Mapping out this space was a challenge because it was so big and had so many possibilities. Spore was trying to do way more innovation than people thought it was.
If you look at the original pitch, Will talks through different modes in terms of classic games. The gameplay had to be different than what it was inspired by, so Spore was innovating on gameplay more than it thought it was. Atlantis has all the greatest scientist in the world, mythologically speaking, building pyramids, lasers, or alien technology. It sinks and everyone leaves on boats and each boat heads to a different continent where they continue to build. That happened with Spore. Sections Close Back.
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We're working to restore them ASAP! Features Developing Spore : An oral 'Sporal'? Former team members look back on the triumphs and challenges in developing one of the most ambitious games of all time. Get daily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inbox.
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Stretch down a pair of legs and pull out two arms so that it looks long and lean. On one end of the body, pop on intelligent eyes behind large round glasses. Add a mop of peppery hair and a prominent nose and ears. Sprinkle on scruffy semibeard growth. Call it Will Wright. Now put the creature in its habitat: the workspace of a computer game developer in Emeryville, Calif. Spread the studios of Maxis Software, which Wright cofounded in , over the floors of two nondescript office buildings.
Sprinkle the interior with dirt-encrusted mountain bikes leaning against cubicle walls and overgrown, pumpkin-orange beanbag chairs. Now surround Wright with others of his kind, hunched behind desks, typing at keyboards, PC monitors glowing.
The software engineers, artists, and others who work at Maxis, now owned by video-game giant Electronic Arts, have migrated here because Wright is a legend.
Over the past two decades, the year-old Wright, who studied architecture and mechanical engineering at Louisiana Tech University, has utterly transformed his industry with hits like SimCity , in which players build virtual towns, and the best-selling computer game franchise of all time, The Sims , in which players create virtual people and then watch them interact.
In the process, Wright has helped forge a new, more toylike frontier in computer gaming, where the main goal is not so much to score points or kill bad guys but to create cool stuff. The game they're working on this bright February day is called Spore , and it's the most ridiculously ambitious simulation game yet.
Sure, there've been virtual worlds like Second Life , which let you customize your characters. LittleBigPlanet , an upcoming game from Media Molecule for Sony's PlayStation 3 game console, is built around player-made terrains and characters. But Wright's Spore is by far the boldest in terms of unleashing players' creativity. In Spore the players create life itself--starting with ooze-dwelling, one-celled creatures that learn, grow, and evolve into intelligent beings with advanced cultures and technologies, able to conquer their planets and outer space.
Computer gamers everywhere have eagerly awaited Wright's latest project since he began talking about it in Spore is finally due to be released this month, more than a year behind schedule. Wright attributes its recent delays to localization, the process of tailoring the game to different countries and languages.
Others around the Maxis office cite the boss's high expectations. Wright concedes their point but shrugs it off. Spore is anything but. Other games may look and sound better, but few games are as original as this one. It offers players far more choice and open-ended play than any game before it.
If Spore lives up to its creator's vision, it will likely be heralded as one of those milestones that redefines what a game can be--just as Doom , a first-person shooter game, pioneered fast-action multiplayer competition in and Guitar Hero delivered the thrill of music performance by introducing a guitar-shaped controller.
The anticipation--and pressure--is high. The game unfolds through five stages, each of which riffs on an established genre of play. It starts, fittingly, in a two-dimensional world, with a single-celled organism that gobbles up microbes and plants to accrue DNA points.
Once the spore collects enough DNA, an editing palette pops up that lets you design the next evolutionary stage of the creature's body. Your creature is then thrown into a three-dimensional environment where it must dodge predators and find a partner with which to reproduce.
Next up is the civilization phase, in which you can assemble vehicles and buildings to bring your tribe's city to life, in the spirit of SimCity or Civilization. If you succeed in conquering your planet and avoiding an enemy takeover, you graduate to the fifth and final level: outer space. Here the object is to fight off invaders and take over other planets. When you boot up most games for the first time, you're immediately immersed in an existing world, complete with a cast of characters who behave in predetermined ways.
