
Spore Prototypes (2008) - rl3
http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes
======
rl3
I never cared much for the final game itself, but the 2005 GDC presentation on
Spore was and still is magical. One of the best demos in history:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw)

You can hear the sheer awe in the audience whenever Wright would zoom out to
the next stage.

~~~
chaostheory
I wonder what would have happened if EA went with Will Wright’s vision instead
of the disaster that was released

~~~
rl3
Probably the same thing that would have happened to SimCity (2013) had EA not
also ruined that.

On that note, I happened upon some concept renderings yesterday, and it broke
my heart:

[https://www.eywong.com/projects/0WRr5](https://www.eywong.com/projects/0WRr5)

[https://www.eywong.com/projects/dD5Ae](https://www.eywong.com/projects/dD5Ae)
(scroll down)

I don't know how someone wakes up and goes "Oh boy, we better close Maxis." It
boggles the mind.

Were it not for their interference, Maxis would've probably been incredibly
profitable for EA, even today.

~~~
zubspace
Wow this looks amazing.

I don't exactly understand, how the texturing works:

"Buildings were textured using a procedural system which utilized a shader
that could overlay 2 UV regions from a single atlas. Each UV tile could be
spread apart with an offset to get the proper spacing between windows and
other detail elements"

This sounds like magic to me.

~~~
Asooka
I _think_ I get it, it's pretty smart. So you have a texture atlas - a big
texture with many small textures packed into it. Each small texture occupies a
rectangular UV region in the big atlas, and when you are looking up texture
coordinates x,y of the small texture, you remap them from (0,0)-(1,1) to the
coordinates of the region in the atlas. This lets you avoid having a ton of
small textures and instead use one big texture, only changing the UV region
before drawing each model.

What he's talking about is a more advanced version that lets you do
multitexturing from a single atlas - use two small textures and blend between
them, with each having different tiling settings to make everything line up.
The way I imagine it works is like so:

You're trying to draw a concrete cube with windows on each side, spaced 1m
apart vertically. You load up a concrete texture and a window texture in the
atlas. You set up the concrete texture to tile continuously. You set up the
window texture to repeat with an offset that lines it up with the building's
UV coordinates such that the windows appear horizontally and vertically where
they should. The shader then chooses the window texture if the UV coordinates
fall within the window tile, or the concrete texture otherwise. Depending on
how complicated you make the tiling, you can get a lot of effects this way.

P.S. Look at the second link's first screenshot. The building that's second
from the bottom, facing towards us. The windows are all spaced equally.

------
jandrese
The biggest complaint about Spore was that it felt like a collection of
minigames without an unifying vision. Maybe developing your game by
aggregating a bunch of minigames is a risky idea.

~~~
setr
The minigame aspect doesn't really matter -- most games can be considered a
bunch of minigames wrapped up, where each component is really its own subgame
(eg weapon crafting vs fighting vs town-building vs etc), all threaded
together to produce some overarching value.

The problem with spore is that it had a very clear, and obvious, and
intentional thread -- the evolution of your creature. Each minigame was
_supposed_ to impact the way your creature developed -- the constraints of
your environment, your skill, your choices, etc, were _supposed_ to guide your
creature down a path such that your choices from minigame 1 would change what
you'd have to work with by minigame 3.

The problem was that nothing mattered. It wasn't that there was no unifying
vision -- it was that the game _pretended_ everything mattered, but you'd chug
along and realize there was literally nothing affected by anything you did --
the whole thing was an empty shell.

It was supposed to be a (perhaps goofy) cross-millenia simulation, and instead
it was.. 5 fairly worthless games mashed together to produce one large
worthless game.

The crime too is that mario party _knows_ their minigames are shallow -- so
they last for at most minutes, and offer like 60 of them. Spore, of course,
somehow believed it had some kind of depth, and run you through each minigame
for hours.

~~~
meowface
>The problem was that nothing mattered. It wasn't that there was no unifying
vision -- it was that the game pretended everything mattered, but you'd chug
along and realize there was literally nothing affected by anything you did --
the whole thing was an empty shell.

This is how I felt when I first played Spore, but since then, I've come to
feel this way about all single-player games and most multi-player games,
honestly. The only games I've played where what you do _really_ affects the
world in a lasting and true way are sandbox MMORPGs. (Examples: EVE Online,
Ultima Online, Shadowbane, Darkfall, etc.) Imagine some of the sandbox aspects
of Spore, but with tens of thousands of other players in real-time.

I think sandbox MMOs are a massively untapped niche. The problem is most of
them have been developed by companies lacking funding and experience (and
often competence), so they're usually rife with game-killing issues, and most
people don't get interested in them or stick with them. Another inherent issue
is that a lot of players aren't comfortable with the idea of semi-realistic
consequences upon death, like other players taking everything in your gear and
inventory, or perhaps even taking your clan's/nation's/corporation's
city/territory that you painstakingly built over months. If you're just a
casual video game player, harsh consequences and ruthless risk vs. reward
often won't appeal to you.

