Spore



Spore is a simulation computer game designed by Will Wright that is developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. Wright has a history of designing innovative, successful games like The Sims and SimCity, and Spore appears likely to continue that trend. It is remarkable both for the innovative technology of the game design, as well as the expansive range of sci-fi game play.

Spore is, at first glance, an evolution simulation game: the player molds and guides a creature across many generations of evolution, until it becomes intelligent or achieves certain degree of sapience, at which point, the scope of the game expands to encompass a broader range of social evolution. This is achieved by first giving the player control over a lone creature (designed by the player) until the creature begins a tribe of his own, at which point a tribal real-time strategy aspect is incorporated into the game by war with other tribes. The player then begins molding and guiding the creature's society into a space-faring civilization, where the player and the creatures begin to colonize other planets and eventually control a galactic empire and/or alliance.

Spore's main innovation, the basis of its scope and customizability, is that Wright has moved into procedural generation of content.

At E3 2005, the game won the following Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, and Best Simulation Game. Answering a question about game-play, Wright said that, "There are games that let their players feel like Luke Skywalker. I want players to feel like George Lucas." The game-play has been described to be a mixture of Pac-Man, FlOw, Diablo, Mr. Potatohead, Erectorset, Clay, Populous, SimCity, Legos, Civilization, Destroy All Humans, and Kid Pix at various stages of game-play.

Maxis had approximately 70 developers working on Spore, most earning six-figure salaries. It took an estimated US$30 million to develop the game.

Spore can also be played without the DVD after installing it.

EA Games has come under heavy criticism for its Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions with Spore as it may only be installed five (5) times on three (3) different machines (a reformatted machine counts as a different machine). After this limit is reached the game will no longer activate. Consumer groups have complained that this prevents people from really owning the game because they are effectively renting it from EA Games for a limited period of time. This decision is reflected in Spore's poor sales figures, however there is an offical mod which "clears up" a machine.

Development
The name Spore was originally a working title, suggested by developer Ocean Quigley, for the game which was first referred to by the general public as SimEverything. Even though SimEverything 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 'Sims' 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 the 'The Sims' series was."

Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson joined the Maxis team to work on Spore.

The procedurally-generated music for the game was designed by Brian Eno, an artist famous among other things for his ambient music. The music is generated by 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 in the form of a short national anthem for their civilization or empire.

Genre
Spore does not fall neatly into any one video game genre. While the game's creators and several media sources described it in 2006 as a god game, other journalists have described it as a real-time strategy game and life simulation game. The game is made up of several stages of gameplay that draw on a multitude of games, and thus a multitude of traditional genres.

Gameplay
Coined Creatiolutionism, 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, where it interacts with alien species across the galaxy. Throughout the game, the player's perspective and species change dramatically.

The game is broken up into distinct yet consistent, dependent "stages". The outcome of one stage 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 stage. While players are able to spend as much time as they prefer in each, it is possible to accelerate or skip phases altogether. Some stages feature optional missions; when the player completes a mission, they are granted a bonus, such as a new ability or money.

If all of a player's creations are completely destroyed at some point, the player's species will be respawned at its nearest colony.

Unlike many other Maxis games, Spore has a primary win condition which is obtained by reaching the center of the galaxy, and facing The Grox, a large empire species guarding the Core. 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 Achievements 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 the creations of any specific Spore player, allowing them to track their creations.

There is a 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". Players can also ban any content in-game, at any time, and Maxis monitors content with notable numbers of player bans.

Interplay
The game is 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 is uploaded automatically to a central database, 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.

After reaching the Space stage, players can visit other players' planets, and interact with other players' species, tribes and civilizations.

Via the in-game "MySpore Page", players receive 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 allied with their species). The personalities of user-created species are dependent on how the user played them.

Sporepedia
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 which shows 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. Players can also upload their creations to Spore.com to be viewed by the public at the Sporepedia website.

Stages
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. Note that there is no time limit for any stage: the player may stay in a single stage as long as they wish, and progress to the next stage when ready.

Cell stage


The Cell stage is the first stage in the game, and begins with a cinematic demonstrating the scientific concept of panspermia, with a meteor crashing into the ocean of a planet, which breaks, revealing a single-celled organism. The player guides this simple microbe around in a 3D environment on a single 2D plane, reminiscent of flOw, where it must deal with fluid dynamics and predators, while eating weaker cells or plants. The player may choose whether the creature is an herbivore or a carnivore prior to starting the stage. Once the cell has eaten several pieces of food, the player can enter an editor in which they can modify the appearance, shape, and abilities of the cell by spending "DNA points". A player may choose to remove a part, which will refund the full price. Parts are acquired by seeking out special "golden shields" from meteor fragments and other organisms, which provide new parts to use in the editor, such as spikes, mouths or propulsion mechanisms. If the creature dies, the player restarts from wherever it died.

