Interesting notes. The way he's doing procedural mesh generation + procedural texturing/skinning/animation is very similar to ZBrush's ZSpheres. I used to work at Pixologic on ZBrush and those types of surface subdivisions concepts and algorithms (Organic modeling, Catmull-Clark, Conway polyhedrons) are definitely a non-trivial field of CS engineering. Nice work to bring this technology into a game!
I don't know. My data plumbing gets parents home to their kids an hour faster. Spore's considerable technical chops were in the service of a game which was not fun to play.
I don't wake up in a cold sweat at night going "Aww shoot, two years of work on this project and it is useless!"
"This is the sort of stuff that makes writing webapps and doing data plumbing for a living seem completely banal and amateurish."
"I don't know. My data plumbing gets parents home to their kids an hour faster. "
Illustrates a classic dilemma, one I am working through.
Would you rather work on something that is intellectually demanding, but maybe used for "trivial" purposes (the spore algorithms end up being part of a not so great game) or something that is intellectually trivial but adds "business value" (most web apps). It is hard to get into the first type of work, but you'll probably gte "just a salary", the second type of work is easier but could probably make you significant money(at least in a startup).
