Intel® HD Graphics are Central to Create

There’s nothing new about games that let players create their own challenges. In the dim and distant days of 1983, EA published what is widely accepted to be the game that gave birth to the “builder” genre. Pinball Construction Set*—for the Apple II*, Atari 800*, and later the Commodore 64* and DOS—was a game that allowed players to design their own pinball tables by placing different objects in the game, such as flippers and bumpers, each with their own adjustable physics properties. With early echoes of today’s prevalent online-sharing culture, the game even let players save their creations onto floppy disks to be swapped with friends.

Back in 1985 as a tender English teenager, I recall poring over the keyboard of my Acorn Electron* for many hours, creating very pretty but entirely unplayable levels in Acornsoft’s platforming game Magic Mushrooms*. The joys of sharing my creations remained a mystery to me however—it could be that C90 cassettes lacked the romantic allure of floppy disks, or that few of my friends had fallen for the Acorn Electron pitch and were happily squishy-keying their way through Jet Set Willy* on the ZX Spectrum*. Then again, perhaps it’s that none of my friends’ parents were willing to let innocent little Billy blow his pocket money on a game called Magic Mushrooms.

Fast forward a quarter of a century and there’s a neat symmetry to the fact that EA is once again at the vanguard of a new kind of gaming experience based on the same concepts of creation and sharing that defined Pinball Construction Set, the publisher’s first foray into the genre. However, Create is much more than another puzzle game with an editor. As Justin Manning, producer on Create at EA Bright Light studio, explained, “What we’re trying to do is visual creativity, so you decorate just for the sheer pleasure of decorating. The challenges are a way of stimulating other parts of your mind effectively, whether you’re a creative problem solver, or more logical. We’re looking at ways of appealing to all parts of the mind.”

And with innovation at its heart, Create is a project that Intel had a great deal of interest in right from the start, embodying as it does Intel’s ambitions for original high definition graphical excellence in gaming. As Manning confirmed: “From the game concept, which it had a lot of enthusiasm for, through to actually getting us out there on the shelves and on a PC, Intel has been super helpful and a great partner for us.” Neither EA nor Intel would be the businesses they are today if they didn’t embrace the original, the innovative, and the risky, and when the result is a game as captivating as Create it’s clearly the right way to go.

Creative Genesis

The original vision for Create came from Rod Humble, the head of the EA Play Label. “He was after a paint package primarily for visual creativity, but one that didn’t require the skill of learning how to draw and using perspective, light, and shade,” said Manning. “As it developed, he wanted something more interactive that you could then play, so our project evolved, but very much with a view to the opportunities for the product and how we could expand it.”

Bringing artistic tools to interactive gaming platforms immediately changes users’ expectations of the experience. “Consoles and PC allow us interactivity more than anything else. They allow us a power that you don’t get with a pen and paper or with a paint brush,” said Manning. “But the thing about those platforms is that as soon as you’ve created something you think, I want to play in that. It became very apparent that we wanted to challenge and stimulate with creative problem solving and mental creativity across the board. So the product developed organically over time from visual creativity to creativity in the widest possible format.”

The game’s target audience is also something that evolved during the development cycle, although kids and families were always firmly locked in the sights of the team from day one, with the central idea being one of providing an experience that parents could share with their children. “The game was initially aimed at families. We wanted to put tools in the hands of children and their families to create images that they would be proud of, without the need to have specific art or drawing skills,” explained Manning. “However, as we developed the product and tested it, we discovered that adults found the game just as entertaining in a slightly different way.”

The team realized that while children wholeheartedly embraced the sandbox and experimental elements of the game, adults were equally taken by the need to prove their cerebral might in solving the challenges. “It’s a mental puzzle to solve and we all like that, particularly if we can be creative and make our own solution. So actually we found that it appealed to everybody.”

Art Attack

A very high quality of visual presentation is central to Create, which on the PC means high-definition graphics. However, when you’re effectively putting the designer’s tools into the hands of consumers and giving them free reign to design things exactly the way they want them, you cede control of the number of elements on screen. You might think this would create headaches for any piece of hardware, even the processor graphics on the 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor.

Some of our game modes, like Scoretacular, encourage you to put as much content in the world as possible. It scores you on being more elaborate and more lateral and more creative. The technical challenge is quite large, so if we can’t solve that we haven’t made the game we’re trying to make.”

—JUSTIN MANNING, CREATE* PRODUCER, EA BRIGHT LIGHT STUDIO

Manning outlined the problem: “There are just hundreds of things you can put in the world, so somebody might come in and just decorate and absolutely load their scene up, then suddenly you’ve blown all the memory budgets in the world and you can do nothing else. We’ve still got to make the game work and make the physics-based objects come in and solve challenges in a meaningful way.”

