Spore (2008 video game)

For the 1987 Mastertronic game, see Spore (1987 video game).

For the 1991 MS-DOS game, see Spore (1991 video game).

Spore
Developer(s)	Maxis
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts
Designer(s)	Will Wright
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows Mac OS X Nintendo DS
Release	EU: September 5 2008 NA: September 7 2008
Genre(s)	God game, Life simulation, Real-time strategy (see "Genre" section)
Mode(s)	Single-player

Spore is a multi-genre "massively single-player online game" under development by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social land-walking creature, to levels of interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

The full version of the game is due to be released on September 5 2008 in Europe, and September 7 2008 in North America and other territories. Spore will also be available for direct download from Electronic Arts on September 7.

Development

Main article: Development of Spore

Spore was originally a working title, suggested by developer Ocean Quigley, for the game which was first referred to by the general public as Sim Everything. Even though Sim Everything was a first choice name for Wright, the title Spore stuck. Wright added it also freed him from the preconceptions another Sim title would have brought, saying "...Not putting 'Sim' in front of it was very refreshing to me. It feels like it wants to be breaking out into a completely different thing than what Sim was."

Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson joined EA Maxis on April 2, 2007 to work on Spore.

Music

Main article: Development of Spore music

The procedurally-generated music for the game is being designed by Brian Eno, an artist famous for his work with ambient music.

Platforms

Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X versions of the full Spore game have been confirmed as being in active development. Other platforms have been discussed, but have not been confirmed.

Genre

Spore does not fall neatly into any single video game genre. While the game's creators and several media sources describe it as a god game, other journalists also describe it as a real-time strategy game and life simulation game. However, the game is made up of several phases of gameplay that draw on a multitude of games, and thus a multitude of traditionally-recognized genres.

Gameplay

Overall, the game allows the player to develop a species from its beginnings as a microscopic organism to its evolution into a complex animal, its emergence as a social, intelligent being, to its mastery of the planet and then finally to its ascension into space, whereupon it interacts with alien species across the galaxy. Throughout the scope of gameplay, the player's perspective and indeed the player's species change dramatically.

It was necessary for the developers to break the game up into distinct yet consistent, dependent "phases". The outcome of one phase affects the initial conditions of the player's species in the next. Each phase, while housing the same creature and player, exhibits its own style of play, and has been described by the developers as ten times more complicated than its preceding phase. While players are able to spend as much time as they prefer in each, it is possible to accelerate or skip phases altogether.

There are three difficulty levels; Spore defaults to the easiest level.

Phases

There is a difficulty selector to each stage, allowing players to choose the difficulty for each part of the game.

The games and films with which Wright associated the various phases are:

1. Pac-Man for the cell phase
2. Diablo for the creature phase
3. Populous for the tribal phase
4. Simple versions of SimCity, Risk, and Civilization for the civilization phase
5. SimEarth, Destroy All Humans!, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the space phase, with elements of sandbox gameplay. DICE 2007 referred to it as similar to Master of Orion.

The first four phases of the game, if the player minimally uses the editors, will take 10-15 hours to complete.

Start of life

The game opens, using the concept of panspermia as the basis for your creature's arrival, with a meteor plummeting onto a planet into a tide pool. The meteor, now a geode, then splits, from which the player's multicellular creature emerges.

Cell

The cell phase. The monstrously large creatures in the background will come to the foreground as the player's organism grows

The first phase of existence, the cell phase, is sometimes referred to as the tide pool, cellular or microbial phase. The player guides simple protean microbes around in a 2D environment where it must deal with fluid dynamics, predators, and eating weaker microbes or plants. There are many different types of cells, many of which can damage and/or eat the player's microbe. Once the player's microbe has eaten several cells, the player can enter an editor in which the player can modify the appearance, shape, and abilities of the microbe by spending "DNA points". A player may choose to remove some part from the microbe during this and the next phase, which will recoup some DNA points. If the creature dies, the player may restart from an earlier evolution.

