Game Design Decathlon - Week Three

Three weeks in and I'm already behind schedule. Whoops!

I'd love to dig deeper on last weeks post and talk more about agency in games, but frankly it's the Steam summer sale and I've just repurchased my favourite game for probably the third time. I'm going to lose friends for this, but it's Spore. Maxis' 2008 Everything Simulator. Sure, it's not the best designed game, nor is it the most stable. What it does offer is that it's just a romp.

I'm not really a fan of story-driven games, which you can probably already guess. I much prefer games like this, where if there's any 'story' per se, it's emergent. It's malleable, you have control over the ebbs and flows of the narrative, guided by the game mechanics.

I'm rambling. I just really like Spore okay? What I want to talk about most of all is something that probably most people aren't aware of. Spore was, and still is heavily driven by the community and their creations. Within the first month of the creature creator being available to the public, people had made more creatures than there were known species on the planet. People love making things. This posed an interesting problem:

How do we make it easy to share peoples creations

The answer was simple, don't make it look like you're doing anything in particular. Every creation in the game, from your loving recreation of Shrek, to a towering arcology and your inevitable flying saucer can be uploaded to the Sporepedia, an online gallery that surprisingly, is still online a decade on.

Here's a creation of mine. It's a spaceship that's also a gun. Inventive, right? Everything you can publish has a thumbnail like this. The lesser known thing is that this thumbnail can be dropped into a folder in your game files to add this creation to your universe. Magic, right?

But how does it work? It's just a PNG image from one angle. To find out, we've got to fire up Photoshop (or any other graphics editing program apart from Paint) and duplicate this image a bunch of times:

Hidden in the background of the image is all the data for that creation, which the game then reads. Steganography is finally useful! If the random pattern of pixels looks familiar at all, it's because the same thing is at work with barcodes and QR codes.