Interview with Alex Hutchinson, Spore’s Lead Designer

Once again we have a new Spore interview, but this time it’s with the lead designer Alex Hutchinson.  One of the most talked-about questions were finally answered on the topic of autosaves.  Here’s what Alex had to say.

RPS: Okay – a break from the really fancy ones. Care to explain why Autosave was so hard to implement?

Alex: Haha I should get an engineer to pitch in here, but the logic was since we don’t support multiple saves, we didn’t want the player to do something save and then have no way to back out. The challenge with allowing more than one save is that the universe is persistent – so your save in this game is physically in the same universe as your other save, so if you save this game several times, which universe are you in when you load up another saved game on another planet and progress to space?

That said, it’s clearly not ideal and we’re taking another look at it. Now that the horror of finishing the game and putting it in a box is passed, issues like these will be re-examined and we’ll continue to support and grow the game you can be sure.

Check the rest of the interview at Rock, Paper, Shotgun