
Sid Meier's Rules - iamelgringo
http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=119
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jonshea
I hate these “Sid Meier’s Rules” articles, because I _love_ Covert Action. It
was like Carmen Sandiego, but with awesome action games and puzzles instead of
geography trivia. I’ll admit that I had a little trouble staying focused on
the big picture when I was in 7th grade, but at the easier difficulties it
didn’t really matter. You always got fed a clue that would lead you in the
right direction.

When I play it now, as a grownup, I don’t have any trouble swapping between
the action parts and the big picture parts.

~~~
quizzical
Yeah, I think this is a lame point. Covert Action was a collection of mini
games inside a larger game and it wasn't hard to follow at all. It just wasn't
a great game because some of the mini games were not really that exciting.

We have an overload of advice from a small number of experienced game
developers who have been saying lots of really obvious things for years. The
consumer should have fun and not the designer or programmer. Duh!

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chris11
I wonder if part of the problem with spore is that it tried to do too many
things at once. I've gotten the impression that while it is a fun game, none
of the stages have a lot of depth.

It seemed like Sid wanted to focus on the experience of building a
civilization from the ground up. But because of the fact that the game got
watered down technically, early stages did not drastically alter future
gameplay.

~~~
noodle
the thing with spore is, based on my understanding, is that the game that was
initially designed and created got scrapped around alpha/beta. it was
originally going to be much more in-depth science-like game, and worked like
this in earlier versions.

then, some other people came in to help get the game produced and completed,
there was an internal power struggle, and instead it got hijacked, re-done,
cartoonified and scaled back in the name of making it marketable and to finish
it on time.

iirc, that is.

~~~
jcl
My understanding is that the main "cute" vs. "science" design issue in Spore
was whether the character animation/simulation system would directly influence
the performance of the creatures. Early on, presumably, creature performance
was directly driven by the simulator, and some of the staff liked the
challenge of trying to find the creatures that performed best in the
simulator.

There are a number of problems with this gameplay dynamic, however. The big
one is that with a complex simulation you have little control over the
performance maximas and minimas. What if, for example, the simulator decides
butterfly wings are a universal detriment? At that point, you might as well
remove them from the game, since no one is going to use them. What if the
simulator decides that there is a "best" creature design, and that it is a
three-mandibled octopod? That will become the design that most players use.

You really don't want a "best" creature. What you want, ideally, is a rock-
paper-scissors stalemate, so that players try out multiple designs, each of
which has advantages and disadvantages. This is hard to engineer with a
simulator. So, instead of using the simulator directly, they built a separate
creature interaction model that they had more control over.

I think this was the right decision and that choosing the alternative would
not have significantly improved the game.

[http://sporedum.net/2008/11/05/will-wright-on-science-vs-
cut...](http://sporedum.net/2008/11/05/will-wright-on-science-vs-cute/)

