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Neither mechanic was the best idea for its own individual stage, and the justification was high-level consistency. For example, each stage required a friendly means of engaging with other entities in the creature stage, this mechanic became dancing for other creatures to make friends while, in the civilization stage, this mechanic translated into attacking other cities with music instead of bullets. Some effort was made, of course, to share ideas and elements across stages however, the compromises involved often watered down what was supposed to make each stage distinct in the first place. (At one point, Will described each of the game’s five stages as light versions of classics – cell is like Pac-Man, creature is Diablo, tribe is Populous, civilization is Civilization, and space is Masters of Orion.) However, making five different games at once is a bad idea making one good game is usually hard enough.Įach of the five stages had different controls, different interfaces, different nouns, different verbs, different goals, and so on. Spore’s biggest issue was that the play at each stage was fairly shallow because the team was making five games at once. A game can have two big ideas, of course, but the problem was that only one of these ideas was any good.
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While prototyping that game, procedural content emerged as a way to fill the player’s universe, and that concept kept growing and expanding until it wasn’t clear anymore which concept was Spore’s big idea.
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When Will started developing the game, the core idea was powers of ten, reflected in the game’s original title, SimEverything, which promised a game at every zoom level. The other idea – procedural content – was that all content in the game (such as creatures, vehicles, and buildings) could be represented with just a few kilobytes of data – which was, in Will’s words, “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.” From this seed grew the powerful editors (which enabled some subversive creativity), procedural animation (which could truly handle anything), and content pollination (which shared the community’s best works). This film inspired Will to create a game with similar radical shifts in scale, jumping from a cell to a creature, then to a tribe, then to a civilization, and finally to a space-faring empire. The first idea refers to the classic short film by American designers Charles and Ray Eames, which zooms in, by powers of ten, on a man and a woman until reaching quarks and then zooms out to the entire universe. Ultimately, Spore was about two big ideas – powers of ten and procedural content. Nonetheless, here are four lessons from my time with Spore.ġ – Don’t be afraid to challenge the initial vision I would welcome – indeed, encourage – other members of the Spore team to speak up on their own experiences with the project, especially if their perspectives differ from my own. Thus, my view of the game’s development is inevitably incomplete – bringing to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant – and needs to be viewed from that perspective. I joined Spore in May 2007 for what ended up as the final 15 months of the project however, the team started the game in 2000, which meant that I saw just 20% of the complete story. Spore received middling reviews from the gaming press, who found the gameplay weak and unfocused, and harsh criticism from the scientific press, who felt tricked by the promise of a game built from real science.įor myself, the time is now right to put down my own thoughts on Spore’s development – my memories of the project are still fresh, yet enough time has passed to ensure that criticism doesn’t impact active teams. The initial concept – of a game in which the player evolves a species from cellular development to galactic dominion – generated an immense amount of hype, which the game struggled to fulfill upon its 2008 release. The game was announced at GDC 2005 during Will Wright’s annual mind-blowing speech on whatever floats through his head.
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A few weeks ago and with little fanfare, Spore turned five-years-old.