that feels like a great message

that anybody can be creative you know i want somebody to feel like they have a future at pixar that you know after playing with this thing for half an hour they've created a creature on the screen that's as cool to them as something in a pixar film and then it comes to life and surprises them so in some sense they end up being surprised by their own creativity uh as a kid i spent a lot of time like the planetarium looking at these star shows on the dome overhead um and watching star maps and it always frustrated me in some sense because space is not flat you know it's this wonderfully 3d thing with these colorful things and those hubble images that you might have seen walking into the auditorium today uh and so i really wanted to convey that space was this wonderfully three-dimensional dynamic thing too it wasn't just static um looking at other games and the way they kind of present space in stars and galaxies um you know for most games a really big kind of play field is a few hundred stars you know and a few hundred stars is a big play field but it turns out galaxies are bigger than that um like a hundred billion stars in a typical spiral galaxy and uh which is odd oddly enough it's also about the same number of neurons in

your brain and the same number of galaxies in the observed universe now why is that i don't know um but anyway galaxies are large i mean they're really large and so i wanted to convey that to the players you know they have this immense play field you know full of interesting cool stuff uh talk a little bit of research material as i said before you know we use books a lot um and probably read over 100 books just researching support alone because i get totally obsessed again with the topic um also movies and stuff you know these you know became a lot of kind of the templates for the meta games that we want to do in our space game uh one of my creative heroes is stanley kubrick um some of my favorite movies were made by him uh one thing about him is that he was totally obsessive about his research and it also took him you know long like five years to make a movie which is about how long it takes me to make a game as well but um his research was just kind of an amazing process when he did dr strangelove in 64 you know he had these recreations of the war room and the inside of the b52 and when the movie came out the air force actually came to him they thought

there was some leak that somebody was looking at blueprints from b52 but he actually kind of cobbled this together from public information sources and interviewing experts about what it probably looked like and he got it almost dead on he was also able to embed really deep messages in innovative forms you know when he came out with dr strangelove a lot of people at the time in the studio are saying this is crazy we shouldn't do a comedy about nuclear war that's not a joking matter um but yeah by making it a black comedy he was able to basically reach an audience of younger kids that were trying to ignore this and all of a sudden this is a message they could hear and they wouldn't saw the movie and you know the movie was just about that you know everybody that's involved in this must be mad you know which is the fact that they're calling mad and so it was a great way to get this very deep message out in a new form that nobody thought was feasible um 2001 uh was really interesting from a research point of view and that how he got space right unlike almost every other science fiction even since then you know every single scene you were dealing with gravity there was no cheat for gravity where everybody is magically walking on the floor because the gravity generator um all the spacings were totally

soundless because in fact there is no sound in space even though you hear tie fighters and things making noises they fly by um he did background research on human anthropology uh interviewed people at nasa the kind of plans that they were building for moon bases and space stations and artificial intelligence experts as to what you know a smart computer of the future might look like and how it might be used um even this scene where like dave gets blasted in with no air through the vacuum to turn on the pod he'd write a research paper that the air force is doing i don't know why they were doing this but they were seeing how long monkeys could survive in a vacuum and they found that they could survive for about a minute actually with no permanent damage and so he actually based this scene on how long a human could probably survive in a vacuum you know to turn the airlock knob back on they were also pretty innovative in terms of marketing this is the original poster for 2001. um and they found at some point this came out 1967 a lot of college students were dropping acid and going to see the movie you know for all the cool visuals and stuff so they redesigned the poster you might notice they changed the tag line as well

he did this conjunction with rcc clark which is one of my favorite science fiction authors and arthur c clarke was similar in that he did a lot of research for his books and his books were almost like a combination of fact and fiction which is kind of a really interesting gray area especially for researching the types of things we do um there's a very interesting interesting group of books called world building books that people use to create fantasy environments for role playing games or science fiction writing there are some very good websites out there very good resources that have this as well and wikipedia just continually gets more valuable to me every day primarily because it's filling in the gaps in these research areas it's not really clear whether you're going to find a book about this or a film or what wikipedia is a great kind of filling in the gaps research resource oh i didn't get a chance to do this last year it was too busy but um yeah this is this is totally off