As the microbe gets larger, objects that are in the background will move to the foreground, which can result in one's microbe being eaten by a much more massive microbe that had previously been swimming in the background. The surface land becomes more and more prominent, and the option to move to land eventually presents itself, allowing the creature to crawl out of the tide pool to begin the creature phase. Legs are not a prerequisite to moving to land; if the creature lacks legs, it will move in a slug-like fashion, which implies there will be an uninterrupted transition between the cellular and creature phases. The microbe resembles a strange insect with cartoonish, human-like eyes, which were used "to make it cute".

The main unit of "currency", which allows the creature to move on to the next phase, are "DNA Points".

Creature

The creature phase is similar in gameplay to the cell phase, but there are several important differences. Principally, the environment is now truly 3D. There will be other creatures inhabiting the world and most, if not all, of them will have been created by other players. Creatures will be seeded into the player's environment according to certain factors, in order to retain a balanced ecosystem. The game will also download creatures in relation to how strong the player's creature is. If the player creates a bigger, tougher creature, the predators that are downloaded will likewise be stronger than average predators. Creatures' characteristics are categorized with a 5 star rating system in six areas: Speed, Stealth, Defense, Social, Cuteness, and Attack. The creature also gains the ability to perform actions, such as "Call" and "Jump".

In this stage, the basic goal is the same: hunt food to earn DNA points, reproduce, and avoid being eaten by predators. Unlike the asexual reproduction in the cell phase, the player must now locate a mate. Once the player's creature has laid an egg, it does not hatch right away; scavengers will attempt to steal the eggs and the player must defend them (conversely, the player may steal and eat other creatures' eggs as well, if they can get past their hostile parents). Before the egg hatches, the player will have the opportunity to 'evolve' their creature via the creature editor, which can be done by spending DNA points to buy body parts. When the egg hatches, the player controls a baby version of the creature that spawned it. Aesthetically, this version of the creature will be smaller, with certain features exaggerated such as the head, and have a higher pitched voice. "The Science Behind Spore" video featured a monstrous creature taller than a tree threatening a city, indicating one of the scale possibilities of creatures.

This stage will evolve the creature's social behaviour, as the baby will be making friends and forming its own herd (for herbivores) or pack (for carnivores). Will Wright referred to this as a simplified version of the friend-making mini-game in The Sims. The ultimate goal of the creature phase is to increase the creature's brain capabilities slowly using DNA points. Once they have increased sufficiently, the player's creature becomes intelligent and the player progresses to the tribal phase. Creatures may make friends with other species instead of fighting them.

In the IGN "Evolution" video, the creatures had names such as "Oddy", "Mephistopheles" and so forth. This seems to indicate that individual creatures are nameable.

Strong evidence of flying creatures, unseen since the original presentation of Spore, has been seen in recent hands-on previews. No outright clarification about the status of flying creatures has occurred yet. However, winged creatures may "glide", as creatures created during the Spore Creature Creator revealed. All creatures will be land-based; there will be no marine creatures.

As with the cell phase, DNA Points serve as currency towards evolving, increasing brain size and allowing the player to move into the next phase.

Tribal

After the player's species evolves its brain capacity far enough, it enters the tribal phase. At this stage physical development ceases (as does the player's exclusive control over an individual creature), and the player is given a hut, a group of fully evolved creatures, a mini-map of the world for the first time, as well as two of six possible "super powers", which are unlocked depending on the species' behaviour in the previous phases.

In this phase the game is similar to an RTS (real-time strategy game). The player may give these creatures tools such as weapons, musical instruments, and campfires, purchased with food that the tribe has hunted and/or gathered. Food now replaces "DNA points" as the player's currency. Creatures also gain the option to wear clothes that demarcate their professions; for example, recruiters wear recruiting clothes while farmers wear farming clothes. The player may also "tame" other non-intelligent creatures, and even use them as livestock. Domesticated creatures seem to undergo neoteny in contrasting photos of the same species, but it is unknown whether it is automatic or if the player was permitted to edit tamed creatures in the editor. Friendly or hostile intraspecies tribe-to-tribe contact can take place in this phase. Creatures also learn to speak in this phase, their language is dependent on the type of mouth they possess; primate-type mouths, for instance, result in Simlish.

