But the handholding and calling the princess mechanic and helping her – that is just pure magic. Looking at Ico as a whole, it’s a generic puzzle/platforming game. I talk about Ico a lot, with the hand-holding mechanic. I try to talk often about interesting, innovative things in mainstream games. It’s more fertile ground for experimentation. Indie games can’t do it by themselves, but indie games are more agile. I think triple-A games have to keep pushing. There is tons of interesting stuff in mainstream games, but it’s diluted by the fact that you have to make these 30-hours of gameplay, genre-based games with tons of pixel shaders that sell five million copies. So, you can push in little ways, but a lot of times people are constrained because they have to have a return on investment. The problem is that it’s a small, tiny thing because the investors want their money back. Even in the triple-A, mainstream space there are interesting things in most games that are trying hard. So far, it’s been working really well.ĭo you feel that the big publisher, big developer, triple-A game development model is doing a good job of pushing the art form?įrom a design perspective, you can play any game and find something interesting about it – some more than others, obviously. But I vowed, on SpyParty, that I would do that. But after the Pardo talk, I tried to convince people, but it was hard to change direction. I would not pin the blame on EA it was our fault for dropping the ball and not focusing on the game design enough. I was on Spore for six years – that’s a long development cycle with a lot of people. I forwarded it around and said, “My god, we are totally doing this wrong.” But it was too late. This talk came out while we were working on Spore. Accessibility is hard, but it’s nowhere near as hard as getting that really deep gameplay. Then, you can put the accessibility in later. Make sure you have it, because that’s the most important thing. Don’t worry about making it accessible at the beginning. The short version of it is: Make the game the hardest core game you can with an intensely deep, player skill, 100-hour gameplay loop at the core. It doesn’t react to you.ĭuring Spore, Rob Pardo of Blizzard gave a talk at GDC Austin about the “depth first, accessibility later” design model they use. You play the game, and it’s not as the same level of depth as the editor. If you play with the editor you think it’s pure magic. It was not as deep as the creature editor. The third way was gameplay, and I think we totally dropped the ball there. I think we did great there people that aren’t 3D modelers can make interesting creatures. The other was the user interface, making the creature editor accessible. One of them was the technology for doing the creatures and the planets and making them come alive. We tried to innovate in three different ways. What did you learn from that project?Ī lot of the things I’m doing with SpyParty are reactions to some of the ways things worked on Spore. Talk about working on Spore with Will Wright. Here is the unabridged version of our conversation. Note: A shortened version of this interview ran in the current issue of Game Informer, but I had to cut many good answers to get it to fit on the page. Right now, Hecker is selling admission to the game’s paid beta (which will get you a copy of the finished game at the time of release). The other player is a sniper, attempting to discern his target. The concept is fascinating: One player is a spy, attempting to blend in with the assembled crowd of NPCs. I recently had the chance to talk with Hecker about his upcoming project, SpyParty, a unique two-player multiplayer game. He also spent a good deal of time writing technical articles for Game Developer magazine, many of which are now considered classic texts in the development community.
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His background spans everything from early 3D graphics technology in Windows to a stint at Maxis working on Spore. Chris Hecker is one of the most creative people working in games today.