Will Wright’s Spore is coming soon. I’m looking forward to it. I still think SimCity4 is one of the most perfect games ever made (and still looks/plays competitively with the latest games out there), and there’s no debating whether or not The Sims franchise was/is a significant game design (and commercial) milestone. I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Spore will be joining that illustrious crowd, though the missing “people” element (you know, homosapiens, actual human beings) will probably keep it from realizing the scope/breadth/depth of audience that The Sims has seen.

The Sporepedia, which serves as a clearing house for the most popular creatures created by players, employs a very clever (and very user-friendly) means to upload/download creatures: they embed the data in the PNG thumbnail of the creature. Instead of having some custom data format that’s opaque to the user (and basically worthless after it hits their desktop except for importing straight into Spore), the user has a traditional PNG that they can trivially view on any modern browser/OS. Embedded in the alpha channel data of the PNG, though, is a bunch of data (about 1K according to some estimates).

Now, this is an old trick, and you can do it “officially” with PNGs in custom chunks or in JPEGs, etc. It’s possible in almost any well-structured format. But it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.

Consider this inspiration! I’m now officially on the look out for how I can apply this technique to Mockingbird. Embedding the game’s description in its screenshot? Encoding ActionScript into the action icons? I don’t know, but I’m going to find something. And you should, too! Incorporate this feature into your products today!

So, now what? That’s the question many folks have been asking me over the last few weeks, since I announced my departure from EA. I’ve had to be understandably coy about the whole thing as to not ruffle any feathers at the mothership… I’ve got enough going on with an international move and such to not have to fight one last political battle.

International move, you say? Yes, we (me, the misses, the baby girl) currently live in Vancouver (well, Burnaby, but that’s besides the point). A week from now, we’ll live in… well, in limbo, as it takes a while for all of our belongings to make the long trek from Vancouver to Austin, Texas. We’ll hang around our parents’ homes in Northwest Arkansas, enjoy Thanksgiving (American-style), and introduce our baby girl to all of her uncles, aunts and cousins. Two weeks from now, we’ll be sitting in our new home in Austin, unpacking what I’m sure will be several million cardboard boxes (now, where’s my crowbar…).

So, that’s the physical “now, what?” over the short term. But what’s really going to happen? What are my next steps professionally?

Well, it’s still a little too early too say. It’s not that I don’t know… I’ve known for nearly six months! But, due to my employment contract with EA, I was unable to act on my plans for world domination. It’d be no good if I went and created the “next great IP” and it defaulted to the folks who paid my bills, now would it? Thus, these next few weeks will see the creation, tangibly in copyrightable form, lots of IP.

What is this IP, you ask? Well… I can’t say now. I’ve spoken to some offline about it, to make sure I’m not crazy, and responses seem to favorably indicate that, at least in respect to this idea, I am not crazy. In fact, it sounds as if I may be providing an honest-to-goodness service for my fellow developers.

Service, you say? Games aren’t services! No they’re not. I am not making a game. You are. We all are. Have fun!

Big news this morning. It came as a suprise to all of us foot soldiers at Criterion. We’ve been working with EA for the last several months, fairly intensely. I guess this means that they liked what we were doing…

GamesIndustry.biz has an excellent article about the acquisition. Of all of the articles I’ve seen so far, it is the most in-depth and interesting to read (seems they actually did the footwork of interviewing those involved as opposed to just quoting the press release).

I’ll be curious to see how, if at all, this will impact by day-to-day life. It is definitely an interesting twist in the middleware saga, and like the above article mentions, a potentially major event in the industry as a whole.