The tribal members are assigned roles by the player, such as fishing, gathering, or hunting. The creatures' behaviors and personalities are affected by the way the player utilizes them. If a player uses them aggressively, their autonomic behavior will reflect that; conversely, if the player uses them peacefully, "conquering" other tribes, say, with music, their behavior will be more kind. Even their idle behavior will reflect their personality; warlike tribal members will practice combat with one another while docile members will practice instruments and throw parties.

Once the player's tribe reaches a certain point of superiority over neighbouring tribes, a statue is built and transition to the civilization phase occurs.

Food serves as the phase's currency, which the player uses to spend on items and structures, as well as barter with other tribes.

Civilization

The civilization phase has the player developing many cities and colonies.

Originally, a city phase was to follow the tribal phase, but it was merged into the civilization phase. The player's tribal camp has grown to a city, which must be cared for. Players now have access to a building editor to change the appearance of the buildings in their city or create new buildings. The game will attempt to detect what style of content the player prefers, download similar content created by other players and add it to the buy menu. Also, players can now use a vehicle editor, allowing construction of land vehicles, aircraft, ships and submersibles.

Once players reach this point they are allowed to view the entire planet from space. Once the player elevates the camera past a certain point, the realistically detailed features of the planet become more exaggerated. For example, the cities of the planet change from a properly-scaled view with all individual buildings visible to a more iconic cartoon-like depiction for functional and aesthetic reasons, and to avoid micromanagement.

The goal in this phase is to gain control of the entire planet, and it is left for the player to decide whether to conquer by warfare or unite by diplomatic means. Once players have gained enough credits in this phase, they unlock the UFO and the UFO editor. Before they may proceed into the space phase, they must paint their planet purple with the UFO; the contextual purpose of this is currently speculative.

The main unit of currency is now Spice.

Space

File:Sporegreenhouseeffect.jpg

A habitable planet (top) gradually becoming an inhospitable, volcanic rock (bottom) as the player pumps carbon dioxide into its atmosphere

After the civilization phase, the space phase begins. A "mission" structure provides new goals and paths to follow as the player begins to spread through the universe.

The player may now travel to, terraform and colonize neighboring uninhabitable planets with special tools (water tool, volcano tool, etc) that can be purchased by the player. The ultimate tool for this purpose is a technology which Wright dubbed the Genesis device, named after the device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, both of which have the same purpose: transform a dead world into a planet capable of sustaining life in a matter of minutes. During the 2007 TED conference, Wright showed off the planetary effects the UFO can have, such as pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to increase the amount of greenhouse gases, which over time caused the oceans initially to rise and flood coastal cities, then eventually evaporate and transform the world into an arid desert planet, followed by a molten rock in space. Wright semi-jokingly called it "a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth." The player may cause icy comets to crash into a planet to create water, or force volcanoes to erupt to increase atmosphere. Players may build cities underwater or on the surface of an inhospitable planet once they gain the ability to create bubbled cities, similar in function to self-sustaining arcologies. Once the world around them becomes habitable, the city loses the bubble.

During exploration of other worlds, the player may scan content and add the information to a database designed like a trading card deck called the Sporepedia. The player may also abduct creatures and transport them to other planets to test a planet's habitability. The player may interbreed different species genetically, or place a monolith (in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligent life, then come back later to see what has evolved. On lifeless worlds, the player may also find strange "artifacts" with unknown purposes to be used later on, possibly adding tools for the UFO.

Once the player has explored neighboring worlds, interstellar travel becomes possible. There are more than 4 billion planets in the game's galaxy, more than anyone can visit in a lifetime. During the 2007 TED Conference seminar, Wright used accelerated time dilation in the zoomed-out galaxy view to show the dynamics of the entire galaxy, as supernovae exploded in brilliant points of light, and the galactic arms slowly turned. He pointed out that the nebulae, which the game features in real-life separate categories of planetary nebulae and reflection nebulae, perform their actual functions in space. He also brought the UFO close to a black hole, keeping a cautionary distance from the gravitational singularity.

