My Liner Notes for Spore - Chris Hecker's Website

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2024-07-09 02:30:03

This page is intended to be a sort of liner notes for my contributions to Spore. It's a place for me to write up miscellaneous development comments about the parts of the game I worked on, while they're still fresh in my mind. I think the game had over 80 people working on it towards the end, and it was in development for more than 5 years, so basically everything in the game was touched by more than one person and was a team effort. Given that, I will strive for inclusion and accuracy, and I will only talk about systems to which I made substantial contributions. If I've left somebody out or made a mistake, I apologize; please email me and I'll correct it immediately.

A Brief Note on Game Credits This page could be seen as augmenting the game credits[1], like what you'd get if you could click on the names to get more information. I think credits are very important for game developers, our industry, and the art form[2]. Although assigning credit is a bit tricky because large-scale game development has a lot of subtle, overlapping, and often blurry responsibilities, I still think it's interesting to have rough descriptions and color commentary of the major things each person worked on. This is my attempt at this for my contributions, before I forget the details. I hope more developers put up pages like this for the games they work on.

Almost all of my contributions center around the creatures, and helping to bring them to life for players. My favorite moment in the game is when you first attach a leg or arm or mouth to the torso in the creature editor, and your creature comes alive and turns to look at its new limb or roars with its mouth. It's great to watch players be delighted by something they just created.