Previewing a stroke of genius: Codename, Spore

[Occulus]

Spore is the brainchild of Will Wright. You'll start with a single-cell organism, and evolve it up to sentience, technology, and finally, interstellar travel. Simple? Yes... and no.

Spore's content, from animation to texturing and populating the world, will be largely procedurally-based. The game itself will figure out how your critter moves, based on the skeleton and traits you give to it. For example, a creature with three legs might have a lopsided gait, or with more limbs perhaps "roll" over and over, contacting its limbs with the ground as it trundles along. You could even put eyes on its feet if you wanted to! Moreover, the game itself figures out how the creature might grab objects, swim, etc all on its own with no help from an army of modelers or a plethora of individual animations (The Sims 2, for example, has something like 22,000 individual animations for its characters).

Spore is unique in other ways as well. After telling your single-cell organism to eat and eat and eat, it will lay an egg, which symbolizes a new stage in its evolution. At this point, the game takes you to a creture editor in which you will have complete and total flexibility- and I use that word quite literally- in creating your creature. You'll be able to stretch it out, pull its into new shapes, twist things, add limbs, bone the skeleton yourself, add spots or stripes to its skin, and so on.

Afterward, the creture drops to the bottom of the ocean and crawls its way up onto land. This is where things start to cook: by investing in brainpower instead of new physical traits, your creature can attain sentience and build a home, at which point you start adding objects to its environment which, again, the game itself figures out how they might interact with.

The concept gets even more grand: because the creature files are so very tiny (one creature file might be as small as 1K, and that is not a typo), the game can store a database of a lot of them. Wright decided that wasn't going far enough, so Spore allows you to take these other creatures from an online database of other players' creature creations, which the game then uses to populate the world your creature lives upon, using the others' traits to decide which niche they will fill in your creature's world.

Those other creatures also aggregate into villages, and at this point in the game, the player is able to zoom out and see the entire world. Incredibly, even this is not the end: the player can give their now intelligent and "advanced" creatures a UFO, which they can use to explore and populate other planets in the solar system, each with its own environment and unique characteristics.

Still, we're not done: after this, the player can give his creatures interstellar travel, which allows them to explore other systems, attempt communication with other players' civilizations, conquer them, or whatever.

Spore sounds like a true stroke of genius in every sense of the word. IGN has an article:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/617/617441p1.html

As does Gamespy:

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/spore/616537p1.html

Here's a snip from the Gamespy article:

The game opens within the primordial soup, which absolutely teemed with blobs and squiggles of prehistoric life. As your creature evolved into a 3D environment and swam around in the sea, the water swarmed with life: plants, bubbles, little microorganisms. That same detail carried out once your critter walked out onto the land, where tiny insects buzzed around. Outer space was cluttered with comets, meteorites, gas clouds, and all sorts of interstellar phenomenon. Visually the game is a treat, not from state-of-the-art graphics but simply from a standpoint of detail and variety.

Wright explained that the real goal of the game is to allow players to create things, and to allow them to transparently share their creations with other players. So, the idea isn't to make you go to a website to actively download stuff; instead, new content is constantly sucked into your game for you to experience, and you won't have to lift a finger. Similarly, the things that you create will be beamed out into the ether for other players to share.

Since creation is key, a great deal of attention is being paid to the editor. The same 3D editor is used to manipulate creatures, buildings, and vehicles. We took a closer look at it to see how it worked: the tools were very simple. It was like playing with blocks of clay. You could slap shapes down, pull them, move them, stretch them, combine them, all by clicking and dragging the mouse. You could scale stuff up and down by rolling the mousewheel. It looked very intuitive: Creating an 8-legged flying creature with a forked tail that grasps weapons is just as easy as creating a four-wheeled tank with multiple turrets and angry eyeballs on the front....

One nice thing about the way the game figures out how creatures will move and walk is that it looks incredibly smooth. These little guys look real. They have their own weight and mass that waddles as they shuffle along, and the animations flow seamlessly from one behavior to the next, no matter how strange the creature is.

Here's another exciting bit, from the same article:

Whenever you create something, assuming you're connected to the 'net, it'll be uploaded for the world to enjoy. But it doesn't just disappear. You'll be able to track how your creations are faring around the universe. You'll get regular "Multiverse Reports" that tell you how many people met your species and how they reacted. Is everyone killing your creatures on sight? Are they using the different buildings you've created? You'll get to see!

This one sounds like it belongs on my must-have list for 2006.