Spore (2008 video game)

For other uses, see Spore (disambiguation).

Spore
Developer(s)	Maxis
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts
Designer(s)	Will Wright
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
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" 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 creature, to 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 was due to be released on September 4, 2008 in Australia and Nordic regions, but Australian stores prematurely broke the street date on September 1, 2008. The game is also due to be released September 5, 2008 in Europe and Japan, and September 7 2008 in North America and Asia Pacific territories. Spore is also available for direct download from Electronic Arts. A special edition game, Spore: Galactic Edition, will include, in addition to the game, a "Making of Spore" DVD video, "How to Build a Better Being" DVD video by National Geographic Channel, "The Art of Spore" hardback mini-book, a fold-out Spore poster and a 100-page Galactic Handbook published by Prima Games.

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. The music is generated in the editors depending on which parts (eg: limbs, battle items, hands, feet, etc) are placed on the creature, vehicle or building. For example, something dangerous like a battle spike will give the music more of a ferocious feel, while something peaceful like a herbivore's mouth will give the music a more relaxed feel. Music can also be created by users.

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. The game is made up of several phases of gameplay that draw on a multitude of games, and thus a multitude of traditional genres.

Gameplay

The game allows the player to develop a species from 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 gameplay, the player's perspective and species change dramatically.

The game is broken up into distinct yet consistent, dependent "phases". The outcome of one phase affects the initial conditions facing the player in the next. Each phase 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.

If all of a player's creations are completely destroyed at some point, then that player's species goes back to the beginning of that level, or the last viable point in species development.

Unlike many other Maxis games, Spore has a primary win condition which is obtained by reaching a quasar placed in the center of the galaxy, and facing a large NPC race. However, the player may continue to play after the goal has been achieved.

Community

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. One of Spore's most social features is the Sporecast, an RSS feed that players can use to subscribe to any specific Spore player, allowing them to track their creations.

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

Interplay

The game is commonly referred to as a "massively single-player online game" and "asynchronous sharing." 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. This was due to procedural generation of material. With the release of the Creature Creator, it was discovered that creature data is embedded in the least significant bit of each channel of small PNG images, using steganography.

After reaching the space phase, players can visit other players' planets, and interact with other players' species.

Players receives statistics of how their creatures are faring in other players' games, which has been referred to as the "alternate realities of the Spore metaverse." The game reports 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.

Sporepedia

The timeline of a creature shows how it evolves over the ages.

The Sporepedia is a major part of the game. It keeps track of nearly every gameplay experience, including the evolution of a creature by graphically displaying a timeline, showing how the creature incrementally changed over the eons; it also keeps track of the creature's achievements, both noteworthy and dubious, as a species. The Sporepedia also keeps track of all the creatures, planets, vehicles and other content the player encounters over the course of a game.

Phases

There is a difficulty selector to each stage, allowing players to choose the difficulty for each part of the game. Spore defaults to the easiest level. The first four phases of the game, if the player minimally uses the editors, will take 6-15 hours to complete, but you can play as long as the community is active.

Start of life

The game opens using the concept of panspermia. A meteor plummets toward a planet and into an ocean. The meteor, now a geode, then splits, from which a tiny organism emerges.

Cell

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

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 and predators, while eating weaker microbes or plants. The player may choose whether the creature is an herbivore or a carnivore prior to starting the phase. Once the microbe has eaten several cells, the player can enter an editor in which they 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, which will refund some DNA points. If the creature dies, the player may restart from an earlier phase or point in the game. The player must also seek out special "golden shields" from meteor fragments and other organisms that provide new parts for the player to use in the editor, such as spikes, mouths or limbs.

As the microbe grows, objects that are in the background move to the foreground, which can mean being eaten by a microbe that had previously been swimming in the background. The creature's behavior directly influences its role in the creature stage, and only parts that are fitting for that creature's evolution will become available. The ocean floor becomes more prominent, and the creature editor interrupts, requesting the user add legs. Finally, the creature becomes evolved enough to come up to the surface and start the creature stage. The microbe resembles a strange insect with cartoonish, human-like eyes, which were used "to make it cute".

The main unit of "currency" is "DNA Points".

Creature

File:EpicSpore.jpg

The player's creature encounters an Epic Creature, a giant-sized version of another player's content that is uploaded to the user's computer (or installed on the Spore disc already).

The creature phase is similar to the cell phase, but with several important differences. Principally, the environment is now truly 3D. Other creatures will inhabit the world, and most of them will have been created by other players. Creatures will automatically be introduced into the environment to maintain a balanced ecosystem. If the player creates a bigger, tougher creature, the predators that are downloaded will likewise be stronger than average. It has also been stated by the game's staff that the farther the player ventures from the starting nest, the tougher the challenges and creatures that await there.

