Spore (video game)

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Spore
Developer(s)	Maxis
Publisher(s)	EA Games
Designer(s)	Will Wright
Release date(s)	TBA 2007
Genre(s)	Life simulation
Mode(s)	Massively Single-Player
Rating(s)	ESRB: Rating Pending
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, Nintendo DS confirmed [1], possibly all current handhelds and consoles [2]

Spore is a PC game under development by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. The game has drawn wide attention for its promise to simulate the development of a species through open-ended, on-the-fly, user-guided evolution.

At first glance, Spore is a "teleological evolution" game, or "god game". The player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal. Eventually, the species becomes sapient. At this point the player begins molding and guiding this species' society, progressing it towards a space-faring civilization. Spore's main innovation is the use of procedural generation for many of the components of the game, providing vast scope and open-endedness. Wright said: "I didn't want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien."^[3]

Spore was actually a working title, suggested by developer Ocean Quigley, for the game which was otherwise referred to as Sim Everything. The title Spore stuck, and 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."^[4]

Contents 1 Development 1.1 Release 2 Gameplay 2.1 Molecular phase 2.2 Cellular phase 2.3 Creature phase 2.3.1 Flying and swimming creatures 2.4 Tribal phase 2.5 Civilization phase 2.6 Terraform and galactic phases 3 Elements of gameplay 3.1 Editors 3.2 Procedural generation 3.3 "Massively single-player metaverse" 4 Music 5 Technologies 6 Awards and acknowledgements 7 Expanded universe 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Development

Spore's development began in 2000, around the time that development began for The Sims Online.^[5] At the 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC), Spore was first revealed and demonstrated to the public during a speech on procedural generation.^[3]

It was officially unveiled two months later at E3 2005, the industry's annual trade show. GDC 2006 featured two Spore related talks, Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore^[6] and Spore: Preproduction Through Prototyping^[7]. A video released on YouTube ^[8] shows "unedited footage of Spore that will be going to TV networks covering E3 [2006]", and includes an overhauled creature editor, a first look at the texturing tools, as well as glimpses at other aspects of the game. Will Wright has said that the game was also influenced by many TV shows, movies, and toys, such as Lego and Star Wars.

At the DICE Summit, Wright playfully introduced four designers according to their design team personas, dubbing designer and senior art director Quigley as The Scientist, Chaim Gingold as The Toymaker, Jenna Chalmers as The Mastermind, Alex Hutchinson as The Cowboy, and himself as The Traffic Cop.^[9]

The New York Times reported a projected development cost of twenty million US dollars on October 10, 2006.^[10]

[edit] Release

No official release date has been announced.

In August 2006, Wright told GameSpot and Stephen Colbert that Spore would be released in the second half of 2007.^[11] The game's publisher, Electronic Arts (EA), partially confirmed this in a conference call for their fiscal quarter ending March 31, 2006. The company stated that Spore would not be released in the following fiscal year which ended March 31, 2007.^[12] The February 2007 report released by EA states current release dates for their games. The current release date for Spore in this report is the 3rd quarter of 2007.^[13]

In the January 2007 Popular Science Sci-Tech preview, the release date of Spore is early September 2007.

The January 2007 edition of PC Gamer magazine contains an interview with Morgan Roarty, a senior producer of the game. The interview includes information about the vehicle editor and refers to a release date as the 2nd quarter of 2007, April to June.^[14]

In the February 2007 issue of the Danish version of RELEASE, EA's official magazine, an article on Spore states:

In [Autumn], players have the opportunity to form life from the very beginning.

A 5 March 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, written about the departure of Electronic Arts CEO Lawrence Probst, suggested that Spore would be released by April 2008.^[15]

On 9 March 2007, Wright stated that they were aiming for a September 2007 release date after his talk at the TED conference.

