Space Barracuda Template Challenge winners may be featured in DarkSpore

So all of the template challenges held in the past year actually served a purpose – to help feed the NPC’s for Maxis’ newest game, DarkSpore.  MaxisCactus gave us an inside look of the process of importing the latest Spore template challenge, the Space Barracuda, into DarkSpore for our characters to battle against.  They’ll be holding more contests for Spore players to create NPC’s (note – only Maxis can convert the creations from Spore to DarkSpore as NPCs), so I’d suggest entering if you want a chance for a creation to be featured in a game!

Oh, and considering that they are tweaking this process, these may or may not make it into the final build of the game, set to be released in February 2011.

Space Barracuda: Preview Winning Player Designs in Game

Many of you probably already know about the template challenges we’ve been hosting on the Spore forum. We announced that these may be used to help design NPCs in Darkspore. Today we announced winners for the Space Barracuda Template Challenge!

Players created Space Barracuda designs based on the following brief description, imagery, and template creation. Check out the original thread here.

“Space Barracuda
Bio: Once tiny sea creatures, the space barracudas are now larger and via gravitic powers, able to “swim” through the air on land. Dangerous and unpredictable, space barracudas use their gravitic abilities to teleport themselves and their prey. Prospectors and fighters should exercise extreme caution around these bizarre creatures.”

The creation entries designed by the Spore community were judged by the Darkspore team and finalists were hand picked for preview in Darkspore.

Check out the finalists in the level editor. They won’t all swarm like this in game, but we needed to see all the finalists animate in game to verify viability as potential NPC designs.

We chose our top six and verified that their animation, look and feel all integrated well with the game environment.

Check out the top 6 in game, pitted against Zrin. They look great!!!

The Winners:

1. Space Barracuda By shamar10
2. Starstaidned Space Barracuda By KaluluUchiha
3. Space Barracuda By WforWumbo

Honorable Mention:

1. Space Barracuda By ESquidey
2. Space Barracuda Template By Richardson72
3. Space Barracuda Template By Richardson72

I want to stress that this whole thing is WIP (work in progress). We’re still working out the kinks with UGC, but we want to try to get your creations in game. The images above depict a level populated with a bunch of Space Barracudas, but that was for judging preview purposes. We can’t guarantee that these will be in the final game, but we’ll continue to explore this as an option.

Thanks to everyone who contributed in this challenge. I hope to see you guys enter the next one soon!

-MC

DarkSpore – a look into Level Design by MaxisMaverick

A  recent post emerged over at the official DarkSpore forums with DarkSpore Level Designer MaxisMaverick sharing some insight on the level design.  Jump over to the thread or you can read what he had to say below:

No doubt you look forward to making your creatures cool. When I played Spore I loved the creature stage most. But I equally enjoyed exploring every nook and cranny to discover all the different creatures, try to befriend them and then when I screwed that up, execute them with my adorable little claw monster. I wanted to play with my creation. This is probably why working on levels for Darkspore has been a really interesting treat.

When you build a PVE level for an action/RPG you are basically creating trip from point A to point B. You make sure you have cool battlefields, interesting routes to explore and cool little places to hide collectibles or health. The sad part is that once you get to point B you’ve been there, done that and you know what to expect the next time you come through. The surprise of seeing something new fades and enjoyment begins to come from mastery and familiarity much like you get from your favorite PVP map.

In Darkspore, however, there is a magical happy place in between familiarity and surprise due to the way our levels load. Our maps themselves are much like a painter’s canvas. They come in different shapes and sizes but it’s the way the paint goes on that determines the feeling the viewer gets. Similarly, here, I design multiple strategies for the different elements that come into play. Each of these elements shape the way the level plays just slightly.

When you drop down to the planet the game pulls one of my designs for collectibles, one of the layouts for dangerous objects, another setup for the health power-ups, then one of my configurations for tactical environmental objects, and so on and so forth for all the elements the given level needs. The first twenty times I play the level the specific combination I get is a surprise even to me. I feel like these worlds pay a compliment the uniqueness of your particular heroes and how you pair them together by being slightly different every time you visit them. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I am.

Developer introductions: Meet the folks behind DarkSpore

* 7/26/10 – Added developer bios for Paul Sottosanti and Daniel Kline

I love Maxis…always have.  They aren’t some faceless corporation – no, they are made up of regular-everyday folks.  And best of all, they actually respond to my email when I send them a message!  MaxisCactus published a brief introduction on a few folks (of many) that make up the DarkSpore team.  Check out their bios below:

Theresa Duringer
Assistant Producer at Maxis

Theresa Duringer in an assistant producer who works on Darkspore as Community Manager and manages integration of user generated content for non-playable characters. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2006 with a BA in Psychology. Her focus on cognitive science in school continues to inform her perspectives on game development and design. After signing on with EA to contribute on Godfather for Xbox 360 and PS3, she moved to Maxis to join the Spore team. As a Maxis web developer, she works with Flash, JavaScript, and JSP, creating UI and doing graphic design. Outside of work she dabbles in animation, photography, and painting. She enjoys ballroom dancing, scuba, and of course, vegging out for hours on end to play video games.