In fact, loading scenes with as much content as possible became a game play objective in itself. “Some of our game modes, like Scoretacular, encourage you to put as much content in the world as possible. It scores you on being more elaborate and more lateral and more creative. The technical challenge is quite large, so if we can’t solve that we haven’t made the game we’re trying to make.”

But it seems that the team at EA Bright Light knows a thing or two about graphics bottlenecks, and having Intel Software Engineer Doug Binks on hand, armed with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers, certainly helped smooth out the process for the PC version. As Manning said of Binks’ involvement, “He took every build from a pre-alpha stage, gave us a lot of feedback on how we might be able to improve or optimize our renderer, and really helped us tune the game for Intel® processors.”

“I think it would be fair to say that we’re not a nose-bleeding graphics game,” continued Manning, “but we do a lot of graphics manipulation. It’s very much about balancing lots and lots of graphic elements in real time without slowdown, which could so easily happen. We made some compromises along the way, but hopefully the solution’s good and you can still decorate and play to your heart’s content.”

As for the game’s graphical performance on the 2nd generation Intel Core processor, it was something that in the words of Manning, “actually turned out to be no problem at all, certainly with Doug’s help. It was really useful to have him at the end of a phone line or an e-mail, and he supported us right up until the end.”

The type of game that Create is and the audience it’s aimed at are important factors in terms of making sure that it’s not only big PCs that can handle its graphical demands. “It’s a family audience as opposed to the new processors and bigger machines,” said Manning. “We’re not challenging the higher end, we’re very much to the middle and low end, but even then you’ve still got to balance all those budgets, GPU versus CPU, physics-based animation versus graphics.”

And even within the family and mass consumer market, the type of PC platform used to play games is shifting. “Laptops have been a consideration for us for several years now as more people move to using laptops and netbooks,” explained Manning. “It’s a trend where the big bulky PC in the corner is the household device for some, but a lot of people are on the move all the time with mobile devices, so we take that into consideration with all of the PC games for EA Bright Light.”

“Particularly on Create, we made sure that we run on as low a spec platform as possible,” said Manning. “Kids have them in their rooms these days, teenagers have netbooks, and so forth. We really want those people to be playing the game, and we have to make sure it works.”

Showing Off

In this dawning age of cloud sharing, whether it’s Apple iPhone* Hipstamatic* photos on Facebook*, a Virtual DJ mix on SoundCloud*, or a PowerPoint* presentation on SlideShare*, if you’re not showing off what you’ve created, you’re not in the game. The same is true in video games, and so the social aspects of Create were a vital ingredient in the game’s development.

“Sharing is very important whenever you create something. The drive to create is effectively to show people, make them hear it, listen to it. Whatever art you’re doing, sharing is the end goal,” said Manning. “We naturally want to do that and make Create a community.”

On the PC, the social and sharing aspects of Create come into their own. The Challenge editor lets players design their own challenges from scratch and upload them to the game’s Web site for others to tackle. “You can share your content online, so you can upload, download, and rate other people’s creations,” said Manning. “You can remix other people’s visual creations; so if you like it you can download it, add your bits, and upload it as your own later on.”

“How we can create a community around sharing has been there since the very beginning for us,” continued Manning. “We want people to share their solutions, their creations, their own challenges. Without the people bringing that to the game, there is no game as far as we’re concerned.”

Creative Overload

Now that the game has been released and players all over the world are creating and sharing the exotic fruits of their imaginations online, Manning looks back on the development process as one that broke the mold. “Working on Create was quite frenetic and organic. It’s not the way we usually do a game development, so actually it was quite unique for us.”

“Given that it’s a creative game, having an organic process to its creation was actually very useful, because we saw opportunities and we took them,” said Manning. “Had we stuck with what we wanted at the beginning we would have just ended up with a visual set of tools that people could create images with, and actually we’ve ended up with so much more that appeals to so many more people.”

Sharing is very important whenever you create something.”

—JUSTIN MANNING, CREATE* PRODUCER, EA BRIGHT LIGHT STUDIO

“The feeling now that I’ve got the game in my hands is quite overwhelming. When we started, the design task to make creativity that could be put in anybody’s hands felt very daunting,” said Manning. “The fact that we’ve done it, that people are enjoying it, creating stuff, and posting it online is really heartwarming for me.”

“At many stages along the way you think you’re dealing with something new and people may not like this; but as it’s turned out, everybody who spends some time with the game really loves it, and that’s great for us.”

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