Development of Spore
Spore is a
History and development
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1a/Simeverything.jpg/150px-Simeverything.jpg)
Spore was originally a working title, suggested by Maxis 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 adding it also freed him from the preconceptions another Sim title would have brought, saying "...Not putting 'Sim' 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 Sim was."[4][5] Wright was inspired by the Drake equation and the 1977 film Powers of Ten when developing Spore.[6]
Spore's development began in 2000, around the time that development began for
It was officially unveiled two months later at
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9a/SporeComics.jpg/220px-SporeComics.jpg)
At the
In April 2007, Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson joined Maxis to work on Spore.[16][17] Soon after, some video game sites theorized that this news indicated that the release of Spore might slip to 2008.[18] A projected 2008 release was revealed three weeks later at an EA conference call, corroborating the speculation that a significant amount of development was still left to be completed.[19] In a GameVideos interview with Garnett Lee, Wright explained, "I credit him with, basically, you know, being able to present [the Civilization phase] that has that many, ah, strategic possibilities but not have it being overwhelming from a gameplay mechanic sense."[20]
By July 2007, the game was a complete, fully featured alpha build undergoing closed play testing.
At the 2008
Promotion and advertising were ramped up in May and June 2008, as the YouTube Spore channel opened, new trailers focusing on each phase along with developer interviews were released, and the Creature Creator was released, allowing players to upload their creations to the revamped official site.
Will Wright announced at
On August 14, 2008, Spore was declared to have gone gold.[26]
Gameplay changes
The gameplay itself had numerous changes during development. The most striking was the shift in realism, from the gritty depiction of cellular and animal life in the GDC 2005 debut, to the current iteration of a more round, softer edged depiction of the creatures. The most visible change was in the cellular phase, which transformed the unicellular organisms into strange insects with cartoonish, human-like eyes, which were used "to make it cute", according to Wright during the 2007 TED seminar.[2] According to Wright, the Spore development team was broken into two camps, the "Cute" camp that wanted to skew the game's focus towards a The Sims-type of game, and the "Science" camp that wanted to keep the game as realistic as possible. The final version was more or less a compromise between the two; Wright stated, "We ended up with a very nice balance of the two factors."[27]
Another constantly changing aspect was the number of phases in the game. Initially, in 2005, the game consisted of seven phases: Cell, Underwater, Creature, Tribe, City, Civilization and Space. During the annual
In Wright's 2005 demonstration, the creature with which he began looked remarkably similar to his earlier microbe. This led many people to believe that the creature was based upon the microbe's appearance. However, in a 2006 video from E3, narrated by a senior programmer, it was said that the player will initially begin as a slug-like animal. The narrator further stated the reason for this was to allow for more player creativity. This created uncertainty as to which method would be used in the final game; particularly as a later video demonstrated the essence of the cell creature emerging from a pond. The 2007 TED Presentation in March 2007 again depicted a legless, slug-like creature emerging from the water, leaving a trail of slime in its wake.[2] The cellular phase was renamed as the tide pool phase,[28] then called the cell phase months later.[29] The final phases: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Space were the five available stages at the final release of Spore.[30]
Two notable locomotive abilities for the creatures were also the subject of speculation during the long development:
Flight
A flying creature was seen briefly in the GDC 2005 demo, but for a long time since that appearance, it was unknown whether it would be possible to make flying creatures in the game, though it is now known that it is. Many Maxis-developed default Spore creatures feature feathers[citation needed] and wings,[31] and it is now known that they are functional and not simply decorative. Wing types include butterfly-like wings, as seen in the IGN Evolution video, bat-like wings, and bird-like wings. In a Gadgetoff 2007 seminar demonstration, Wright made a bird-like creature with large, feathered wings; but it only flapped its wings and did not fly.[32] However, on February 13, 2008, a hands on preview revealed that wings still give creatures the ability of limited flight.[33] The Creature Creator and subsequent videos revealed that creatures have a limited form of flight: gliding. A creature's ability to stay aloft was dependent on two factors: the jumping ability (to get in the air) and gliding ability (how slow the descent is).
Swimming
Similarly, the underwater phase featuring
During the
Release date delays
The game had undergone numerous delays to its release date throughout its development, having appeared at three straight
On May 8, 2007, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that the release of Spore is "right on the bubble with Q4 [January–March 2008], if not, for Q1 fiscal 09 [April–June 2008]". CFO Warren Jenson stated that the game will not be included in the company's financial plan for its current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2008.[38] Later that year, on August 1, 2007, Riccitiello reaffirmed his previous statements in another conference call, saying the release "is sort of squarely targeted against March, April, May of next year", but cautioning that "intellectual properties like this and games like these are so large and so complex that we chose not to put it in our fiscal year guidance because these things are pretty hard to predict, and the outcomes can be volatile […] So our best guess right now is Q1 of next fiscal, but we're not actually providing guidance for next fiscal at this point."[39] Maxis VP Patrick Beuchner revealed on July 10, 2007, during a G4TV interview that the Nintendo DS and mobile phone versions would ship the same day as the PC version.[21] In October, Wright stated that Spore would be ready in roughly six months (around April 2008).[40]
On February 12, 2008, Electronic Arts announced in an official press release that the official release date would be September 5, 2008 for Europe and September 7, 2008, for North America.[44] Later it was announced the full version of the game was due to be released on September 4, 2008, in Australia and Nordic regions, but Australian stores prematurely broke the street date on September 1, 2008.[45]
Spore Creature Creator
The Spore Creature Creator was released several months before 'Spore's' release, which allowed users to create creatures for the game prior to its release.