The stage consists of five stages, which are halved themselves; every half-stage, the creature grows larger. As the cell grows, objects that are in the background move to the foreground, which can mean being eaten by a cell that had previously been swimming in the background.

The cell's eating habits in the Cell stage directly influence its diet in the Creature stage, and only mouths appropriate to the diet established in the Cell stage will become available in the Creature stage (However, it is possible to keep the cell mouth opposite what is available in the creature stage, thus allowing a player to truly be omnivorous even if the game gives him/her herbaceous or carnivorous status. If that cell mouth is removed, though, it cannot be regained). The ocean floor becomes more prominent as the player progresses, and once the player decides to progress to the next stage, the creature editor appears, prompting the user to add legs before the shift to land.

Creature stage


Once the player's evolved creature has been granted legs, its journey on land begins at a single nest guarded by other creatures of the same species. From this nest, the player's creature can mate with one of the creatures at the nest, add or remove parts in the Creature editor (once the creature has mated), or heal itself after being wounded in combat.

The environment is composed of a balance between neutral and aggressive species. Environmental triggers, as well as the player's vital health and hunger meters, are always a concern-and sometimes a challenge. Sea monsters and the occasional Epic creature roam the seemingly boundless land, and sources of food can sometimes be far.

As the player's creature evolves and traverses the mainland, it will encounter various other species and Epic creatures. The creature can then decide whether to befriend or hunt these neighboring species; this decision in turn affects the characteristics of the player's future tribe in the consecutive stage. Also scattered across the land are bone piles or skeletons that both hide parts. These parts can be accessed in the Creature Editor during mating.

Socializing with creatures of other species can allow the player the option of forming a pack. This pack travels, socializes, and fights other creatures alongside the player, and can reach a maximum capacity of three. Packs can be vital to the survival and evolution of the player: a large pack can increase the odds of the player befriending other creatures, or can aid the player in combat. Any creatures from befriended species can be added to an empty slot in the player's pack.

Once the creature has befriended or hunted enough of the other creatures, it will have attained a higher level of intelligence and complexity. From that point, the creature will be prepared for the Tribal, Civilization, and Space stages.

Tribal stage


After the player's species evolves its brain far enough, it enters the Tribal stage. 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, as well as two of six possible "super powers", unlocked depending on the species' behavior in the previous stages.

This stage begins with a cutscene parodying 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this stage, the game is similar to a RTS (real-time strategy game). The player may give the tribe tools such as weapons, musical instruments, and healing or fishing implements. Food now replaces "DNA points" as the player's currency, which the player can spend on structures and additional tribe members, or use to appease other tribes. Creatures also gain the option to wear clothes, the editing of which replaces the Creature Editor in the 'Tribal Editor'. If creatures of a different species were added to the player's pack in the Creature stage, they are now used as pets. Additional creatures may be domesticated in the Tribal stage, which provide eggs for food. Contact with other tribes of the same species, or even different species, can take place in this stage, 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, or the Insect type mouths result in the language of the warrior bugs from Starship Troopers. 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, allying other tribes, 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 may increase the population limit of the player's tribe. Depending on the means the tribe used to overtake the neighboring tribe--by forming an alliance or initializing a hostile takeover--the totem piece will either be a music-playing or war-like figure. When the totem pole has five pieces, the player may move forward to the Civilization stage.

Civilization stage


The events of Tribal stage have left the player's tribe the dominant species of the planet, but the species itself has since fragmented into several nations, similar to the way humanity now lives. The player retains control of a single nation. The goal in the Civilization stage is to gain control of the entire planet, and it is left to the player to decide whether to conquer it militarily, economically, or religiously. When entering the stage, the tribal camp is now a city. Two new editors (the building and vehicle editors) are used to create city buildings and vehicles. The player can place three types of building (House, Factory, and Entertainment) around the default City hall building (which acts as a house) and up to 9 types of vehicles (religious, economic, and military in sea, land and air). To earn income, players can capture Spice Geysers, conduct trade, or build factories.

In constructing vehicles and buildings, as with most real-time strategy games, there is a capacity limit; building houses will increase the cap, and constructing various buildings adjacent to one another will provide a productivity bonus or deficit: for example, building an entertainment center next to a house will provide happiness, but a factory will decrease happiness and increase production. 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. The main unit of currency is "Sporebucks".