Both Microsoft Windows^[16] and Nintendo DS^[13] versions of the game have been confirmed. Additionally, Wright has expressed the desire to release the game on other platforms, such as the PlayStation Portable, seventh generation consoles, Apple Macintosh, and even mobile phones.^[17]

[edit] Gameplay

Spore will be a simulation that "ranges from the molecular phase to the galactic phase".^[18] It will consist of several long phases, each with its own style of play.

In his original Game Developers Conference speech, Wright likened the style of gameplay of each of the six phases to an existing game. During the annual Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences DICE Summit on February 7, 2007, a slide was displayed (see image, right) which lists a total of eight phases.

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

• Tetris for the molecular phase (however, this stage is not mentioned in the official Spore website)
• Pac-Man or flOw for the cellular phase
• Diablo for the creature phase
• Populous for the tribal phase
• SimCity, Risk, and Civilization for the civilization phase
• SimEarth, Destroy All Humans!, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the space phase, with elements of sandbox gameplay.^[3] DICE 2007 referred to it as similar to Master of Orion.

Each phase of the game determines the starting point of the next phase. In the Game Developers Conference presentation, the creature that Will Wright was "guiding" through the creature phase was based on his earlier cell creature. It had three legs, a tail, eyes and a mouth in roughly the same position. He had evolved this creature through gameplay of the prior phases. He mentioned that the creatures' personality, whether it be logical or emotional, peaceful or violent, etc, is also affected by this gameplay.

[edit] Molecular phase

Very little is known of the molecular phase after its revelation on February 7, 2007. Current rumors state that the Molecular Phase might not be a part of the playable game. Current evidence states that the Molecular stage was a name used as the specific beginning of the Cell Stage.

The gameplay was likened to that of the classic puzzle game Tetris in the presentation. Since then this stage has not been featured in presentations which have started with the cellular phase. Further, at SXSW2007 the Spore presentation only showed five stages in the opening slide - cellular, creature, tribal, civilization and space faring.^[19] Whether the sub stages mentioned below have been dropped or play a part in larger stages is still open to speculation.

[edit] Cellular phase

The cellular phase is sometimes referred to as the microbial stage or the tide pool stage. The player guides simple microbes around in a 2D environment where the microbes must deal with fluid dynamics, being eaten, and weaker microbes. There are at least three other types of cells, two of which can eat the player's microbe.

Once the player's microbe has eaten several cells, it forms an egg which, when clicked, opens the creature editor which allows the player to modify the appearance, shape, and abilities of the microbe. The player can then add offensive abilities. For example, in Wright's 2005 demo, he added a small spike which allows the player's microbe to attack the organisms that previously ate the player's microbe. Each time the player's microbe progresses to the next generation, it grows larger. Once the microbe grows to a certain size, the player leaves the 2D world of the microscopic and enters the creature phase.

[edit] Creature phase

While the tide pool phase introduces the player to the game and its editor, the creature phase plays a big part in terms of what the player's creatures will look like in the later phases. It is similar to the tide pool phase, but there are several important differences. The most obvious one is that it is a 3D environment. There will be other creatures inhabiting the world and most, if not all, of them will have been created by other players. If there is a lack of predators in the ecosystem and weak herbivores are everywhere, the game will automatically download a new race of predators that another player has created and load them into the current player's world to balance the 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, like-wise, be stronger than average predators.

In Wright's 2005 demonstration, the creature with which he began looked remarkably similar to his earlier microbe. This led many people to believe that the creature was based upon the microbe's appearance. However, in a 2006 video from E3, narrated by a senior programmer, it was said that the player will initially begin as a slug-like animal. The narrator further stated the reason for this was to allow for more player creativity. It is unsure which method will be used in the final game.

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 tide pool phase, the player must now locate a mate. Once the player's creature has laid an egg, it does not hatch straight away; scavengers will attempt to steal the eggs and the player must defend them. Before the egg hatches, the player will have the opportunity to 'evolve' their creature further into the next generation, which can be done by spending DNA points to buy body parts. When the egg hatches, the player becomes a baby version of the creature that spawned it. Aesthetically, this version of the creature will be smaller (but with certain features exaggerated such as the head) and have a voice of a higher pitch. This stage will have a profound effect on the creature's social skill evolution, as the baby will be making friends and forming its own herd; 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 sapient and the player progresses to the tribal phase.

