During E3 this year we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to see EA’s upcoming game “Spore”
personally demonstrated for us by the game’s designer Will Wright. What we saw was possibly one of the most innovative games ever. The game revolves around evolution; you start with a microscopic view of
your tiny creature and evolve it constantly until you have a full blown race with cities and interstellar space travel capability.
There are six main stages to the game, beginning at the cellular level and ending at space travel. We were
shown two of the stages. Will started with the creature editor, where he created his creature from scratch with a very simple and easy to use editor, he said the goal when creating this editor was to make it easy for the average person to do in minutes what it normally takes the average Pixar employee days to do. It looked a lot like making something out of clay: he could form the torso however he wanted and then choose from a list of other parts to add to it, like legs and arms, and then he could choose from a list of textures which were automatically applied to his new creature in a surprisingly effective way considering that he just created a totally random shape. Once he was done creating his new creature the game play portion of the stage began. This involved controlling a single creature on land, where he moved the creature around to find things to eat, avoid predators, and find a mate to propagate the species. After mating, the creature
editor popped up and he was able to upgrade his creature with better feet, arms, and eyes. Then he played the game as a baby version of the new creature he just created. As a baby, he also paid attention to the social aspect of the game by playing with his peers and taunting a nearby group of peaceful animals with his siblings.
One of the important features of Spore is what he called “procedural animation”, which is a method for
animating your creatures without the need for a professional animator like a typical game would. With this procedural animation the game figures out the best way to animate your new creature and applies these animations seamlessly, no matter what kind of creature you create the game can almost instantly figure out how it would walk, fight, and show emotion. It’s all very impressive to see in person.
The last thing he showed us was the space portion of the game, he started out on his home planet with
several large cities, he went to his capital city and initiated the space ship creation, although this time he selected a pre-built ship instead of using one of the editors to create his own. He said that he wanted the editors to feel optional, so if you just wanted to enjoy the game play without creating any custom content then you should be able to do that. Once he had his space ship the people in his capital city started celebrating and setting off fireworks, and he was able to travel anywhere on his home planet very quickly, and for the first time the camera pulled back and you were able to see the whole planet from a distance, the planet looked more cartoony from a distance, with exaggerated proportions. You could also see a storm in the atmosphere of the planet, Mr. Wright said that the planets have their own weather systems and wind. He described his new space ship as the Swiss army knife for the rest of the game, it had many tools available, including an abduction ray, weapon systems, and terraforming tools that could be used on the surface of planets.
In this stage of the game it’s possible to travel to thousands of different stars and planets, and with the tools available it’s possible to take a barren lifeless planet and turn it into a lush environment suitable for life, you can even help the creatures of your new environment along and help them achieve sentience. But not all of the planets you find will be lifeless, some of them will already be rife with creatures, either taken from a local database on your hard drive, or downloaded from other players. It’s completely up to you how you interact with these creatures: you can abduct them, fight with them, or make peace with them and be friendly, it’s all up to you.
Another major feature of Spore is the game’s ability to share your creations with other players transparently, meaning that you don’t have to do anything to give and receive creatures, buildings and ships to populate the enormous galaxy that you can explore. This is not a multiplayer game, so after you share your creations with other players they are all autonomous, but they do retain some of the characteristics that you have given them, meaning that the creatures that you have created and shared will mimic your behaviors even after you send them to other players. You can scan things with one of the tools on you space ship, and if those things were created by another player then you will see a “created by” section after you have scanned, this gives you the ability to tell the game that you like the things that that player has created and that you want to download other things that that player has made, very handy for seeing what your friends have been up to.
An overly simplistic summary of Spore would be that it’s a combination of Will Wright’s previous games,
from Sim City, to The Sims, and everything in between, with the ability to create and share your own content all along the way. This game is enormous in scope, there are more stars and solar systems in this game then a player could explore in a single lifetime. It’s been in development for many years and we should all get to
experience it for ourselves sometime in 2007.
