Have you played Spore? It’s a rare thing for a video game to place player creativity at its core, and then to surround it with such scale and variety. Rare especially these days, in the midst of social network slot machines. People enjoyed playing Spore well enough, despite delays and bruised expectations, and apparently EA/Maxis made their zillions back. You can currently get the whole epic thing for only USD $20 on Steam. BUY IT. OK, I’m biased as hell, but I absolutely loved building it! I get a little narrowly focused on my work sometimes, so I have to step back to remember and acknowledge the brilliant people surrounding me during my time there, and how much I learned and changed as a result. Working with that team was an honor.

I spent about four years at the Electronic Arts Maxis studio, helping to teach Spore how to animate creatures that players had not yet created. (edit: over 160,000,000 so far!) I also made my way into the Spore Creature Creator, and gave the player as close as I could manage to a blob of floating, free form clay to shape their creature’s spine and body. You could make creatures with five heads, legs that wrapped around in a spiral and split twice with four knees, and a three-elbowed arm or two coming out of each! And thanks to magical software and talented animators, they could dance and sing and eat and fish and run and growl and fight. Insanity!
[to do: videos of this stuff, derp]

Spore’s creature animation system shows the magic that creative programming can accomplish. Our tech lead, Chris Hecker, wrote a few excellent papers for Siggraph and the Game Developers Conference that describe how we did it in detail. Read them and watch videos!

• Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies, the SIGGRAPH 2008 Technical Paper about the Spore Animation System. Very detailed and technical. Includes videos of Spasm, the animation tool.
• How To Animate a Character You've Never Seen Before, the Game Developers Conference 2007 lecture on the system. Much more accessible, less detailed.

After Spore came the expansion pack Spore Galactic Adventures, where the player can create their own story with custom planets, buildings, creatures, dialogue, and chapters. I wrangled the adventure editor to give players a detailed physical presence to their sandboxes, from planetary to pebble scale. I’m still surprised to see the creativity, scale, trickery, and attention to detail in the adventures people have created all around the world. Players have built rube goldberg devices, computers that work using the in-game physics, recreations of Star Wars battles, catapults that launch you into orbit around planets, meteor strikes, boss battles, mazes that cheat, etc.