With the long-awaited Spore having just been assigned a September 7th ship date, Newsweek columnist N'Gai Croal was given an opportunity to query Will Wright about the design process and why it took as long as it did to create the game.

In the interview, Wright addressed the lengthy development time: "Oh gosh. It was so many challenges to overcome. A lot of them initially were technical challenges: procedural animation; can we do these levels of detail enough to have zoom on the models; etc. Once we nailed most of those, it became a very large design challenge. And probably the biggest design challenge was keeping it very accessible to players so that every bit of the game was intuitive, easy and approachable. At the same time, we were going to mix all these genres, so we wanted to have one kind of control scheme, camera scheme, feedback system, rewards, across these different game genres. That probably overall was the biggest challenge, I think."

Wright also talked about how his team looked to social networking sites to make the game familiar to gamers. "What you want to do is find some metaphor for the players to wrap their minds around it right off the bat. That's where looking at things like social networking sites became a really good model, a communication tool for us to make it really clear to a player what a Sporecast was, or what a buddy list was, or what tagging of content was. These are terms that a lot of our players will already understand in different kind of arenas. It's just hasn't really been applied to games before," he explained.

When questioned about pressures from the corporate side needing to meet a ship date and make fiscal projections, Wright actually said that EA has been very understanding of the time needed to polish Spore.

"Interestingly enough, on this project probably more than any other, the executive management at EA has always been on the side of 'Get it right.' Whenever we were basically saying, 'Okay, we're not going to ship it this Christmas the way we thought,' it was always, 'Okay, but just get right. Get it right.' If anything, I think the team itself has felt more internal pressure to ship it sooner," he commented, "but at the same time, as we get closer and closer, it's like 'Oh, there's these last few things that'll just make it perfect,' and 'Oh, we've got to get this in.' Things become visible to you toward the end of the process. Design opportunities that weren't obvious before, and so they weren't part of your schedule, but then you uncover these possibilities, and it's like, 'Oh God, I don't want to leave that on the table. It would be so painful to do that.' So that's probably the overall reason why the game is taking so long."

Later on in the interview, Wright talks about the Wii version, which ships at a later date. He noted that the controller aspect of the Wii makes the project very interesting for him. "What interests me about the Wii is that in some sense you have a much higher bandwith controller than you have with any other console or even a PC. How do we abstract the maximum? Because one of the biggest advantages we have is our procedural animation system, which means that we can have an infinite of variety of animations that we can make the creature do because it's done procedurally. So that's a natural kind of strength of having a higher bandwith input device--it should really feel like I'm puppeteering this creature very directly, as opposed to I'm just indirectly controlling with a few buttons here and there. The rest of the design is totally going to evolve around that," he said.

He continued, "A lot of the prototyping they've been doing is, 'How do we make you feel like you have the most control over this creature, even in a very subtle ways, by moving this controller around?' and then make the gameplay serve that, because I think if I had nothing else, but a really fun creature to drive around the environments, and I felt like I was really controlling in a very expressive way I would have a blast with just that alone. So that's a really good starting point."

There's far more in the full interview, so check it out.