Chris Hecker announced recently via his blog that he has been let go from Maxis as part of the series of layoffs at the developer. Originally an indie game developer, he has spent the past six years on the Spore franchise.
"I had a truly great time working on Spore. I was lucky to get to contribute to some really amazing stuff over the past six years," wrote Hecker. "In the past few months, I chose to work on smaller things that generated lots of goodwill but no revenue, which tends to be a problem when you're expensive and the economy is down! Still, we got asymmetry into a patch, which has enabled some really incredibly insane creatures and vehicles. Next I was going to do some research on improving searching and browsing assets in the incredible resource that is the Sporepedia. I think there are some amazing opportunities to mine the user created assets if the browsing and tagging facilities can be improved. Will and I used to debate the best way to classify the assets, and hopefully we'll see some neat stuff going forward there."
Hecker will be working on his own project called SpyParty. With the game, he "tries to really capture the subtlety, tension, and drama of espionage, as opposed to the industry's usual blow-stuff-up take on spy games."
"I think it's an incredible time for indie games, with 'AAA indie games' like Braid, Castle Crashers, World of Goo, and many others lighting the way towards complete creative control and artistic independence for small, innovative, and highly polished games. It's exciting and scary and it's a very long road, but it seems like it might be the way for me!"