In this stage, the basic goal is the same: earn DNA points, reproduce, and avoid being eaten by predators. In order to reproduce the player must locate a mate.

Another difference introduced is the social aspect which provides means by which a player can earn DNA points. Socialization is the nonviolent alternative to consuming creatures for DNA, as befriending other creatures earns DNA points, allows access to their nests for resting, and makes them allying against attack more likely.

Creatures have stats for Abilities, Attack, and Social, using a numeric rating system. Adding specific body parts grants the ability to perform actions, such as "Call" and "Jump". Creatures can be given a name, description and tags. Body parts can be found during gameplay, which add that part to the editor for future use. These usually come from preying upon other creatures, but herbivores can gain these parts by socializing with other creatures. The only body part a creature requires is a mouth (or it will starve to death.) If a creature has no feet, it will hover slowly in the air. Creatures also may have a limited ability to fly: gliding. A creature's ability to stay aloft is dependent on two factors: the jumping ability (how high in the air) and gliding ability (how slow the descent is).

This stage will evolve the creature's social behavior, as the creature may make friends and form a herd or pack. Will Wright referred to this as a simplified version of the friend-making mini-game in The Sims. Creatures may also make friends with other species. The evolutionary goal of the creature phase is to increase the creature's brain capacity. Once the creature becomes intelligent, the game progresses to the tribal phase.

The player may encounter Epic Creatures from this phase and beyond. An Epic creature is actually user-created content that is increased to giant size; the content is picked by the software based on specific criteria suitable to that particular world.

As with the cell phase, DNA Points serve as currency.

Tribal

After the player's species evolves its brain far enough, it enters the tribal phase. Physical development ceases, as does the player's exclusive control over an individual creature, as the game focuses on the birth of division of labor for the species. 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". These are unlocked depending on the species' behavior in the previous phases.

In this phase, the game is similar to an RTS (real-time strategy game). The player may give the tribe tools such as weapons, musical instruments, and campfires. Food now replaces "DNA points" as the player's currency, which the player can spend on items and structures, or use to barter with other tribes. Creatures also gain the option to wear clothes that demarcate their professions. The player may also tame other creatures and use their eggs as food. 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. Contact with other tribes of the same species, or even different species, can take place in this phase, and creatures also learn to speak. Their language is dependent on the type of mouth they possess; primate-type mouths, for instance, result in Simlish. Creatures, as with The Sims, also "speak" with icons embedded in word balloons.

Tribe members are assigned roles such as fishing, gathering, or hunting. The creatures' behaviors 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 this; warlike tribal members will practice combat while docile members will practice instruments and throw parties.

There are five other tribes along with the player's, which can either be destroyed or befriended. For every tribe befriended or destroyed, a piece of a totem pole is built, which increases the population limit of the player's tribe. When the totem pole has five pieces, the player moves foward to the Civilization phase.

Civilization

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

The goal in the civilization phase is to gain control of the entire planet, and it is left to the player to decide whether to conquer or unite. When entering the phase, the player's tribal camp is now a city. Players now have two new editors: the building and vehicle editors. The game will attempt to detect what style of content the player prefers, downloading similar content created by other players and adding it to the buy menu. Players can construct a variety of land vehicles, aircraft, ships and submersibles. If the player elects to start at the Civilization phase, they are prompted to assign the new civilization a philosophy: militaristic, economic or religious.

In constructing vehicles and buildings, as with most real-time strategy games, there is a capacity limit; building factories will increase the cap, and constructing them adjacent to one another will provide a productivity bonus. Like Civilization III and IV, the player's territory is marked with a colored border that increases as the player gains more power through militarism or influence. In addition to military conquest, players may construct special missionary units that plant themselves outside of a city and attempt to convert other cities via propaganda. Players also have access to superweapons, each of which have devastating effects on other rival civilizations. Players can also form alliances with a rival civilization, and when the entire world has been conquered by both factions, the rival faction will join the player's.

When the player becomes technologically advanced enough, the UFO editor appears. At this point players are allowed to view the planet from space. When the player elevates the camera past a certain point, the 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 cartoon-like depiction.

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

The space phase provides new goals and paths to follow as the player begins to spread through the universe.

The player may now terraform and colonize neighboring uninhabitable planets with special tools (water tool, volcano tool, etc). Terraforming tools include pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas. Left unchecked this can cause oceans to rise, then eventually to evaporate and transform the world into a desert planet, followed by a molten rock in space. The ultimate tool is a technology which has been dubbed the Genesis device, named after the device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which instantly transforms an deadworld into a habitable one.

