Year Old Relic: Will Wright’s GDC Spore Presentation
Posted by inpheaux on March 2nd, 2006 at 4:10 pm
It was brought to my attention thismorning that somehow a good number of people still haven't seen last year's epic first-look at Spore. For those of you who have somehow been blissfully unaware of the existence of Spore, let me bring you up to speed. Spore is what Will Wright, Maxis' head nerd, has been doing for the past several years. After it was determined that The Sims was creatively dead, and nothing but an expansion cash-cow for EA, Will scoured the planet for people to recruit for a new dev team. Will went out looking specifically for people with experience in the demo scene, guys who spend their free time making super small but impressive computer-based art.
Will was driven by the concept of making a game based around procedural generation. He wanted to get away from how development of The Sims worked. For The Sims, a large chunk of time and effort during the development process was based around having a small army of artists churn out Stuff. Furniture, lamps, wallpaper, carpet, whatever. For everything you can buy in The Sims, some employee of Maxis or EA had to spend time to make it, skin it, program it, and put it in the game. Will had enough of that. Procedural Generation is the opposite. Instead of having a bunch of artists churn out Stuff, you have one guy write a program that makes the stuff for you, generally on the fly.
Procedural generation lends itself perfectly to the meat of Spore, Will is aiming at making "The Universe: The Game". It's kinda hard to describe Spore, because I can't think of anything that even remotely comes close to the scope of Spore. Let me try this: Spore is like if you took every 4X game ever, smushed them together, added in some evolution-based games like Cubivore and EVO, and then put it online while you were at it. In Spore, your goal is to live and flourish. You're given a species, and given direct control over one specimen. Periodically, you'll get to do some evolving, and alter your species in a very open free-form manner. You want him to have sixteen legs? Go for it. Giant death claws? Super, bring it on. Want it to look like a Care-Bear? Well, sure, if you really want to. Whatever you make, Spore's hefty procedural techniques will sort out how it should move, how it should attack, how it should sound, whatever.
As you progress, your species can eventually become sentient, and then instead of playing an evolution game, you're playing a highly customizable free-form RTS. Get a bit higher and more organized and you're suddenly playing Civ. Know how Civ ends with space flight? Spore isn't big on having things end like that, so advanced space technology lets you zoom off and explore the universe, and screw with it however you want in your ufo. Spore is going to be the biggest sandbox ever.
I could go on about Spore for hours, but I've found it's best to think about Spore as little as possible, because seeing how EA handled The Sims, I'm afraid that EA will go "Wait, this is way too big! Cut off spaceflight and make that an expansion. Cut off city-based and planet-based stuff too, make that an expansion. How else are we going to sell expansions when we can't just ship a cd full of another 100,000 chairs and sofas?" So rather than having me think about Spore for much longer, go check out Will's GDC Keynote from last year:
Google Video: Spore Presentation from GDC 2005
It's 35 minutes long, but it's so good. Furthermore, Will is slated to give another talk at GDC this year, and also expected to have some more goodies for us at E3, so stay tuned. Spore is currently slated for a Fall 2006 release, but . . we'll believe that when we see it.
Discuss this article on the forums.