Players can make contact with other civilizations, most of which are created by other players. Intelligent species can be found by running the mouse over other star systems and their individual planets to try to pick up radio static or noise that can indicate intelligent life. When the UFO visits that world, they may impress the beings with fireworks, attack them with weapons, or try to establish a language with the civilization via a Close Encounters of the Third Kind-styled musical mini-game. The player may beam down a holographic image of his/her creature to interact more directly with an alien species. A user-created civilization's AI reacts depending on its behavior and personality, both of which are based on the play-style of its user. The player can unite or conquer the galaxy by diplomatically creating a federation or sparking an interstellar war. As a show of great force, the player may even use a weapon to completely destroy a planet (similar to the capabilities of the Death Star from the Star Wars saga), which will sometimes bring retribution from that species and its allies. The player is sometimes called upon to fight off an invasion of their home planet.

The Space phase will also introduce the game's main villain, the Grobb (Borg spoken backwards), a malevolent robotic species which serves as the ultimate challenge for the player.

Currency, as with the civilization phase, is Spice.

Ending

The overall objective for a species is to reach the quasar at the center of the game's galaxy. To reach this point, the player must find a way past a vast Grobb empire which blocks access to the galactic center. What actually happens upon reaching this point is currently unknown, but the player can continue to play past the end and explore the hundreds of thousands of planets that populate the Spore galaxy in the "sandbox" mode.

Sandbox

The space phase is sometimes referred to as a sandbox, because the player has near-complete control of everything. It has been mentioned that the space phase works on two axes: a horizontal axis (the ability to interact with many planets in a variety of different ways) and a vertical axis (the ability to revisit different phases of gameplay).

Editors

The Creature Editor

Spore's major concept is that nearly everything is created by the players. Will Wright has stated that in addition to being simple, all the editors will be as similar as possible to each other so that skills learnt are easily transferable from one editor to the next.

In concept, the editors start simply in the cellular phase and move to higher levels of complexity acting as tutorials for progressive levels of gameplay. For example; the cell editor as demonstrated so far has a small set of choices (three sensory, three movement, and three attack options) and a two-dimensional structure compared to the E3 2006 creature editor demo which, for sensory alone, had nine options of four tiers each for a total of 36 options as well as three-dimensional structure. The structure ranges from a spine or body model in the early creature editors to presumably more free-form editors for the building editor.

At E3 2006, Wright showcased the creature editor. It allows the player to take what looks like a lump of clay with a spine and mold it into a creature. Once they are done molding the main form, they can then add body parts such as legs, arms, feet, hands, eyes, mouths, decorative elements, and a wide array of sensory organs like antennae. Many of these parts affect the creature's abilities (speed, strength, diet, etc.), while some parts are purely decorative. Once the creature is designed to the player's satisfaction, they can paint the creature using a large number of textures, overlays, colors, and patterns, which are procedurally applied depending on the topology of the creature. After the player feels their creature is complete, it can be tested in a small enclosed area, demonstrating how it would move around, fight, interact, etc.

Pre-release utility

The Spore Creature Creator utility will be available in two different versions on June 17, 2008 in Europe and June 18, 2008 in North America for PC and Mac. There will be a paid version (for $9.95/£4.99) and a demo that will be downloadable from Spore.com and included in The SimCity Box. The demo version of the editor will only contain 25% of the available creature parts that are found within the paid version (an early version of which was leaked on Saturday the 14th). The utility will include a test environment for players to see their creatures go through animations and allow the player to import other user-created creatures through the Sporepedia at Spore.com. Creatures created with this utility will help populate the Spore universe when the game is released. The utility includes screen capture and video tools as well, including YouTube functionality. The Creature Creator also gives the user the ability to create animated avatars, and will output in RSS and embeddable HTML code to facilitate easy incorporation into such sites as MySpace and Facebook.

Community

Wright calls the game a "massively single-player online game". Simultaneous multiplayer gaming is not a feature of Spore. The content that the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database (or a peer-to-peer system), cataloged and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games. The data transmitted will be very small — only a couple of kilobytes per item transmitted, according to Wright. This was due to procedural generation of material. With the release of the Creature Creator, it was discovered that creature data is embedded in small PNG images.