Spore Comic Creator
The Spore team worked on a partnership with a comic creation software company to offer
Platform announcements
Microsoft Windows,[48] Nintendo DS[49] and mobile phone[50] versions of the game were initially confirmed.
Wright expressed the desire to release the game on other platforms, such as
In a Videogamesblogger.com interview, Wright said that the game will take different forms on the different consoles. As for the Wii, Wright also said that it offers a lot of creative opportunities so the Wii may receive a different game.[53] On October 26, 2007, Wright expressed a desire to develop for the Wii because the console was his "favorite platform" (though he did not elaborate any plans for a Wii version), in what was called an "off-the-cuff" statement; as of February 13, 2008, no official announcement from Electronic Arts has been forthcoming.[54] In a February 12, 2008 interview with N'Gai Croal,[55] Wright talked briefly about the Wii version and how they plan on making the Wii controller a factor in that version of the game. In addition, representatives by EA and Maxis confirmed in an interview that a Wii version of Spore was in the early design process.[56]
Electronic Arts announced on January 15, 2008, that the
On February 13, 2007, the
Electronic Arts confirmed on March 31, 2008, that Spore would be receiving post-release expansion packs. Only one expansion pack has been revealed so far, called "galactic adventures" . It will include an adventure editor, as well as many new items and the ability for a player to go down to a planet's surface.
Special edition
On June 24, 2008, the Spore: Galactic Edition was announced. This
Procedural generation
Spore extensively uses procedural generation, rather than individual objects. Wright mentioned in an interview given at E3 2006 that the information necessary to generate an entire creature would be only a couple of kilobytes, according to Wright, who presented the following analogy: "think of it as sharing the DNA template of a creature while the game, like a womb, builds the 'phenotypes' of the animal, which represent a few megabytes of texturing, animation, etc."
In Spore, all creature animations are made on the fly. "The game automatically knows how to animate your creature based on how you put it together. For example, if you give your creature four equine legs, you can logically expect it to gallop around like a horse." This is untrue in the final game.[65]
In Wright's first public demonstration of Spore, he created a
Chris Hecker, who worked on Spore (including its early prototypes), gave a presentation at GDC 2005 and Futureplay entitled "Why you should have paid attention in multivariable calculus", in which he describes the mathematics of an implicit surface and various methods to apply texture projections to such surfaces. Sean O'Neil worked as a consultant for Maxis "to assist with R&D involving dynamic generation and rendering of a fractal-based world".[67] He maintains a website with a demonstration of procedural planet generation and a simulation of dynamic atmospheric scattering.[68]
Wright noted that he hired a handful of demoscene programmers and artists because of their familiarity with procedural generation. An example of software they used was ParticleMan, which simulated gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud, which would be incorporated into the space phase. It helped orchestrate such gravitational dynamics as orbits, nebula formation, star formation and particle streams from sources like pulsars and black holes. ParticleMan was developed internally at Maxis by Jason Shankel and uses the GLUT OpenGL app kit developed by Mark Kilgard and the GLUT-based GLUI UI library developed by Paul Rademacher.
The official site allows users to sample a number of Spore prototypes, which include ParticleMan, SPUG, City Maze, and other software, all under 1000KB in size, save the 20MB Space, and the 45mb Gonzago.[69]
Technologies
Will Wright names the
On August 9, 2007, SIGGRAPH 2007 featured a seminar titled Spor(T), including segments Player Driven Procedural Texturing, Creating Spherical Worlds, Fast Object Distribution, and Rigblocks: Player-Deformable Objects, given by Spore development team members Andrew Willmott, Ocean Quigley, Henry Goffin, Chris Hecker, Shalin Shodhan and David DeBry.[70] Andrew Willmott has made available slides and videos from the seminar detailing the techniques.[71]
Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts' Games Label announced that Electronic Arts may use the underlying technology of Spore to develop eclectic software titles, such as action, real-time strategy and role-playing video games, focusing on player-creation concepts. Gibeau stated, "What's so beautiful about Spore is that it's extremely malleable... you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii. It really travels well to other platforms."[72]
Music
The music for the game was designed by Brian Eno, an artist famous for his work with ambient music. Eno has worked with Kent Jolly and Aaron McLeran to implement a simple piece of software in Spore called "The Shuffler", which procedurally generates fragments for the soundtrack from a number of samples, based on the programming language Pure Data.[73] Eno appeared in the aforementioned June 2006 lecture to give a talk alongside Wright at the Long Now Foundation. In January 2007, Eno confirmed his involvement in a lecture given at the Berlin University of the Arts.[74] Eno was involved with Wright and Spore at least as early as June 2006.[75]
See also
References
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Usually these prototypes are never seen by the public, but we thought some of the more intrepid players out there might enjoy playing around with a few of our early Spore prototypes.
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External links
- Prototypes at spore.com