Perhaps the game has tree-lined streets or castles with dungeons and moats. Maybe colonies of dwarves and trolls populate those worlds, or maybe gangsters do. These objects are all encoded in the game's original software exactly as the developers envisioned and animated them.
In Spore , that model doesn't apply. Almost nothing exists until the player makes choices about each object's shape and texture. To enable that design process, the relatively small team of 20 artists and seven programmers created a palette of editing tools. Potato Head on steroids. Eight days later, early adopters had created more than a million creatures. To understand why the Creature Creator is so compelling, consider its incredible flexibility. Say a player wants to make a building.
Spore provides a menu of architectural elements to tinker with: windows, doors, that kind of thing. The player clicks and drags the pieces onto a base structure and can stretch or shrink them along several axes.
From the game's perspective, each building's design is simply a list of instructions; when the player is finished tinkering, those instructions direct the game engine to generate an image of the building and place it within the Spore world. Simple enough. Then there's the process of making a creature, which offers a whole other level of variety and complexity. For instance, each creature can have any number of features and appendages--eyes, mouths, legs, feet--which can be stretched and curled like clay into outlandish shapes.
To convincingly evoke even the wackiest animal a player could design, the game code had to be able to apply the knowledge of a human animator, on the fly--the ability to understand body language and subtle facial expressions and then to encapsulate those qualities abstractly in software. Wright decided to build Spore 's real-time animation around a technique called procedural generation. Other game developers have used the technique for years in a limited way, but no game has ever relied on it so heavily to create highly customizable yet lifelike creatures in real time.
So the Maxis team had little to go on as they tried to figure out how to make their exotic beasts move. Stuart Kauffman wrote about autocatalytic sets, which are theories about the origin of life, like did life come to Earth on a comet or did it originate out of self-organizing chemical sets. How would something like that manifest in the game? Wright: Well, we actually took a different direction. At the beginning of the game you see this comet hitting the planet, which is a panspermia theory , which is the alternative theory to bio-genesis, which is that life formed naturally through chemical complexity on Earth.
We ended up prototyping and exploring a lot of spaces that are not in the game. We're trying to look for the most interesting 20 percent out of the percent of what we could put in the game. What's the prototyping exploration like? Wright: In the early phases it entails me talking to a programmer about some system we want to explore and we build a very simple prototype like the ones we're putting on our website.
So start poking and prodding and playing with this little toy. It's fun to watch stellar formation animation. It's fun to play with autocatalytic sets. We'd build prototypes for each one of these and play with them and imagine a singular experience that involves some subset of these prototypes that use similar concepts that can be ramped in the players' mind so they're not having to learn, you know, 20 different things that are totally unconnected.
Are some of tehse directions you're talking about the basis for the expansion packs an ongoing label requires? Wright: When a game is released, we have a good sense of how we can expand it in different directions.
But you do first have to get it out to the public and see what they do with it. As we see the fans doing various things with it, it will become pretty clear to us that, Oh, yeah, this would be probably the best direction and we already have an expansion map, so we know how to navigate that terrain.
But we're also exploring entire other forms of media and starting to think, what does this brand mean. We want Spore in a very general sense to become this intersection between science and creativity. What do you hope fans will learn about science from Spore? Wright: I want this to be more on the motivational side than the education side. I really want to spark people's interest in these subjects. People still tell me they went into, you know, civil engineering because of SimCity.
It wasn't that SimCity taught them how to build a city, but it got them interested in how fascinating the subject is. That motivation is far more powerful than just trying to pour facts into their head.
So, if nothing else I'd like people to come out, sit back, look up at the stars and think a little bit deeper about what a galaxy is. I've heard Spore was originally known as SimEverything. When I design a game, at the very beginning, I design a box, and with Spore many, many years ago, the title on the box was SimEverything.