[edit] Flying and swimming creatures

Not much had been discussed about the possibility of flying creatures in the game, but a flying creature was briefly seen in the GDC 2005 demo. No other examples of flying creatures have been seen, so their existence is still speculative. The game does include the option to place feathers on a creature, though it is still unknown whether the feathers would be functional, or just decorative, as they are on the Featherump.^[20] Similarly, the underwater phase has not been seen since the demo, leading to fears that it may have been cut.^[21] Additionally, in the SXSW demo, each phase has a mentioned text goal on the screen, and the stated goal of the tidepool phase is "become large enough to move onto land," by implication omitting a creature-underwater phase. However, the opening Flash player cinematic of the official site features an underwater evolution of a creature,^[22] so it is possible that the underwater phase is simply a part of the larger creature phase, though the site has not been updated since August 2006, and the flash piece may have a still older creation date.

[edit] Tribal phase

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 direct control over an individual creature), but the player is given a hut and several of the creatures designed in earlier phases.^[24] At this point the game is similar to an RTS in that the player can order the tribe members to move, attack, etc. The player may give these creatures tools such as weapons, musical instruments and campfires. The creatures' behaviors and personalities are affected by what tools the player decides to give them. At this point, tribe-to-tribe contact can take place, should the player choose to (whether that contact be diplomatic or violent). Once the tribe reaches 20 members, the player will progress to the city phase.

[edit] Civilization phase

In his GDC presentation, Will Wright described part of the civilization phase as "a simplified version of SimCity". The player's tribal camp has grown to a city, which must be cared for. Players can use a building editor to change the appearance of the buildings in their city. As in the creature phase, 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. Players will also be able to make relations between their civilization and other civilizations on their home planet, whether peaceful or war-torn.

Once players reach this point they are allowed to zoom out further for the first time, and view the entire planet from space. Once the player zooms out past a certain point, the realistically detailed features of the planet become more stylized. For example, the cities of the planet change from a properly-scaled view with all individual buildings visible to a more stylized, cartoon-like depiction for clarity. As in the tribal stage, players can meet other creatures of the same species in other cities to attempt either diplomacy, for opening trade routes and eventually forming an alliance, or for the purpose of attacking them. At this point, a vehicle editor is opened, allowing the player to construct a large variety of land vehicles, aircraft, boats, and submarines.

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 diplomatic means. Once players have gained enough credits in this phase, they unlock the UFO and the UFO editor, and can proceed into the space phase.

[edit] Terraform and galactic phases

After the civilization phase, the space phase begins. During the 2007 DICE Summit, it was revealed that the space phase was divided into two separate phases: terraform and galactic, denoted by the advancement of the race the player controls; terraforming represents a limited form of power to slowly change planets within one's own system, whilst the galactic phase represents a more God-like power upon the acquisition of the interstellar space drive: being able to travel outside of one's solar system. This ability presents the player with multiple options:

• The player may terraform and colonize uninhabitable planets with special tools that are purchased with credits (water tool, volcano tool, etc.) The ultimate power in that area would be 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. Players may colonize hostile worlds or deep under the ocean 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.
• The player may travel between star systems and make contact with other civilizations on distant worlds, most of which are created by other players. Interactions revealed so far include impressing civilizations with fireworks, attacking them with weapons, or trying to establish a language with the civilization. These civilizations may react violently to the player or worship them, depending on that civilization's behavior and the race's personality.
• The player could try to conquer the galaxy by different means: beginning an interstellar war, diplomatically creating an interstellar union, etc.
• The player can run the mouse over other star systems and their individual planets to try to pick up radio static or noise that can indicate intelligent life.
• The player may abduct creatures (familiar or unfamiliar) and transport them to other planets. Players can do this to test a planet's inhabitants to see if they are friendly or not, or to merely test a planet's habitability.
• The player may interbreed different species genetically.
• The player may cause icy comets to crash into a planet to create water.
• The player may place a "monolith" (à la 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligent life, then come back later to see what has evolved.
• The player may use a weapon to completely destroy a planet (similar to the capabilities of the Death Star from the Star Wars saga).
• The player may scan content and add the information to a database designed like a card game called the Sporepedia.^[25]
• The player may also find strange objects with unknown purposes to be used later on, possibly adding tools for the UFO.