The player may cause comets to crash into a planet to create water, or force volcanoes to erupt to increase atmosphere. Players may build cities on the surface of an inhospitable planet once they gain the ability to create bubbled cities, similar in function to self-sustaining arcologies. When establishing colonies on alien worlds, players have to take care of them as they would any other city and keep morale up.

The player may also abduct creatures and transport them to other planets to test a planet's habitability. The player may interbreed species, or place a monolith (in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligence. On lifeless worlds, the player may also find strange "artifacts" with unknown purposes.

Later, interstellar travel becomes possible. There are more than 500,000 planets in the game's galaxy, which behaves as a real galaxy would. Using accelerated time dilation in a zoomed-out view of the entire galaxy, players can see the dynamics of the entire galaxy, as supernovae explode in brilliant points of light, and the galactic arms slowly turn. The game features, among other things, planetary nebulae, reflection nebulae, and black holes, from which the player has to keep a cautionary distance at the event horizon.

Players can make contact with other civilizations, most of which are created by other players. Intelligent species can be found, and 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 creating a federation or sparking an interstellar war. As a show of great force, the player may even completely destroy a planet (similar to the capabilities of the Death Star from Star Wars), which may bring retribution from that species and its allies. The player is sometimes called upon to fight off an invasion of their home planet.

EA has stated that there will be a 'secret ending' which can be found within the Space Stage. However it has also been said only the 'really hard core gamers' will be able to find it.

Currency, as with the civilization phase, is spice.

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

See also: Spore Creature Creator

Tribal clothing editor

User-generated content is a major feature of Spore; there are eighteen different types of editors (some unique to a phase), and even a music editor which allows players to create and share songs to be used as the Civ stages' nations national anthem. Will Wright has stated that in addition to being simple, all the editors will be as similar as possible so that skills learned are easily transferable from one editor to the next.

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 demonstrated so far has nine choices and a two-dimensional environment while the creature editor has dozens of options and a 3D environment. The structure ranges from a spine and body model in the creature editor to more free-form editors for the buildings.

For example, the creature editor allows the player to take what looks like a lump of clay with a spine and mold it into a creature. Once they have molded the torso, they can then add parts such as legs, arms, feet, hands, noses, eyes, mouths, decorative elements, and a wide array of sensory organs. Many of these parts affect the creature's abilities (speed, strength, diet, etc.), while some parts are purely decorative. Once the creature is formed, they can paint it using a large number of textures, overlays, colors, and patterns, which are procedurally applied depending on the topology of the creature. The only "required" feature is the mouth (otherwise, the creature will die from starvation). All other parts are optional; for example, creatures without feet will float slowly in midair.

Other editors are used for buildings and for vehicles. Eventually, players can edit entire planets, using various in-game processes. Electronic Arts has promised new editors to be released after the game's release, such as a Flora editor.

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.

Reception

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".

Spore won the GameTrailers E3 2008 Award for Best PC Game. It also won the E3 2008 Overall Best of Show from GameSpy.

PC PowerPlay gave the game a score of 9/10, praising it for its limitless custom content and varied types of gameplay but criticized it for shallowness, noting that the phases lack the depth of the games they were based on and that the creature phase was repetitive. The reviewer concluded that Spore was not targeted at hardcore gamers, but a more mainstream audience.

Licensing

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

Software

Electronic Arts confirmed that Spore will be receiving post-release expansion packs.

The Nintendo DS spinoff is titled Spore Creatures, focusing on the Creature phase. The game will be a 2D/3D 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. Spore Origins is the mobile phone/iPhone/iPod spinoff of Spore, and 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 players' "Spore stories". 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. The utility was revealed at the Comic-Con International: San Diego on July 24, 2008 as the Spore Comic Creator, which would utilize MashOn.com and its e-card software.

Digital rights management

Spore will be using a modified version of digital rights management (DRM) 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. A disadvantage of this DRM software is that it does not allow one user to login to his/her Spore profile on another user's copy of the game, and that it has a limit of three installations. The installation limit is triggered each time a user changes certain pieces of hardware, reformats the computer, or installs/upgrades a new operating system. Furthermore, when a user uninstalls Spore, the installation count is not reset.

EA Customer Support, however, states that EA can be contacted by the user and have, on a case-by-case criteria, their activation count for Spore reset when the activation limit is depleted.

See also

• Business simulation game
• City-building game
• Government simulation game
• Life simulator game
• Real-time strategy game
• Simulated reality
• SimLife

External links

• Official Spore website
• Sporepedia at official Spore website
• Official Spore YouTube page
• SporeWiki, an external wiki