Instead of military conquest, players with a Religious trait construct special missionary units that convert other cities via propaganda. Likewise, Economic players communicate solely by trade and have no weapons. Players also have access to super weapons, 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 has conquered or allied with all the civilizations on the planet and decides to move on to the Space stage, the UFO editor appears. At this point players are allowed to view the planet from space.

Space stage


The Space stage provides new goals and paths to follow as the player begins to spread through the galaxy.

The player may now terraform and colonize neighboring uninhabitable planets with special tools (comet tool, volcano tool, etc). Although these tools start off limited and very expensive, the player can obtain infinite versions. Terraforming tools include a heat ray which can create more favorable conditions on, for example, an ice planet. If 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 (though since Heat Ray is a manual tool, this will only happen if the tool is left on). These tools may also be used as weapons, sucking out the atmosphere or altering the temperature of a planet in order to kill the inhabitants without a pitched battle. The ultimate terraforming tool is a technology called the Staff of Life, dubbed the 'Genesis device' in the game's development stage, which instantly can transform any planet into an ideal (T3) planet, complete with stable temperature and fully-filled ecosystems, although it is limited to 42 uses.

The player may cause ice comets to crash into a planet to lower temperatures, or force volcanoes to erupt to increase atmosphere. Players may build colonies on the surface of an inhospitable planet 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 of 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 and to create ecosystems to stabilize a planet's atmosphere. The player may utilize various tools such as Fireworks to interact with primitive lifeforms, or place a Monolith (in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligence. On some worlds, the player may also find strange "artifacts" with functions varying from terraform coloring tools to treasures which can be sold for a relatively large price. Artifacts can be present on lifeless worlds and inhabited worlds, although taking them from planets occupied by sentient beings will anger them.

There are more than 100,000 planets in the Spore Galaxy (including Earth and the Solar System).

Players can make contact with other civilizations, called 'empires', 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 or a 'happy ray', attack them with weapons, or cast crop circles. 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 (using a bomb known as the "Planet Buster" which has similar capabilities to those of the Death Stars 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, colony, or an ally's planet, from space pirates, environmental collapse, or attack from enemies.

EA has stated that there will be a storyline and 'secret ending' which can be found within the Space stage, and that 'only the most hardcore gamers' will get to it. This goal is the previously mentioned Staff of Life in the center of the galaxy, guarded by a hostile race of cybernetic aliens known as The Grox, who are extremely difficult to defeat. The player also must download the "Expanded Travel Radius" official mod if he/she wishes to defeat them.

Sandbox
The Space stage is sometimes referred to as a sandbox, because the player gains near-complete control of everything, though in the initial stages of the Space stage, the player inevitably must interact with other civilizations as in previous stages. It has been mentioned that the Space stage 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 stages of gameplay).

Flora Editor
There is also a mysterious "Flora Editor". It is said it will be released in further games.

Editors
User-generated content is a major feature of Spore; there are eighteen different types of editors (some unique to a stage), and even a music editor which allows players to create songs to be used as a national anthem in the Civilization stages and above. 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 Cell stage 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 legs will, as said before, slither on the ground like a slug.

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. However, a beta flora editor and expanded cell editor are available in the game code and can be accessed by changing the target parameters for the shortcut executable. It is worth noting that the beta flora editor does not affect game play, as you will not see your creations in the actual game, too these creations can not be shared online but this will likely change if the editor is made official.

There are also simple means of creating visual media: such as a screenshot facility that captures the screen without the surrounding user-interface; and a 640x480 video creator with a built-in YouTube upload service. Maxis has also partnered with a third-party to provide a Spore-branded Comic Book Creator service, which was live at launch.

Expansion packs
As with many Maxis games, Spore is likely to have many expansions with possible packs for Flora editor, Aquatic stage and a Hut editor.

An expansion or parts pack called the Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack was released on November 18, 2008. It wasn't a full expansion pack that would add game play, but rather an item pack, containing about 60 new body parts, similar to The Sims 2 Stuff packs.

An expansion pack for space called Spore Galactic Adventures has also been confirmed for future release. It will allow the player to beam onto planets, rather than using a hologram. It will also add an "Adventure Creator" which allows for the creation of missions to share with the Spore community. It is planned to be released by June 22nd, 2009.

Upcoming games
Also in a 2009 Spore Evolves preview it was revealed a new distant game (release date unknown) for younger people that is Spore Creature Keeper. In it you may take care of creatures as pets, build their houses and even play online. It has a little of Sims (hunger bar).

Sometime in 2009, Spore Hero (Wii) and Spore Hero Arena (DS) are going to be released. They might be similar to the Spore Galactic Adventures and are going to come out this summer. Exact release date is also unknown.