I can show the team my box and say, Look, we want to build this, imagine what will be in this box. Spore was feeling pretty unique and SimEverything almost felt like a parody of the Sims brand, which is why I liked it. Spore was not shown two months later at E 3 , the industry's annual trade show. GamingSteve, however, had received a few concept art images of the tribal stage.
The demo begins with a cell in a tidepool, who begins eating green objects as Will Wright begins to control it. Not long after, brown clouds of smoke begin to attack the cell, who steers into some bacteria, causing some damage. Will Wright makes the cell lay an egg, allowing access of an early version of the Cell Editor. Will adds a spike to the front of its body, which in turn allows the cell to kill the bacteria that hurt it prior to evolution. Will Wright explains that over time, the camera will pull out farther as the stage progresses and the cell becomes larger, before moving on to the next stage.
The video skips ahead to the early creature stage, when the cell has become a more complex creature. Will Wright explains that the camera has shifted from 2D to 3D, and begins to swim around. He notes that the entire underwater world is procedurally generated, and explains how the player character's animation is generated as well.
He later notes that all of the creatures were created by other players , bringing the creature to a pod of jellyfish-like animals. The creature lays an egg, bringing Will to the Creature Editor. He removes the fins of the creature, replacing them with three legs and a hand at the end of its tail, as well as shortening its snout. After he is done, he brings the now terrestrial creature onto land. Will notes that it walks in a way that conforms to the way he built the creature, and instructs it to hunt a striped one-legged creature.
Will points out that his creature is attacking the creature with its tail; the area he added its weapon. After a short chase, Will's creature takes down the prey, the killing blow implied to have been inflicted to the head. After the hopper is killed, Will's creature begins to drag the carcass to a safe place to eat, only to be interrupted by a much larger predator , who gives chase to Will's creature. Wright moves the creature a far distance from the predator, stating that it would most likely rather kill a hopper instead.
He guides his creature to a nest with other members of his kind, which he finds by performing a mating call. Will's creature is taken over to the other member of its kind, and the two begin to copulate much to the delight of the audience , and an egg is laid, giving access to the editor once more.
Will shows off a few creatures he had created prior to GDCe. He returns to his avatar creature, and notes that as creatures evolve, they would have to invest money for a larger brain, and once the creature's brain is large enough, it moves on to the next stage.
The video skips to a section of the Tribal stage, when Will's creatures have become sentient. Will states that at this stage, the game switches from a "first-person eater" to a Real-Time Strategy. He then brings up the concept of weaponry, primarily "monkeys with guns," saying that there is something "cool" about the idea. He explains that the creature is now at the "top" of its evolutionary ladder in terms of body plan, though at this level he can now purchase various weapons and other tools for the tribe.
He spawns in a spear rack, prompting the tribe to investigate. Will notes that more elaborate procedural verbs are beginning to come into play, stating that many of the actions you make will garner some form of response from the creatures you control.
Some of the tripods equip themselves with their new-found weaponry , and Wright decides to buy the creatures a campfire before they "get in trouble.
Will explains that, depending on how the player works their way through previous stages, their creatures may behave in different ways, noting becoming an emotion-based society and a logic-based society in particular. He proceeds to buy the tribe a set of drums, as the tribe begins to dance, prompting the audience to cheer.
He compares this stage to the game Populous , buying tools for a tribe and controlling groups of creatures which he can send out on skirmishes. He brings up that later in the stage, he will have to compete with other tribes of creatures. Finally, he notes that the main focus of the stage is to upgrade the main hut , a mechanic that works in a very similar way to upgrading a creature's brain. He purchases a better hut for the tribe, and explains that as he upgrades the hut, it will become possible to buy more advanced tools, aadd more slots for tribe members, and have more space for food.
After this, he says that the final upgrade of the hut will bring the player to the next stage. In , a flurry of information came in. GDC '06 showed working prototypes of Spore and several talks were held.
One of these talks concerned self-pollinated content , the mechanism of the massively single-player style of Spore. An issue of Computer Gaming World featured a few pages concerning Spore. E 3 saw several demos given by Will Wright himself.
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