Fred Dieckmann
Lead Designer at Maxis

Fred Dieckmann is the Lead Designer on Darkspore. He has been at EA for over 15 years, allowing him to work in all aspects of making games and serving in roles like Tester, Technical Artist, Producer, and Game Designer. In all of those roles, he had always loved game design and was usually called on to bounce off game designs, design levels, or help with UI design (which to this day, he still regrets). He has worked on a wide variety of game genres from platformers like The Simpsons, and racing games like the NASCAR series and Andretti Racing. Dieckmann joined the team at MAXIS by bringing the SIMS to the console world, with the The Sims, The Sims Bustin’ Out and The Sims2. Like most game designers, he is a gamer at heart, playing everything he can get his hands on, and is often seen playing them in meetings.

Casey Weaver
Software Engineer at Maxis

Casey Weaver is an engineer on Darkspore responsible for creature customization and loot. He adapted the revolutionary Spore Creature Editor for Darkspore, giving users the most exciting Action RPG editing experience yet. Weaver also developed an all-new dynamic loot system that provides millions of possible items to collect. After finishing up The Godfather at EA, Weaver was offered a chance to work at Maxis. His work on Spore spanned both the Creature and Tribe phases. Weaver enjoys playing many games. His current obsession is League of Legends. He really enjoys the cooperative gameplay and endless supply of player characters with totally unique abilities. Weaver is excited about collecting and customizing all of the unique characters in Darkspore.

Paul Sottosanti
Systems Designer at Maxis

Paul Sottosanti has been designing games since childhood and designing them professionally for over six years. The first five were spent at Wizards of the Coast, where he designed cards for games like Duel Masters and Magic: the Gathering, including a lead design role for the Morningtide expansion. Eventually he moved to the digital space as lead designer of the successful Facebook app Dungeons &Dragons: Tiny Adventures. When Maxis began looking for a systems designer for its new project, Darkspore, Paul couldn’t resist joining the team. Between his education in computer science and communication design from Carnegie Mellon University, his knowledge of paper gaming picked up at Wizards of the Coast, and his extensive experience playing games of all genres and platforms, he brings a uniquely valuable perspective to the project. When he isn’t knee deep in complicated Excel sheets, you can find him working tirelessly to build the most powerful and menacing heroes the Darkspore universe has ever seen.

Daniel Kline
Software Engineer at Maxis

Daniel Kline has been a professional AI/Game Programmer and Designer since 2001. AI engineers occupy a funky place in the classic developer hierarchy. He’s spent much of his career getting paid to think about the science of game design, game mechanics, AI, the role of “story” in games, and the procedural methods for generating stories and specialized content. He’s a deconstructionist systems designer, a monster-maker, and the guy whose (building) your trusty companion. His story encompasses shipping 5 titles with companies such as Activision, Blizzard, LucasArts, Eidos, and Midway. Kline was the Head AI and Gameplay Engineer on Star Wars: Force Unleashed, and the AI programmer on Diablo 3. As a designer, he built the first two levels of Call of Duty: Finest Hour. But no longer! In 2010, he joined the team at Maxis as a Software Engineer where he is responsible for AI Development and game design. Recognized as a leading thinker on interactive storytelling games, he’s spoken on panels and given talks at GDC and universities, and blogs about them alongside other game issues at Game of Design.

Thomas Vu
Lead Producer at Maxis

Thomas Vu is an 8-year veteran of the video game industry, producing and designing some of the biggest and most high profile games including Simcity 4, the Sims 2, Warhammer and Spore. He is currently the Lead producer and Cheer Captain of Darkspore, where he wants to continue in the Maxis tradition of making great games that push the expectations of what games can ultimately become. Prior to working at Maxis, Vu collaborating with NASA and the ISS in La Jolla, experimented with genetic recombination at Salk’s Institute in San Diego, and worked on a countless number of start-ups in the internet craze of late 90s. In his spare time, you can find him leaping around with Jax in League of Legends, building marines and siege tanks in Starcraft 2, or killing zombies in Left for Dead.

