Spore Prototypes (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Spore Prototypes (2008)

spore.com

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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

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

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

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/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.

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure that the Sims franchise, which used to be a Maxis product, has been and still is incredibly profitable for EA.

Probably more so than SimCity ever could have been, just due to the size of the target audience[1]. Of course, why not do both?

[1] And maybe it's easier to sell content packs for The Sims, though Paradox sure seems to be trying to do the same for C:S.

Honestly, is there much difference between the GDC presentation and the final game?

There's a huge difference. The GDC presentation had more of a focus on science and realism, while the released game was casual and shallow. The only thing the two games shared was the look.

I still occasionally have flashbacks to 13 year old me finally getting the game after 3 years of watching that video and the disappointment and anguish afterwards. Though around 2007 when I saw more recent presentations I was starting to have doubts.

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.

It’s worked well for franchises like Mario Party, Wario Ware, amongst others.

Those games are explicitly designed and marketed as collections of minigames though, whereas Spore seemed to be presented as if it was supposed to be a more cohesive experience.

Yakuza Zero as a counter-example. I think the problem with Spore is that it lacked depth, lacked the breadth of even contemporary RPGs or open-world games, and attempted to appeal to a mass audience by focusing on the wrong things. Minigame is just a concept. It's not good or bad.

The core gameplay in yakuza zero is still just combat. Everything else is completely optional, apart from few hostess missions.

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.

It's not like nothing mattered. e.g.: - How you evolved in Phase 1, decided if you get omnivore / carnivore / herbivore - How you acted in Phase 2 & 3, changed what you can do in Phase 4 & 5. So what super weapon you have in Phase 5 and if you are a religious, economic, military, ... nation. - Attacking nations, changes how they react to you in later stages of evolutions.

There would have been a lot more potential in that game, but it is not like it was complletly unplayable. In fact, I didn't know about the hype regarding the game as I was a kid and just stumbled across it. Therefore I didn't had these high expactations, and it got my favorite game for many years.

you're not wrong, but it's really as minimal an impact as it possibly could be -- my main point is that the game is incredibly shallow, not that it was nonfunctional.

>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.

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.

But it could also be really a breakout hit — look at Myst for instance

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

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

The space stage was pretty fun, although you may as well go play any of the better dedicated 4x or space exploration games out there.

I've made several attempts at play-throughs over the years. Each and every time, the game crashed shortly after getting to the space stage. I'd curse myself for not remembering to save, forget about the game for a year or two, and the process would repeat.

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.

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

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)

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.

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

NMS had problems of a completely different character at launch. Once they fixed the bugs, added the features that were missing and did a lot of polish, people really like the game. It's very well-received now. Here's a short story of how and why it had a bad launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ .

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.

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.

You probably know but, there is a simplified version of this: https://agar.io/

:) Thanks! I made that!

I've long wanted a whole game around that. Proper procedural stuff floating around.

> 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

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...

Check out Thrive. Has its own subreddit. Takes the ocean stage much further.

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.

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-...

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