topic by the way i mean this is as off topic as you can get and i love this picture it's like they're going out for a church picnic except they're going to launch a rocket let's go launch a rocket today okay i'm going to tell you the story of the soyuz 23 that was launched in 1976 um cosmonauts zurov and rosdeski these were actually military cosmonauts a special core that was trained going up um the soviets had the very first space station the solute series they launched six of these these were scientific space stations or so we thought uh it turned out that they had a military space station program as well and they couldn't hide the launches from us so they just said oh we have six values but it turned out that every other one was in fact not a solute at all but in almaz station the military station and they were interleaved launches and it was a great deception we didn't find out like 20 years later about these things um the all mods were interesting they were basically manned spy satellites they had these huge you know uh telescopes where the cosmonauts could point as they were flying over and photograph whatever ground control

wanted photographed um at the same time the us was developing the us dynastar x20 as this kind of re-entry vehicle maybe it could be used as an intercept or the russian slot and so they were enlisted if we found out that they had manned spy satellites that we would go up and shoot them down so they decided to defend this thing now witness the fire power of this fully armed and operational battle station so in fact these were the first armed battle stations in orbit um they were armed with 20 millimeter anti-aircraft cannons that were bore sighted along the length of the space station um they actually you know destroyed several targets in target practice you know satellites at about a mile distance thing but it was terrifying to fire because it had to be tied into the reaction control system of the space station otherwise they would deorbit the station with the recoil of the gun so they were pretty risky but anyway so these guys pull up in their soyuz but the uh approach computer hasn't like almost crashing into it going way too fast they didn't trust it so they shut off and they did back burn and all this and before they knew it they wasted all their fuel they didn't have any more fuel to do a manual

docking so they had to abort the mission at that point they never got to dock with the almas um so they're coming back and mission control sends them the wrong coordinates for re-entry and they end up coming in like 100 kilometers off target and that puts them right in the path right in the middle of this giant blizzard that's blowing through kazakhstan at the time and the blizzard pushes them another 50 kilometers off target and they end up coming down into uh scenic lake timges right in the middle of it um except it's not so scenic because it's like a blizzard and it's 20 degrees below zero at this point and they hit the ice and break through the ice of this frozen lake and start to sink and uh the parachute drags the whole soyuz capsule upside down and now these guys are stuck in their spacesuits upside down bopping up and down in a storm and this is when it starts getting bad the inside of one of these soyuz is like the inside of old vw and they're very spacious they can't really they've never been able to take off the spacesuits while in that capsule so they had to cut them off with knives and there was an air vent that opened because they assumed that they'd be sitting on the ground and they didn't

need air and then all water was rushing in the capsule at this point and so they were scrambling grabbed rags managed to plug the hole to stop the leak um and at this point they were also out of air because they you know the air vent was opening let air in um one of the guys happened to be a diver and so he knew that the real danger was the carbon dioxide poisoning and so they had almost no battery life left they turned off every system including the radio beacon to find them and uh he stayed up all night bobbing upside down in the water and he when right before he passed out from the co2 poisoning he would turn on the co2 scrubber just long enough to get clear headed again and turn it back off to save the battery power and basically stayed all night doing that and the next day it cleared a little bit an intrepid helicopter pilot saw the part of the parachute cable sticking out the ice managed to hook it with a helicopter and dragged them like five kilometers to the shoreline and to their amazement when they opened the capsule both cosmonauts were still alive so this one has a happy ending that's the russian space minute so back to the research um when we do

research one of the other things we want to do is establish kind of what is the style texture of the world you know and this is almost more in a visual kinesthetic sense you know is it real is it toy like um how familiar does it feel is it caricature uh in sport we actually very early identified this kind of split in our team um kind of between what we call the science team and the cute team in terms of you know how should this thing look you know and these are kind of representative samples from both teams uh we eventually decided that we really whenever possible want the players to be able to make that choice themselves in the editors and we tried to make the editors fairly malleable and that would be the primary dimension that they were kind of exploring um some of the research materials spanned both of these things we kind of went from fairly realistic stuff this is the work of google dixon who does a lot of kind of imaginary zoology stuff he actually also later works on this series the future is wild from the discovery channel which was an excellent series about maybe the future of evolution on earth more imaginable stuff we found great sources disney did these series of movies with nasa back in the 50s about space

