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 type 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 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 the player controls more than one creature and a tribal real-time strategy aspect is incorporated into the game by war or socialization with other tribes. There is then a stage where the player must unite the planets city-building cultures through various means. The player then begins molding and guiding the creature's civilized 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 Game 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, Lego, 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 30 million USD to develop the game.

Spore can also be played without the disk after installing it. However, the player can't after installing Spore Galactic Adventures.

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. However there is an official 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, and a lot of his contribution focused on the Civilization stage. A noticeable aspect of this is the format of the communication screen in Space and Civilization stage.

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.

Spore is notable for having several features that are new to games, as a revolutionary game. Spore has advanced Procedural generation and its creativity is huge, and is one of the few games that allows the player's imagination and creativity to shine. Many features of Spore are changeable with editors. They however, have limits built in, such as the complexity meter, that forcing players to think more carefully. There are hidden features in the editors, that the player can find as well over time.

Removed features and changes
Since the demo's of Spore, some gameplay features, editors and stages have been removed, however, these features were possibly removed because they were glitchy. The style and graphics of Spore which hasn't changed too much, but the artistry is more cute in today's Spore, in order to arrract a wider variety of players, however, this has still caused some upset with players who want a more realistic game. Features could have also been removed because Maxis was being experimental with what parts would work, and what might not, and to see what players wanted. Will Wright hinted this in the Ask Will Wright interview. Some have speculated whether they have been removed to open oppotunities for expansion packs.

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 or aggressive, intelligent being, to its mastery of its home 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 currencies.

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 NPC empire that guards 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 creature's 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 planets, and interact with alien species, tribes, city based civilizations and space-faring empires.

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.

Patches

 * Patch 1.01 tuned game difficulty, improved graphical effects, added new cheats, and fixed gameplay problems.
 * Patch 1.02 fixed issues relating to gameplay controls, audio, planets' appearance, graphics, and removed the Bad Baby! achievement.
 * Patch 1.03 added twenty-four exoskeleton parts, kept the server's copy of the player achievements in sync with the player's local achievements, and allowed the use of the Escape key to open the options menu in the main galaxy view.
 * Patch 1.04 improved general performance, made all Grox planets reachable, and improved graphics.
 * Patch 1.05 allowed asymmetry for creatures and vehicles, tuned gameplay difficulty, added a cheat that allowed exporting of creatures to the COLLADA format for use in Autodesk Maya, and made YouTube videos publish as public by default.
 * Patch 1.05.0001 fixed objects' orientation near water or lava while testing an adventure and fixed a crash in the building editor when holding down Control and/or Shift keys while moving a part.
 * Patch 1.06 is a Dr. Pepper exclusive patch with unknown fixes and 14 mechanical parts.

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 (also known as the Tide Pool stage), 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 begins as a simple microorganism on a 2D plane, giving the effect of living inside a petri dish or a droplet of water. The stage is similar to the game FlOw, where it must adapt and evolve to the fluid dynamics and predators inside the enviroment, while eating weaker cells or plants. Stages are notable for getting more complex in movements in each stage, for example creature stage is a 3D enviroment.
 * Gameplay time:5 to 15 minutes.

Before the game starts, the player must choose whether the creature is an herbivore or a carnivore prior to starting the stage. The main goal of the cell stage is to collect DNA Points through eating leftovers, plants or other cells, and then finding a suitable mate and evolve the various traits that will help the player survive. The first editor of the game will then appear, the Cell Editor, which also operates in a two dimensional plane.

Creature Stage
The Creature Stage is the next level of evolution for creatures in Spore. The Creature stage is now a 3 dimensional enviroment, however, the ground acts like a plane. Once the player's cell has become strong enough, the player then gets the option to move onto land. The creature stage gets more advanced as the player evolves (in the beginning of the game, the creature stage is comparable to the Devonian period on Earth, but by the end, is comparable to today's Cenozoic era), and deals with various topics, such as environments and habitats, reproduction, migration, the necessities of organisms and diet, evolutionary niches (which the player may find) and various traits and adaption strategies. The primary objective is to earn more DNA points, and eventually evolve sapience and a pack mentality, however, the player doesn't have to evolve at all. Cooperation and competition come into play on this stage and the players actions in this stage will influence the creature's archetype in the next stage (just as in cell stage).
 * Gameplay time:1 to 10 hours longer if the player wants.

Tribal Stage
The Tribal Stage deals with the independence of species, forming simple societies, outcompeting the individual creatures with cooperation. After the player's species has evolved sapience, the player gets a choice to enters the Tribal stage. The player can no longer evolve into new species, now is an RTS style game, which the player must look after the whole tribe.
 * Gameplay time:3 to 10 hours

Behavior effects the tribe a lot more in this stage. 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. Depending on the means the tribe used to overtake the neighboring tribe, by forming an alliance or invading the other, will influence the archtype of the next stage.

Civilization Stage
Main article:Civilization Stage The Civilization stage occurs after the player's tribe dominates all other species of their Homeworld, but the species itself has since fragmented into several nations, all in competition for resources, rather than food. The player hascontrol of a single nation. The goal in the Civilization stage is to conquere or unite the entire planet, whether it be militarily, economically, religiously or through the help of alliances.
 * Gameplay time:2 to 10 hours

First the player must form the creature's technology, society, city happines and architecture, and then build vehicles to capture spice geysers. However, soon the player will come into compettion with other nations. The main unit of currency is "Sporebucks", which replaces DNA points and food.

Space Stage
The Space stage provides new goals and paths to follow as the player begins to spread through the galaxy. It is the most expansive stage, and is one that is never ending.
 * Gameplay time:12 hours to infinity.

It deals with various scientific and science fictional concepts, such as colonisation, astrobiology, interaction with alien races, the galactic topography (how the astronomical phenomena and planets interact), terraforming and various missions. The main goal is to expand the player's empire to the Galactic Core, a super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The stage is notable, because the game evolves as well, the galaxy is ever changing and also what the player has done in previous stages ultimately winds up to this stage.

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). Even when the player has reached the core, earned all the badges and achievements, the game continues because the player can use imagination and creativity to influence the game (such as having wars with the player's two empires), or playing a game without colonies for example.

Flora Editor
There is also a mysterious "Flora Editor". It is said it will be released in further games. The game can be run differently so the Flora Editor can be used, but the editor is extremely glitchy.

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, City Stage and a Hut editor.

An expansion or parts pack called the Spore Creepy &amp; 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 released. It allows the player to beam onto planets, rather than using a hologram. It also adds an "Adventure Creator" which allows for the creation of missions to share with the Spore community. It was released on June 23rd, 2009.

The future of Spore
In 2009, the Spore Evolves preview revealed a new distinct game (release date unknown) for younger players called Spore Creature Keeper. The game is a mixture of Sims and Spore and player may be able to take care of creatures as pets, build their houses and even play online. Other than that, it is largely unknown what the gameplay has, and there is little mention of it since the preview trailer. The release date is unknown, and because it has not been menshioned, the game could well have been cancelled.

Recently EA registered a tradmark called Dark Spore, little is known about it, and it might be released in 2011. It is unknown, whether it is a sequel, spinoff or expansion pack. It may be related to another unknown title Spore TBA.

Will Wright has mentioned the possibilty of an MMO some time in the future and Lucy Bradshaw has hinted on the possibility of a Flora Editor expansion in the future too, however, the latter two are unknown and highly speculative.