Mar 27th, 2009 |
Over on the O’Reilly Radar, Kurt Cagle has published an interview with Will Wright,of Spore and Sim City fame, who will be giving a keynote presentation at Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday, April 2 at 10:00 a.m.
In the interview, Will looks back at how his fascination with models and robots started him on the gaming path and forward to Sims 3 which is scheduled for release in June. Of his development process, Will notes:
…we’re basically exploring an emergent system. And because it’s emergent, by its very nature, you can’t sit there and engineer it top-down. What we have to do is we have to sit there and kind of play with a wide variety of algorithms and structures. Turn them on. Observe the behavior. Then when it doesn’t quite do what we want, we go back to the drawing board. We refine it a little bit more. But it feels much more like the process of exploration that is in engineering.
I’m looking forward to hearing more of Will’s thoughts about the relationship between game development, city planning, and behavior at the show next week. And now off to the full list of sessions for the show to see what else I’m going to add to my personal schedule!