and uh their animators were imagining what life on mars might look like um this is a great movie i don't know if any of y'all saw this movie um and he's really imagined to plan some things um and it was like this french checklist slovakian weird animated thing but still the uh the creatures and things and they were great for partners vehicles you know this is like great thunderbirds you know what these toy-like feel uh it turns out that thunderbird one was actually based upon the soyuz launcher by the way um and then these things you know which i showed a little bit of last year these comic book covers and these are definitely going more in the cute kind of character direction and um it was just amazing how many of these things i managed to dig up you know and each one of these is you know several years worth of issues you know future future captain future man of tomorrow they also wonder uncanny they just go on and on and each one of these things has this interesting combination of an interesting world maybe some cool vehicles some aliens exactly the stuff that we wanted to have in our game my animation director bob king actually did a couple for us kind of in that style just to get a

sense of what that would feel like um and so it always helps to actually get like a real sample that's relevant to what you're doing you know in that style and it really helps you kind of visualize it um this is actually the very first box i design for spore way way back you know one of the first things i always do when i do a game is i design a box and i was trying to give people a sense for what i was thinking and it's what i'm thinking has changed a lot since then but this is kind of my original title and import this is the back of the box and so i do the back of the box with bullet points little screenshots you know and in fact i put this on a real box with something inside of it so it feels heavy so i can hand it to somebody and they can imagine oh yeah i'm in the software store holding this would i buy it if you zoom into here you'll see that this is early on when i was thinking that we would be colonizing at sublight velocities and how exciting that would be i kind of changed my mind these are the system requirements that i was estimating at the time now you know early in this phase we

wanted to go through this process of deconstruction and reconstruction of ass of creatures vehicles buildings planets all the stuff in the game um we actually had a lot of people come in and say said draw an alien creature if you could design a creature in the game over to be and we had them new drawings and we studied the drawings more recently our fan sites have started doing that this is what i want to build and explore these are from one of our fans uh hydromancers um these are drawings that he's done of things that he wants to do in the game and it's really inspective for us to go look at those expectations and say can we measure our editors against this this is actually a really cool little prototype that appeared i think after we showed spore last year gdc these students at usc took their first level the cell level and built it basically you know in flash a very cool game and it's great when other people do your prototypes for free you know without even asking like that you know and i got to meet jenova chin just like two days ago and he's a brilliant guy with a great aesthetic um we also hired this conceptual artist christian scherr who came in and we had him draw all sorts of things that we

then have went through this deconstructive process with um we had him draw you know things in different styles like scary aliens um maybe goofy things you know other things that were just kind of odd in alien like ways um after taking all these creatures some of which were related some of which weren't we then started deconstructing them into parts you know if we pull sets of parts off of these slings what would they be and um we found that the eyes and the mouths were like the most expressive parts that we could pull off but then we had all the other ones hands wings and then at some point we started putting these deconstructed parts into a taxonomy how do we now sort these parts with some sort of evolutionary relationship you know what is the pathway which a player might explore these on a tech tree for instance um and what is the functional calculation so these might be carnivorous mouse up here these might be herbivorous nails over there and so we're just getting some sense of how we can kind of take these whole constructs and pull them into lower and lower level pieces and then establish the relationships between those pieces and then we move them into modeling you know because it's a big difference going from kind of illustration to modeling and then we start building larger sets of these things we're actually going to

