Project Spark review: If it’s in the game (design)…

by Unknown 12:04 0 comments home New Invents Science Tech

Shockingly detailed design tools ground an otherwise underwhelming package.


"Play. Create. Share" has long been the three-word slogan for the charming, if a bit well-worn, LittleBigPlanet games. For most players it's likely more than a motto, it's an actual schedule of events as well. You play the game to get a feel for what's possible, then mess around with the creation tools, and finally share it with the community in the hope that it's worth the effort.

About a year after LittleBigPlanet's 2008 release, Microsoft tried its own hand at the design-your-own-game game with Kodu Game Lab, a $5 download doomed to the backwater of the Xbox 360's Indie Games program. I spent $5 and an ounce of curiosity on that release back in the day, and I can't say I came away impressed. I was expecting a magic wand to impart knowledge and power in the wizardry of "coding" in a way that I could understand as someone with no real experience in programming or game design. Instead, Kodu was a bare bones logic learning tool that threw me in to the deep end of ifs, thens, and whens with little guidance and little ability to build anything with real depth.
Project Spark, the free-to-play design lab that Microsoft first showed at its E3 2013 press conference, is everything I wanted Kodu to be at the time. Spark is a learning tool, sure, but it's also a genuine platform for making games.

You can go where you wanna go...

Where Kodu could generously be called plain to look at, Spark pops with color and an angular, almost claymation-esque style. The "project" opens with a sharp, if cloying narration about the nature of creativity and sharing seemingly plucked from mid-afternoon Disney XD children's programming. This sets the tone for a just-slightly-edgier-than-children's-game aesthetic that, with a little nudging, fits just about whatever genre you might want shoehorn around it.

In terms of scale, projects designed in Kodu were small and sparsely populated, and nearly impossible to develop into something that could fully be called a "game." Spark programs, in contrast, can be enormous and varied, and shared freely with the world on both Windows 8 and the Xbox One.
Dipping into the creation mode in Project Spark opens up a world of options for creating places, characters, objectives, and mechanics almost too numerous to describe. Most objects run on basic "if, then" logic, but there are numerous modifiers to customize them to your will.
For instance, after you create a hostile non-player character—perhaps a premade goblin, bandit, or even a creature you sculpted yourself with the in-game editor—you get to fill its in-game "brain" with strings of basic AI instructions. "If the player character bumps into this unit, then it becomes hostile" could be one such brain-filling instruction. Another might cause the enemy to disengage after the hero exits a certain area.
Add one string to an enemy's programming, and you've got a foot soldier. Add a dozen, and you can create an army of finely-tuned nemeses to harry unsuspecting players in everything from first-person shooters to side-scrolling platformers.
Outside of these character-level instructions, you can make larger adjustments to the wider game world as well. With a little bit of tweaking on the player-character's camera and movement options, suddenly a 3D island exploration game becomes a twin-stick shooter. Dim the lights and up the enemy rate instead, and you get something with more of a survival-horror feel.
The density of tools is literally too great to describe in complete detail. Hours of carefully molding environments, encounters, and goals brings a sense of accomplishment just short of what I can only imagine professional game developers get from months of hard coding and modeling work.

Tools don't make the designer

Unfortunately, unless you're willing to put in Herculean amounts of patience and experimentation, you're still likely to get mediocre results from your time playing around in Project Spark.
This may not be a shocking revelation to everyone, but game design is incredibly difficult. Even with the comparatively limited tools available to players in Project Spark, the process is daunting for a beginner. You have to make sure one line of "kode" (as Spark calls its instructions) doesn't interfere with another, and without the benefit of play-testers, you have to confirm for yourself whether that finely tuned fighting machine immediately walks off the perfectly formed mountain you put them on.
Getting strong results out of Project Spark takes a level of time, patience, and practice that the community hasn't either had time or interest to develop completely throughout the game's lengthy beta period. So many of the community-created stages are shells designed for others players to download and "remix" themselves. Few have true gameplay by themselves.  As such, the "play" angle of LittleBigPlanet's holy trinity is a tough sell.
It doesn't help that Spark's complex and true-to-code design elements are paired with shockingly limited community feedback tools. After playing a level, you can choose to rate it up, down, or not at all. There's no comments system (likely for the best), but there's also no ability to crowdsource critique tags like "difficult" or "unfinished" as in LittleBigPlanet.
Discoverability is also a problem. Even while creators can tag their own levels, there's no way to filter them. The only way to find new creations is either through the curated lists provided by the developer or by searching for keywords which include the titles of the project. I once found a third-person, wave-based shooter I would like to try again, but searches in the "genre" category didn't even yield similar projects, much less the game itself. What happened to that opening bit about creating worlds for anyone to enjoy?
For a game ostensibly about  interacting—with games and with those that play them—Project Spark is a lonely experience where only the "create" portion of the "Play. Create. Share" trinity is really fulfilling. To be fair, that is the most important pillar for a game like this to get right. So for those willing to stick with the game design process, this is as rich a set of tools for generating and prototyping rich, deep game ideas as a non-programmer can expect to get.

The Good

• There's literally no better tool for learning and tinkering with game design on consoles right now.
• While complex, the creation tools are presented in a way that makes altering an entire game world seem straightforward.
• The art is generic enough to work with just about anything, but colorful and unique so as not to be boring.

The Bad

• Most the community-made content is mediocre at best; you might find a few gems in the rough, but time will determine how many.
• Tools for player feedback are incredibly bare.
• It's difficult to search for games a specific type with the current tools.

The Ugly

• If you think amateur level design looks rough, just read some of the dialogue players have cooked up.

Verdict: As a free experience, it's hard not to recommend at least trying the creation suite if you have any interest at all in game design—just don't come looking for a stellar time playing any of the community creations.