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Spore

Stu Belden Posted on Thu May 26 09:28:25 CDT 2005

This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.

Will Wright discusses his new game creation called "Spore"

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:: Response posted on 2005-05-26 by Jim Drewes

Yeah... I didn't really read what you posted, but I'd heard of Spore before. In fact, you can go to EA's official website for the game spore.ea.com

There really isn't much there, but at least its a start. Sounds like a pretty incredible game.

:: Response posted on 2005-05-26 by dan

my jaw dropped about eight times watching that video. bacteria to glactic god, all in one game.

:: Response posted on 2005-05-27 by Mike Brinker

I still find the fact that it's all procedurally generated content to be the most fascinating thing. I am looking forward to being in the same studio as this game and getting a few behind the scenes looks at the development later on.

:: Response posted on 2005-05-28 by Stu Belden

Kenyon, make them make a Mac verison. Also, make it run on my old G4.

:: Response posted on 2005-05-30 by dan

So, he said 'procedurally generated' a zillion times. What exactly does that mean, and opposed to what?

:: Response posted on 2005-05-31 by Jim Drewes

I guess that is opposed to brute-force generated, or generated by hand.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-01 by Kurt Hoeman

so I went and looked at the parts of the video. I really do not see the appeal to this game. Maybe there is something I am missing, so someone can explain it to me if they want. But as far as I can tell, looks like a kinda dumb game.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-01 by Jim Drewes

Kurt... its all about scope. Do you remember Sim City? Do you remember Civilization? Or even The Sims can be referenced. All of these games were entertaining in part because you could witness growth. In Sim City you started with nothing, and grew an entire metropolis out of land zoning. In Civilization you begin with spears and pottery and grow into a space-aged civilization that develops atomic bombs and space stations. This is all somewhat procedurally generated. But Spore takes that concept to an entirely different level. Imagine Sim City and Civilization if you started out as an amoeba. You develop molecularly until you can form multi-cellular organisms.. and so on and so on. Its quite incredible if you consider the scope.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-02 by dan

Jim: exactly. I don't game at all, and I personally can't fathom the idea of spending hours and hours playing a game like this. But the fact that in one environment they are able to keep the game play, the look and feel, the rules of the game, all of it coherent from the level of an ameoba to glactic god and everything inbetween is quite impressive.
I've watched my brother play the Final Fantasy Online game and those graphics were intense. I looked at the screen shots from the Spore website though, and was not that impressed. The demo video made things look somewhat photo-realistic but it's mostly still the same level of graphics that you get in the Sim games.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-03 by Kurt Hoeman

yeah, I guess I never played any of those game because I did not find them interesting. Maybe that is why I do not think the game looks like anything special. Also I think that Dan hit it right on the head about the graphics. They looked like somehting I could have done, just not that impressive... to me that is.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-03 by Jim Drewes

Whats more important to you, photorealistic graphics, or engrossing and entertaining game play?

:: Response posted on 2005-06-03 by Woody

kurt's mom is most important. along with skip, and boxes.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-06 by Mike Brinker

Lets see if I can put this into perspective for everyone.

Essentially, Spore is so freakin cool because all of the content of the game will be created by...yours truely! Thats right, its all created by the user! No other game has done this before! Sooo, Kurt, if you wanted to create a character with 7 legs, 5 arms and 3 heads, you could do that. Whats also mind blowing, is that you create
this creature starting from a cell and then managing it all the way up to a galaxy level! The cool thing is, NO ONE has ever seen your
creation before, ever! Not even Will Wright himself could think up the stuff that half the
users will create.

So, how is this all done? With mathmatical algorithms (procedurally generated content). If you still aren't getting an acurate picture of what these math formulas can do, check out something called the "Demo Scene". Google for it. It's fun.

Another good comparison is this. How big do you think the modern First Person Shooter, like
Doom 3 is? 2 gig? 3 gig of hard drive space? Probably more. Guess what? There is a
first person shooter that is....drum roll please.... 100 kilobytes! WOW! And it fits on a
floppy to boot. Thats even cooler. They did this the same way, with tiny lines of math
code that produce three dimensional content. Also with some very good compression tools...

:: Response posted on 2005-06-18 by dan

Penny Arcade made fun of Wil Wright's presentation on spore.

:: Response posted on 2005-06-21 by Jim Drewes

Thats pretty funny.

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