Saturday, March 04, 2006
Spore!
The other day I came upon an awesome game that's coming out, called Spore. It's designed by Will Wright, the designer of SimCity and the Sims.
You start the game as an amoeba in a drop of water, running away from brown blobs as you try to find something to eat. Each time you lay an egg, you can go into an editor and mutate your offspring a bit. If they survive, your progeny evolve into creatures that can make their way onto land, go through a tribal period, war with nearby tribes, build cities, and eventually spaceships.
All of that is just the tutorial for the game!
Once you have a spaceship, the real game begins. You can terraform planets, abduct other lifeforms to transplant them onto your planets, use a SETI listening device to find other life forms in the galaxy, and so on. And it sounds like it's multiplayer!
Will says this is his 200th prototype of the game. It doesn't look like a prototype to me!
There's a video of an early demonstration of the game over on Google. It takes a long time to get to the actual demo, but it's an hour well spent!
