So Many Schemes

If you haven’t seen this, you absolutely have to check out this video (or the more complete version) about Will Wright’s new game, Spore. In Spore, you start life as a microorganism and evolve to the point of terra-forming whole galaxies and creating interstellar civilization. The scope of this game is immense, and this game is exciting on so many levels, not least of which is its obvious giant leap forward for game design, artificial life, and procedurally textured landscapes, environments, and worlds. I’m blown away.

I think one of Spore’s largest advancements is its leverage of other player’s content to bootstrap your world. Instead of requiring the game developers to come up with varied designs for thousands of species of life forms or civilizations, Spore finds content created by other players that will work well with your needs, and brings those to you in the form of tools or buildings to be purchased, other life forms, and alien races to encounter. This is brilliant. The game can only get more advanced and varied as players use it.

Spore’s worlds and creatures are procedurally generated. I previously wrote about procedurally generated environments, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. You can create creatures by combining many different parts, each of which has functionality. You can also reshape and mold parts as if they were clay. Then, the system analyzes the morphological structure of your newly created creature and figures out how it might move — how it should walk, fight, eat, mate, and more. The generated movements are plausible and visually pleasing. No motion capture or hand-animation required.

Spore tackles an incredible scale. I watched the video, and at every stage I thought, “wow, that’s a great game!”, then I found out that what I had seen was just the tutorial/prerequisite for the next, even larger stage of game play.