use a game each one of these parts also by the way has morph channels so each one represents the center of in fact a fairly wide more space where you can stretch the toes out or make them curly or add this or that feature to it and then eventually reconstruct creatures after going through that deconstruction reconstruction process that i mentioned with generative artists um doing it with the content here as well same thing with textures brainstorm ideas um then go out and actually develop the particular scripts apply them see how close we got to the targets um vehicles pretty much the same thing conceptual airlands see build the models texture buildings same thing blocks models and then probably put them in scene planets were a little more elaborate um on the planets we actually started with a lot of very simple descriptions of the variety of worlds we wanted players to be able to create in the game um we took a few of those and we went really deep on them you know looking at what the materials that we might find on that world how that might influence the coloring what sort of items vehicles trees land forms we might find on those worlds um and then developing

these kind of uh pictures showing the world another process was actually taking worlds and going through and building a backstory um what sort of cities would they build what would their industry be what would their sociology be like um what are the elements of the technology and so these are all from the same world kind of looking at different snapshots of how these people live and how their world looks and then eventually uh developing the characters reassembling it all into one scene for the final rendering and you know it isn't that we want the players to build exactly this world these each one of these worlds represents some outpost of this space this creative space that we want them to be able to build themselves and so they're like almost eigen values around the planet space now um eventually we get to the geology level and we're actually developing scripts that will carve out and make these planets some are more fantastic some are more realistic we have one guy christian stratton who's kind of like my magrathia this is the guy that built my planets for me one of my artists and uh he's actually been building a taxonomy of what types of planets we would find in different zones you know how they should look plus their relative distribution in the

universe uh we have some that are very out there imaginative or dr seuss that we want to be very rare if you find one of those you get excited about it most of them are more terrestrial so there is this concept of kind of uh whimsical equals rarity that as you're exploring the galaxy you feel like you've discovered treasures um as we pull away from the planets we get out to all these cool hubble pictures um and we're trying to recreate all these in 3d these are actually from the game uh game versions of all the hubble objects so there are three dimensional things that you can kind of move around interact with uh in space levels now to wind down really quick here okay back to direct's equation um now clearly all these values are not zero and in fact not none of those values can be zero if any of those values were zero we wouldn't be here so each one of these values has to be something uh if we take fairly pessimistic assumptions and we bump them all up to point zero one and most of these are fractional so it's like one percent um and then we just take those numbers and we multiply them times the

you know 100 billion stars in a typical galaxy times the 100 billion galaxies that we know of we still end up with a pretty large number of aliens out there about 100 million in this case um that's a large number but uh on the other hand that's only about one alien species per thousand galaxies you know so even if we bump those numbers up a bit we're still talking about um probably less than one alien species per galaxy especially if they spread into a galaxy very rapidly so my conclusions from seti not that you really care uh is that they're out there but they're probably really far away not in our galaxy and that has a lot of implications for the search for city that we should be looking further out to distant galaxies my research conclusions are that um and this is something i do always in the beginning of every project i take a lot of time to consider it and don't get too committed to any one idea too early and that's what i'm doing a lot of the reading of the research phase i cast usually a very wide net over subjects and a lot of times like in the sims which started as an architectural simulator and led more to behavioral stuff

um i'll find myself taking very interesting kind of twists and turns through that research path and what you really want to know is what 90 of the material is irrelevant to that core idea because the core idea is going to be shifting around underneath your feet all the time and you need to kind of understand the region of space it can shift in uh i have no problem with this one um but getting totally obsessive about your subject i find helps a lot you know it just it drives the interest you know whenever you see anything that's relevant to what you're working on you'll see it more readily on the shelf or somebody mentioned something or an article you'll just find yourself absorbing this stuff so readily that it's almost effortless um and then you want to cultivate that onto your team you know as you talk to your team about this stuff you know and get them interested in it pretty soon you'll be talking about this stuff over lunch and you're all really enjoying it and learning from each other um and this kind of you know comes to the fact that eventually you're gonna become a teacher um not just the people on your team but to the people in your game you know these deep lessons that you're learning through research are eventually through several filters gonna end up you know kind of as a player and this is one thing that

is probably the most important to me is the fact that we always have the opportunity to change our players at a very deep level i mean to the point where we can influence their future career for instance and that's something that we shouldn't take lightly and it's something that we shouldn't um squander so we should probably make the best use of that whenever we can so thank you [Applause]