Project Spark is Microsoft’s attempt to capture the magic of a Minecraft-like sandbox (interview)

GamesBeat: If you were to do something like create a sci-fi version of Project Spark, would that be a huge investment of your team’s time?

Sterchi: We’re trying to strike a balance. Our intention is to provide this as a service. It’s constantly evolving. That comes from on-board features, polishing them and improving on what we have, as well as adding new functionality and new content and things like that. We’re trying to balance a steady cadence of having this constantly evolve, along with all of the time and the effort and the investment that goes into making really polished 3D art assets.

It’s something that we’re evolving. We’re getting better at it as we go. We hope to always be more efficient. But it’s always an investment to create those assets. The castle pack we’re about to release went through a couple of revisions, because they needed it to snap together perfectly and work from all sides and still carry an appealing aesthetic. We think that pays off down the line, when people are constantly seeing that there’s new things in the feed.

What’s important to us is that there are always new things there. You can come back every day and there are new games, new adventures. That service mentality, being able to provide those assets and new content, is part of that.

GamesBeat: Is it already clear that free-to-play is the right way to go, as opposed to doing a $60 game?

Sterchi: Part of our goal is that everyone is able to create. Very clearly, when you lower the barrier to free, you start to remove those obstructions. What we are seeing is people jumping on board and saying, “Oh, I just want to give it a try.” Then they talk about how, five hours later, they’re immersed in it.

Lowering that barrier is definitely one of the big things. If you think about the model, it’s continually evolving as to what you want to get out of it. Just letting people try something that we think is really fresh, letting them experience it for themselves, is priceless for us.

GamesBeat: Are you having contests as well, things like that?

Sterchi: We have big plans for events. We’ll be able to talk about them more soon. We’ve done a few light events around things like, “Make this type of theme game,” or “What can you make with these objects?”

Sandil: We’ve been very focused on getting the beta out on Xbox One. Later we’ll have more plans to reveal about contests and promotions. But there are definitely plans to do that. Project Spark is going to be a key app for the next generation, in new devices as well. It’s a way we can show all kinds of new things to do with touch and control.

GamesBeat: What’s left before you’re able to say you’re shipping a finished game?

Sterchi: The Xbox beta has a bunch of new features in there. You can share a level and then pull it back down on your device. When we go to Xbox, we’ll have cloud saves, so just having a level locally will let it show up on any of your devices.

We have a lot of work around Kinect. Kinect is opening the doors to a lot of special things. We’re doing full-body motion capture, voice capture, and facial expression capture. We have several features around just making sure we can scale. We can take in the masses and have that amount of concurrency.

GamesBeat: Putting yourself in the game — is that what Kinect makes possible?

Sterchi: Right now, you can project them on the characters we have. You can put them on a troll or a goblin, taking all of your body motions. We have some more plans as far as how we can use Kinect in the future that we haven’t revealed, around some more of those elements.

One of the big things that we’ve yet to fully reveal is multiplayer. We feel like playing and creating together and having that back and forth and collaboration is a big part of the game. From beta to release, multiplayer is going to be another big thing that we’ll end up revealing and working toward.

GamesBeat: What are some more milestones for considering this a success? What do you want to see happen?

Rebh: For me, I’ll feel like we’ve hit a great milestone when we start seeing real celebrities in the community. Right now, it’s a closed beta. But when community members who are making stuff are on talk shows and stuff, talking about the stuff they dreamed up and made in Spark —

Sterchi: You can look at that from different angles. I look at it from a creative angle, and like I said before, am I seeing things that have never been done before, new mechanics and new ways to play games? Yes. So I definitely think we’ve been successful on that level already.

Are we seeing people empowered and enabled to do things in a completely new medium that they’ve never been able to do before, creating digitally? Yes. Those things are definitely there. When you start to think about the long-term goals or business goals, it comes down to the masses, getting the masses in and seeing the first 100,000 downloads or million downloads. Those are things we have to get to in time.