Michael Perry:
Executive Producer at Maxis

Michael Perry is a 20-year video game industry veteran, during which time he has enjoyed working in a variety of roles on several games with some amazing people. Perry has returned to Maxis to produce Darkspore, the next major game from the studio, after most recently serving as Creative Director on EA’s The Godfather video game. Earlier, Perry programmed several versions of Will Wright’s SimCity, produced and designed the award-winning title SimFarm, and produced Yoot Saito’s award-winning title SimTower. He led the architecture design and development of the groundbreaking Sims Exchange on TheSims.com web site. He also directed the game design of several versions of The Sims for console, including the award-winning The Sims Bustin’ Out. Perry even scored the soundtrack for one game, for which he profusely apologizes and sincerely promises to never do again.

Lauren McHugh
Software Engineer at Maxis

Lauren McHugh currently works on many of the core systems for Darkspore, including an ability system that enables the team to create a wide variety of exciting abilities such as teleporting through a wormhole, summoning pets, or surrounding the player in a plasma column. McHugh also works on areas like physics, animation sequencing, player attributes, UI and game flow. While on the Darkspore project, she’s had the opportunity to improve the player experience in many ways, such as reducing the player’s perception of lag or computing damage in a consistent and intuitive manner. Prior to her role on the game, McHugh developed gameplay for the original Spore game. McHugh joined the team at Maxis directly out of college in 2005. She is an active member of the game developer community, who has volunteered at the Game Developer’s Conference several times, and in 2007 presented on a panel at the conference to describe Spore’s behavior tree AI system. McHugh enjoys playing games, especially MMOs. Her favorite part of these games is cooperating with her friends to overcome challenges, which is why she’s very excited about becoming an avid Darkspore player herself.

Malcolm Azania:
Writer at Maxis

Malcolm Azania is the lead story writer for Darkspore. Azania, under the pen-name Minister Faust, is the award-winning author of From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain, and the critically-acclaimed The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, both published by Del Rey/Ballantine. He was a contributing writer for BioWare’s Mass Effect 2, co-wrote the ME2 downloadable mission for Kasumi, and wrote Gift of the Yeti.

San Diego Daily Transcript – video interview with Paul Sottosanti of Maxis on DarkSpore

The San Diego Daily Transcript crew caught up with Paul Sottosanti, a system designer for Maxis, to divulge some more information about their upcoming game, DarkSpore.  Have a watch after the jump!

jump

Comic-Con 2010 – DarkSpore panel video from GameSpot

GameSpot has added Maxis’ panel on DarkSpore from the 2010 Comic Con event.  If you didn’t get a chance to watch it live, now is a great time to catch up!  They show off new gameplay and of course, shares with us new information.  Looks like fun!  Thanks to Thomas for sharing this link with me!

GameSpot – Darkspore germinating at Comic-Con

The basic gameplay is a sci-fi action-RPG, but players will have to focus on acquiring a stable of new creatures, and then implementing squad-based tactics in the way they use them. As with other action-RPGs, boss battles, loot collection, and co-op play will also play a role.

Carrington, whose previous experience at Wizards of the Coast had him designing Magic: The Gathering features, explained how he looked to the collectible card game’s color system as a way to balance creature types in Darkspore. He accomplished that by implementing five different genesis types of monsters: Bio, Necro, Plasma, Cyber, and Quantum. Each type has its own color and visual effects so players can tell at a glance what type an enemy creature is.

He also went into some of the abilities of each monster type. Bio specializes in healing, poisoning, and growing stronger. Plasma uses energy and lightning attacks, while Necro deals in the supernatural and undeath, with an emphasis on attacks that damage over time. Cyber monsters have homing attacks and area-of-effect attacks, as well as the ability to lay traps. Quantum monsters are teleporting specialists with the ability to “blink” around the battlefield quickly.

DarkSpore ComicCon preview at GameSpot

CinemaBlend – Darkspore Gameplay Details Revealed at ComicCon 2010

While Spore allowed you to make creatures completely from scratch, in Darkspore you’re provided detailed hero models that act as a foundation for customization. In the revamped Creature Editor, you’ll still be able to change the hands and feet and scale them. You can also apply colors and textures to them as well, Your equipped items will dramatically change the appearance of the characters, too.

Toward the end of the panel, Maxis stated that Darkspore isn’t a sequel or expansion pack to Spore. The point was already clear from their presentation, though. They’ve created something radically different from other titles in the Spore series that is too complex to be a mere add-on.

full preview here

Process of creating NPCs for Darkspore

I love the fact that the DarkSpore developers are so willing in sharing with us their developer secrets!  I wish more studios would follow suit!  Source is from the DarkSpore forums and brought to you by MaxisAlex.

MaxisAlex here, one of the gameplay engineers on Darkspore. I wrote this article for those who are interested in the process we go through to create a non-player character (NPC). It’s surprisingly quick and fun!

An NPC in the editor

It starts with a kickoff meeting with the artists, the engineer, and the designer. The designer describes what the NPC is supposed to do in the game, how it behaves and what kind of abilities it has. There is often a discussion at this point about how to create the more complex abilities, such as what animations and effects will be needed.