The galactic phase is sometimes referred to as sandbox mode, since the player has near complete control of anything and everything. Rather than presenting the player with a finite goal, as earlier phases do, the Space Phase gives the player freedom to accomplish any variety of tasks they wish to perform. Planetary zoos, alliances with other races and interstellar warfare have all been mentioned, and are all believed to be possible in-game. Every race will have a 'personality' that will change how a player interacts with them. (At GDC, Wright has mentioned that the races of Star Trek have influenced these "personalities"). User-created races uploaded to the player's machine will behave as that user played them; that is, if a user played a race pacifistically, that user's race would behave in the same manner to the player. Conversely, if the user played that race as a hostile species, it would be very difficult for the player to negotiate with that species.

It has also 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).

In the E3 2006 demo, Will Wright explained that there would be over half a million different stars, each one having it's own planets, more then anyone could visit in a lifetime. As is traditional with most of Will Wright's games, the game never presents the player with an absolute ending and the galactic phase continues for as long as the player wishes. The exploration remains fresh from uploaded content and on-the-fly procedural generation by the software.

[edit] Elements of gameplay

[edit] Editors

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 content creation skills are easily transferable from one editor to the next. There are several different editors, each one dealing with a different type of content.

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 tide pool 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. Editors move from a spine or body model in the early editors to presumably more free-form editors for the civilization or sim-city phase. Planet-molding is perhaps the most ambitious, free-form and least detailed editing option; whether or not it will involve a true editor or an array of tools available to the "UFO" is unknown.

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 of their choosing. Once they are done molding the main form, they can then add 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 final 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. After the player feels their creature is complete, it can be tested in a small enclosed area. There are also the building editor (city phase), the hut editor (tribal phase), the vehicle editor (civilization phase), the flora editor (from tribal to space phase), the UFO editor (civilization/space phase) and the terrain editor, and all work from the same basic software.

At the DICE summit, designer and senior art director Quigley revealed the difficulty of making the editors (the creature and vehicle editors in particular) extremely accessible, stating it was like "art directing a million incompetents... [Gamers] don’t have good sense as to what makes a good character, so you have to put in all these techniques and tools, so when they do something, it looks good."^[9]

[edit] Procedural generation

In Spore, all creature animations are made on the fly. "The game automatically knows how to animate your creature based on how you put it together. For example, if you give your creature four equine legs, you can logically expect it to gallop around like a horse"^[27]

In Wright's first public demonstration of Spore, he created a tripedal creature in the creature editor. This creature was dubbed the Willosaur^[28] by fans, after Wright, and became one of the mascots for the game, appearing prominently in the game's first trailer.^[29]

The game then determined how a lizard with three legs and a prehensile tail should walk. Other animations of the lizard including hunting, eating, swimming, dragging objects, mating, and dancing, all of which were procedurally generated based on the model that the player created. Wright then revealed several pre-made creatures which moved realistically, despite their exotic design: large, insectile creatures with multiple heads and six legs, Tweety Bird the SUV: a walking bird whose massive head caused it to tilt while turning, and a dog-like creature with a set of unusually branching limbs. He also humorously demonstrated a creature that looked like a Care Bear (claiming it would be a vicious carnivore), indicating that players could create animals similar to those found in nature or popular culture.

There has not been much direct information released regarding the technology Spore uses to procedurally generate its creatures and worlds. 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, according to Wright, who presented 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".