During Wright's Long Now Foundation seminar with Brian Eno in June 26, 2006, he mentioned that players would receive statistics of how their creatures would be faring in other players' games, referring to this as the alternate realities of the Spore metaverse. The game would report to the player on how other players interacted with them (for example, how many times other players destroyed their planet). The personalities of user-created species are dependent on how the user played them.

Spore's user community functionality includes a feature that is part of an agreement with YouTube granting players the ability to upload directly from within the game a YouTube video of their creatures' activity, and EA's creation of "The Spore YouTube Channel", which will showcase the most popular videos created this way. In addition, some user-created content will be highlighted by Maxis at the official Spore site, and earn badges of recognition for their work.

There will be a parental control toggle which allows the player to restrict what downloadable content will be allowed, from "no user generated content" to "official Maxis content" to "downloadable friend content" to "all user-created content".

Procedural generation

Main article: Development of Spore § Procedural generation

Spore uses procedural generation extensively in relation to content pre-made by the developers. Wright mentioned in an interview given at E3 2006 that the information necessary to generate an entire creature would be only a couple of kilobytes, and went on to give the following analogy: "think of it as sharing the DNA template of a creature while the game, like a womb, builds the 'phenotypes' of the animal, which represent a few megabytes of texturing, animation, etc." These small data packs for specific creatures are intended to be uploaded and downloaded freely and quickly from the Sporepedia online server.

Awards and acknowledgments

At E3 2005, the game won the following Game Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, and Best Simulation Game. At E3 2006, Spore was awarded the following Game Critics Awards: Best PC Game, Best Original Game, and Best Simulation.

On October 8, 2006 the game, its development, and its developer were featured in an article by Steven Berlin Johnson in the Sunday New York Times magazine, titled "The Long Zoom."

Licensing

Electronic Arts is using the Spore license to develop many related products, including console games and merchandising. Such licensing includes:

Software

Spore, mobile phone version.

Electronic Arts confirmed that Spore will be receiving post-release expansion packs. No other information is available as to what sort of content the packs will feature, but EA has hinted it will be similar to The Sims expansions.

The Nintendo DS spinoff is titled Spore Creatures, focusing on the Creature phase. The game will be a 2D story-based roleplaying game as the gamer plays a creature kidnapped by a UFO and forced to survive in a strange world, with elements of Nintendogs. The mobile phone/iPhone spinoff of Spore, as with the Nintendo DS version, will focus on a single phase of gameplay; in this case, the cell phase. The simplified game will allow players to try to survive as a multicellular organism in a tide pool, similar to flOw. The iPhone version takes advantage of the device's touch capabilities and 3-axis accelerometer.

A Wii spinoff of the game has been mentioned by Will Wright several times, such as in his October 26 2007 interview with the Guardian. Buechner confirmed it, revealing that plans for a Wii version were underway, and that the game would be built from the ground up and would take advantage of the Wii Remote, stating, "We're not porting it over. You know, we're still so early in design and prototyping that I don't know where we're going to end up, so I don't want to lead you down one path. But suffice to say that it's being developed with the Wii controls and technology in mind." The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Spore are still under consideration.

Merchandising

There will be an iTunes-style "Spore Store" built into the game, allowing players to purchase external Spore licensed merchandise, such as t-shirts, posters, and future Spore expansion packs. There are also plans for the creation of a type of Spore collectible card game based on the Sporepedia cards of the creatures, buildings, vehicles, and planets that have been created by the players. There are also indications of plans for the creation of customized creature figurines; some of those who designed their own creatures at E3 2006 later received 3D printed models of the creatures they created. The Spore Store also allows people to put their creatures on such items as T-shirts, mugs and stickers.

The Spore team is working on a partnership with a comic creation software company to offer comic book versions of your own Spore story. Comic books with stylized pictures of various creatures, some whose creation has been shown in various presentations, can be seen on the walls of the Spore team's office.

Digital rights management

Spore will be using a modified version of digital rights management software SecuROM as copy prevention, which will require authentication upon installation and when online access is used. This system was announced after the originally planned system met opposition from the public, as it would have required authentication every ten days. It was also announced that Spore will be playable without a disc after installation.

External links

• Official Spore website
  • Sporepedia at official Spore website
• Official Spore YouTube channel