The artists then go to work: first the character is made in a variation of the creature editor which you are all probably quite familiar with, but with lots of new parts made just for Darkspore. The character model is handed off to the animator, who uses it to make animations for each of the creature’s abilities. Unlike in Spore, where the animators had to make animations that worked for all sorts of crazy shapes, the animator can make an animation that really looks good for a specific character. In the meantime, the effects artist is busy making all the beams, rockets, explosions, and auras that make the battlefield so active.

Checking out the NPC in the test level.

Once all that is done, the engineer sets to work gluing it all together. First, a text file is created which describes all the characteristics of the NPC, including which character model it uses, what abilities it will use, and what order it prefers to use them in. Next, a Lua object (Lua is a scripting language) is created for each ability. The object includes not only data about that ability such as range and which icon represents it in the UI, but also the actual instructions for what to do when it activates. The Lua script uses a library of functions built in C++ (another, faster language) to determine what happens at a high level. For example, the Lua script might say: play the casting animation, trigger the ice aura effect, put a five-second slow on all enemies in five meters. It’s up to the faster C++ code underneath to run that animation, draw all the particles in the ice aura, and make a list of all the enemies nearby. Working in Lua allows us to change the behavior while the game is still running, which speeds things up a lot.

That’s about all there is to it! Once the engineer is finished, the NPC will be examined in the game at a twice-weekly meeting, and we’ll make a list of changes for the next meeting. The process continues until everyone is satisfied. This sort of iterative design is a common practice at Maxis.

Testing the NPC in Zelem’s Nexus

Darkspore UGC NPCs – contests to turn your Spore creature into DarkSpore NPCs

The following was posted by DarkSpore community manager MaxisCactus.  In the following text, she explains how you can participate in upcoming Spore contests in which winning creations may be featured as NPC’s for the upcoming game!

On the Spore forum, many of our Spore players have participated in our template challenges and there has been speculation around why these are happening.

With the huge announcement Tuesday about Darkspore, you may have already guessed that some of the winning creations from these challenges could help constitute the cast of NPC creatures you’ll see in Maxis’ new action-RPG.

Stegavaar Template Challenge Entries

The entries to these contests absolutely blew us away, and we can’t wait to show off challenge winners as NPCs in Darkspore.

During each template challenge judging round, we bring our favorite entry creations into Darkspore to see how well they integrate with the existing Darkspore environment. A group of Maxis artists, designers, and producers analyze your creations, how well they animate, the execution of their design, and their fidelity to the NPC bio we provided to inform your work.

Stegavaar Entries Previewed in an earlier game iteration

Each template challenge is based on a real Darkspore NPC, which has its own specific abilities, unique animations, and personality already designed and implemented. When we drop your models in to skin the NPCs, they come to life in a new way.

Loading up a level where I have to battle Falcore’s inspired triple-spike tailed Scorpiod or flee Potatofish’s barreling armored Stegavaar proves that these creations deserve a spotlight in Darkspore.

While we’re still working on the pipeline, and the process hasn’t quite been ironed out, there’s something magical here that we can’t wait to show you.

Your participation in this is completely voluntary. The Maxis team is creating all of the core NPCs in the game, but we want YOU to contribute too!

I hope you’ll keep submitting entries in future challenges, and maybe some of you will see your creations come to life as mutated E-DNA hordes in the Darkspore game!

Previous and Current Challenge Links:
• Stegavaar Template Challenge
• Lightning Stalker Template Challenge
• Space Barracuda Template Challenge
• Triocular Scorpiod Challenge
• Uklideon Template Challenge
• Quadrakiller Template Challenge
• Toxiraptor Template Challenge
• Necro Template Challenge

-MC

Darkspore ARG game – Helpdna.com

It appears the folks over at Maxis is having a little fun with the fans by creating an ARG to help with the promotion of DarkSpore.  ARG, or Alternate Reality Game is a type of game that contains puzzles in which people have to find various clues to help them proceed.  It’s a little difficult for me to explain, the closest experience to an ARG that I am familiar with is the backstory to the Cloverfield movie.

Anyhow, DarkSpore developer Mike Perry and a few other folks created Helpedna.com (Help E-DNA).  It currently contains a DOS like console in which we need to input commands for more clues.  So far it’s left everyone in confusion over at the DarkSpore forums…but a few people managed to figure out a few working keywords:

If you enter comic con or comic-con or comiccon it returns Coordinates interpreted. THANK YOU.

If you enter pi or language, it returns 3.14…

If you enter video, it returns … upload in progress …

If you enter darkspore, crogenitor or edna it returns who are you?

If you have any new information, feel free to post it here or chime in at the forum!