Chris Hecker, who currently works on Spore (including its early prototypes), gave a presentation at GDC 2005 and Futureplay entitled "Why you should have paid attention in multivariable calculus", in which he describes the mathematics of an implicit surface and various methods to apply texture projections to such surfaces. Sean O'Neil worked as a consultant for Maxis "to assist with R&D involving dynamic generation and rendering of a fractal-based world".^[30] He maintains a website with demonstration of procedural planet generation and a simulation of dynamic atmospheric scattering.^[31]

Wright noted that he hired a handful of demoscene programmers and artists because of their familiarity with procedural generation.

[edit] "Massively single-player metaverse"

Wright calls the game a "massively single-player online game"^[32]. Simultaneous multiplayer gaming is not a feature of Spore. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings 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 the aforementioned procedural generation of material.

During Wright's Long Now Foundation speech with Brian Eno in June 26, 2006, he mentioned that players would receive stats 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 (e.g. how many times other players destroyed their planet). The personalities of user-created species are dependent on how the user played them.^[33]

[edit] Music

The music for the game is being designed by Brian Eno, an artist famous for his work with ambient music. Eno has worked with Kent Jolly and Aaron McLeran to implement a simple piece of software in Spore called "The Shuffler", which procedurally generates fragments for the soundtrack from a number of samples. Eno appeared in the aforementioned June 2006 lecture to give a talk alongside Wright at the Long Now Foundation ^[34]. In January 2007, Eno confirmed his involvement in a lecture given at the University of Arts, Berlin ^[35]. Eno had been involved with Wright and Spore at least as early as June 2006^[36].

[edit] Technologies

Main article: Interactive skeleton-driven simulation

Some of the advanced animation technologies used in Spore are described in the research and papers published by Steve Capell (and others), who made his Ph.D dissertation on Interactive Character Animation Using Dynamic Elastic Simulation^[37] and is now employed at EA. The papers were submitted and presented to SIGGRAPH. Specific papers which cover the animation techniques are:

• Physically Based Rigging for Deformable Characters^[38]
• Interactive Skeleton-Driven Dynamic Deformations^[39] and
• A Multiresolution Framework for Dynamic Deformations^[40]

all part of the Deformable Objects and Characters projects^[41] with example videos.

Other elements of the animation synthesizing techniques are presented in the Motion Libraries for Character Animation projects^[42] at the University of Washington and contain more videos.

The video^[43] of the skeletal editor in the project offers insight into the theory behind the animation technique.

Will Wright names the demoscene as a major influence on Spore,^[3] which is largely based on procedural content generation developed by many demoscene veterans. Specifically, as the demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit micros such as the Atari and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data. Wright showed pictures from demoparties like Assembly demo party to great applause at the GDC '05.

[edit] Awards and acknowledgements

At E3 2005, the game won the following Game Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, and Best Simulation Game.^[44] At E3 2006, Spore was awarded the following Game Critics Awards: Best PC Game, Best Original Game, and Best Simulation^[45].

On 8 October, 2006, the game, its development, and its developer were featured in an article by Steven Berlin Johnson in the Sunday New York Times magazine; the article was entitled "The Long Zoom".^[10]

[edit] Expanded universe

EA has plans to expand Spore's features even further. There are plans for the creation of a type of Spore collectible card game based on 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.^[46]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official Spore website
• Summary of Long Now Seminar with Will Wright and Brian Eno
• Popular Science interview with Will Wright
• Popular Science podcast interview with Chaim Gingold
• GDC 2005 Presentation (full)
• GDC 2005 Presentation (gameplay only)
• E3 2006 Presentation videos
• E3 2006 Gameplay Demo
• Spore Presentation with Robin Williams
• D.I.C.E. 2007 - Will Wright and the Spore Design Team
• Gaming Steve Spore Forums - A popular Spore forum.
• SporeWiki.net - A wiki dedicated to all topics related to Spore.

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