GameSpot: Give us a brief update on the development of Spore. What aspects of the game is the team working on at the moment?

Will Wright: We've basically got all the levels playable at this point, so we have a lot of tuning ahead of us, because we've finally integrated all the different styles of [gameplay]. At this point, it's basically iterating on the gameplay, doing a lot of tuning, finishing up some of the [art] assets, interface, design...stuff like that. So, in some sense, we're in the home stretch. Although the home stretch is pretty long nowadays (laughs).

GS: How big is the team at present? How much of the team is working on art, programming, artificial intelligence, design, and other areas?

WW: Our team is probably around 80 people right now. We have a disproportionately large number of programmers on this team and a small number of artists, because of all the procedural content. So, probably 40 percent of the team is programmers, which is pretty high. The art staff is probably about a third of the size of [the art staff assigned to] a typical EA game. And all our artists are very technical as well, so they're doing a lot of the programming and scripting.