I suspect there'll one day be a "killer app" of sandbox MMOs that'll put them
more into the mainstream, but I think it may be a decade or more away.

~~~
setr
The question of games as simulation is actually a very interesting one, and in
my opinion, the one true way of viewing games -- every game is a simulation of
some fictional universe, and the player's primary goal is to understand,
interact and finally abuse that simulation to achieve his goals.

Sandbox MMOs are the end-game, but I don't think we exactly need them just yet
-- we can get 80% of the way there in a much simpler fashion -- you don't need
true simulation; you just need sufficient simulation. You don't need world-
modification, you just need sufficient world-interaction. You don't need
environmental destruction and creation, you just need environmental reaction.
The true goal is a reactive, but self-stabilizing, environment.

For example, the mistake Ultima Online made with their simulation was to make
the environment self-containing -- which lead to catastrophe as soon as the
assumptions were violated (players hoarding resources, and not feeding it back
into the system). They had the simulated, editable environment.. but it wasn't
self-stabilizing (or even stabilized by GOD aka Origin Systems), and it badly
needed to be.

Dwarf fortress makes the interesting modification of allowing, accepting and
even _encouraging_ catastrophic environmental reaction -- _losing is fun_. A
sandbox MMO obviously can't do the same, because it'd be too detached from any
individual player's interaction, but there's clearly variation that can occur
in how you run the simulation

But currently most games don't understand that simulation is the one true
goal, so they don't even get close. We're not at 80% of the way there.. we're
more like 10%, except in a very few titles. EVE is probably the only thing
that makes any real progress towards it.

But anyways that's far more advanced than what Spore needed to be a _good
game_. Spore didn't need to be an advanced simulator in each of its stages --
it just needed to have some legitimate reactions to the choices you made. It
needed a basic simulator in each stage, but really the only simulation with
any merit was stage 1 (the bacteria or whatever). After that.. nothing you did
mattered except for stats.

------
onorton
Some people are working on an open source spiritual successor [0]. If you were
in awe of the original 2005 demo and what could have been you should
definitely check it out. The cell stage is in early stages (heh) but is
already quite enjoyable.

[0] [https://github.com/Revolutionary-
Games/Thrive](https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive)

------
esotericsean
Spore was an amazing experiment. It was a terrible game, but I'm glad they
tried it.

~~~
jakelazaroff
I felt the same way. My friends and I _obsessively_ waited for it to come out
back in high school, but were all pretty disappointed when we actually played
it. It was kind of nostalgic when No Man's Sky essentially followed the same
trajectory a decade later.

~~~
hatsunearu
No Man's Sky had an epic redemption story after its disastrous launch.

~~~
dkersten
They added a lot of what was missing for sure, but No Mans Sky still feels
like it lacks depth when I last played it (granted, I haven’t played it in
about a year so don’t know what it’s like _right now_ )

------
aylmao
I wonder what a modern Spore would look like. Both the procedural aspects and
the graphics could could be made much better with the processing power
available today.

The world of Spore after the water stage felt a little empty, I'm sure modern
computers could generate more variety of plants and animals. Moreover, it
always felt a little claustrophobic with the limited rendering distance. Spore
should've been all about the beauty of ecosystems/worlds— I'm imagining
Minecraft-like random weather events and biomes, caves and mountains into the
distance. At the planet-level, I'm imagining something that feels more like a
planet vast and diverse in weathers, features, etc. with a lot of detail if
you zoom in.

Video-game aesthetics and video cards have also progressed a lot since Spore's
original release. It could also take on a different style, less cartoonish and
maybe more realistic, or more artistic, or both.

Again, I'm thinking of Minecraft, with sunsets, a vast sky, inspiring piano
music playing in the background, etc. Maybe something in the style of Journey,
with a well-thought out color palette, or like Breath of the Wild, with a
unique art style and shading.

~~~
StevenWaterman
It sounds like that would have a lot of the same issues that No Man's Sky did.
It's hard to make a procedurally generated world be meaningful. I don't think
that problem will be solved by adding more processing power - we need a
breakthrough in game design or theory

~~~
z3t4
Gameplay is often hard, they played it safe by using well tested concepts.
There is however a "hack" you can do if you you have a cool engine but lack
gameplay - just make it a multiplayer sandbox experience, and the "gameplay"
will be invented by the players and community.

------
thrower123
The only part that I thought was any fun was the initial ocean stage, swimming
around collecting food and upgrading your animal. Reminded me a lot of some of
the old 2D space shooters I played as a kid. It would have made a really nice
browser game.

~~~
tauchunfall
> It would have made a really nice browser game.

flOw is a free Flash game released in April 2006. Where "the player navigates
a series of two-dimensional (2D) planes with an aquatic microorganism that
evolves by consuming other microorganisms". The author/developer of the game
was also involved in the development of Spore [1].

There are videos on YouTube showing the gameplay (which is circa an hour) of
the PlayStation 3 version (released 2007) and PlayStation 4 version (released
2013).

Thesis about Flow in Games:
[http://jenovachen.com/flowingames/thesis.htm](http://jenovachen.com/flowingames/thesis.htm)

If you read the Wikipedia article about the Flow video game you can also find
a link the the archived version of the games' source code.

[1] "I wasn't hired for Spore just because of Flow. There's a lot of other
game design philosophy involved in Spore, and they liked my philosophy, so I
was hired to help with design.",
[https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/64984-Flow-
Graduat...](https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/64984-Flow-Graduates-to-
PlayStation-3)

------
zaarn
I've played Spore when it came out, when I was a lot younger too. Back then I
enjoyed it a lot. Nowadays, I realize how much of a clusterfuck that game was,
with lots of things that were just plain broken or bugged.

------
pharke
I think this article has important context for the discussion here.

The Man Who Made Spore Suckier
[https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/87123-The-Man-
Who-...](https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/87123-The-Man-Who-Made-
Spore-Suckier)

