To begin tonight, I'd like to thank Patrick for telling me about this subject. Patrick told me about a new game that Will Wright is developing. (Will Wright is the genius that brought us games such as SimCity, The Sims, etc.) The game is called Spore, and it won rave review at last year's E3 gaming expo. It is informally called SimEverything because it's almost like all the sim games all combined into one giant game.
You basically start off with a single-celled being, and it evolves into bigger and bigger things. Eventually, your species will become sentient, and learn how to use tools and such. As time passes, you'll begin to build villages, then cities, and then eventually control the world. Then you leave your planet to populate other planets, then leave your solar system, then leave your galaxy, etc. As you fly through space, you'll colonize new worlds, and try to seek out other intelligent life.
You can also design almost anything in the game, from how your creature looks, what the buildings look like, what the vehicles look like, and more. If you want a creature with 2 heads, 10 legs, and 10 mouths, that's totally doable.
A copy of the
Spore game demonstration is available at Google Video, check it out as it does a much better job of explaining it then I do. It runs for 35 minutes.
The game looks very cool, and it's definitely one of these games that are outside the cookie-cutter mold that has plagued the game industry as of late. (If I see another Grand Theft Auto derivative game, I'm going to scream.) This is definitely a very unique and original concept that Will Wright has come up with. This game's going to be published by Electronic Arts (ERTS)!
For the computer geeks that read this blog, there's
an extended version of the Spore game demonstration and it covers some interesting topics. The most interesting thing I got from it was the notion of procedural methods, where all the content in the game is more or less generated on the fly using algorithms. This is the opposite of how video games are done today, where all content is written before the game ships. It's interesting that Will Wright says that procedural methods are one of the few ways that independent game developers can compete against massive game publishers who have armies of content writers at their disposal.
In either case, I'm pretty excited about what's coming in the future of gaming. I'm especially excited because after I graduate, I can re-enter gaming. My gaming life has pretty much been put on pause during university because nothing kills grades more than gaming.
For those who want even more information about Spore, the
Wikipedia has an article, and so does
Wired Magazine.
