The evolution sim that was never meant to be.
Original Source:
Spore: An oral history by Jay Castello / Designroom (free registration required)
Yes, but:
RIP VG Cats!
The game got released in 2008, why is this a modern day article as if the game was just released, while the information is what everyone who ever played the game already knows? The game is almost old enough (just 2 more months) to get it’s drivers licence and buy alcohol in my country. When I was reading this I was like: “wait… Was there a new Spore game released?” But no, it’s just about an 18 year old game 🤷
I thought the world was going to shit, but apparently there’s nothing else to write about than an 18 year old game, from a sea of thousands of game being released per year.
Ok, Thanks for sharing, at least it’s not bullshit from Trump or Musk or whatever I guess.
If you made one now it would work a lot better, modeling evolution and proteins is vastly better Science now.
Yeah… Evolve to an inteligent species, then evolve into egocentric low IQ assholes that constantly almost blow up society because of a dick measuring contest… Until they do press the button. First dominate and kill other species, then dominate and kill your own.
Much more realistic game, don’t know if it’s more fun.
But jokes aside, I wouldn’t mind a new version of that game, or something similar. It’s rather unique in its genre.
Yeah it sucks that the Internet won’t let you create your own better posts about more modern games.
Holy shit dude, nobody’s forcing you to read it and comment all that drivel.
A website made a recap article about it, including interviews with developers. That’s an extremely common practice in journalism. This submission is a recap of that interview. Instead of losing your shit and typing all that out you could have read 4 lines of the article to learn that yourself.
Oh sorry, I didn’t know reality checks on timelines weren’t allowed.
By the way, this just got in: a plane just flew into the WTC. We don’t know much yet, but there’s a high possibility it might be a terrorist attack on the US. Stand by for a press conference from your president George W. Bush.
You’re the one somehow bemused at the existence of an article about a part of history (of gaming), which again is a very common thing. Consider therapy.
To follow your bizarre example, we’d never have articles or interviews about 9/11 ever again. Let’s just not bother talking to people who were around back then.
I’m deeply sorry I didn’t follow your rules for posting comments on the internet. I will indeed find therapy to deal with the shame, and to learn about your rules so I won’t make this mistake ever again. Even my mom called me to tell me I was her biggest disappointment (although in general, not necessarily related to my comment mistake) so you must be right.
Yeah we were there when it happened
I got the collector edition. Never again.
I bought my first ever PC that was built for and came with spore.
I was happy with the computer, the game was… less than what I thought it was going to be.
Those of us not in the industry refer to that as “lying.”
The thing that really bugged me about Spore was how lame the “evolution” was.
If early developments in your creatures set certain things in motion that then played out differently that would be great and add replay value.
But nothing was meaningful at all, you could completely change stuff back and forth. Very little in your evolutionary history actually mattered, at all.
That’s because
childrenadults would get stuck on a path that was untenable, and management didn’t like that idea. It would lead to a bad experience and a negative review.There were a couple details that mattered.
Whether you were aggressive vs friendly vs neutral at each stage had some consequences for all later stages. Creatures you befriend in the Creature stage could become pets in the Tribal stage, which could include the powerful lone wolf ones.
As a kid my first experience of it was a friend playing it so I got that feeling of wonder from that instead of trailers and the like, and because of that i was very satisfied with the game
The game still was somewhat of a technical marvel, especially for its time. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like the creature editor where it would allow you to create fairly arbitrary creatures, try to automatically detect what was the head, torso, legs; and try to animate them all correctly. Then, entire creature definitions were encoded into small PNG files using stenography, which could be shared with minimal data usage.
I loved Spore, but I’m easily pleased with video game. I liked creature stage the most, but also liked space and puttering around!
I even really liked the cell stage because the gameplay loop was fun and simple, plus you got to eat the bastards who were eating you before you got bigger.
I still have and play the game sometimes. I would have loved for it to be what I envisioned but it’s still the most enjoyable evolution based game I’ve played. I should look and see what else might be available. I really like the concept.
There is a game called thrive that is attempting to do a really hardcore version of spore. There’s still really at the early stages of evolution and the complexity of the bacterial stage is pretty intense.
Evo: Search for Eden is my vote for best evolution game.
Maybe someday we will get a spiritual successor to spore
Exact same thing that happened with No Man’s Sky. That first trailer was so obviously curated out-the-wazoo, and I remember people insisting it was the last game they’d ever need to play based on it alone. And we all know what happened when that one came out.
I don’t know how much of that was developer hubris and how much publisher (Sony) pression to deliver. Internet historian made great video about NMS, and at least from dev perspective it was a clusterfuck of massive overprimising and bad circumstances.
Oh I remember this game. I’m still irritated at the fraudulent claims. The game was not at all what I expected. Marketing can eat me for this one.
It might be worth to link to the original source: https://www.designroom.site/spore-an-oral-history/
Design Room is a new online magazine authored by one of the writers laid-off by Vox Media when it acquired Polygon.
You can read the Oral Histories after a free subscription.Translation: “We were just shitting you, so don’t buy our game.”
Now I’m really worried that this chould severily damage the sales of this game
Spore taught me a lesson on not trusting hype.
It was my first experience with a hyped disappointing game.
Also I do not think it was something technical. It was just EA evilness to their marketing team though that a more child oriented game would sell better than the hardcore simulation the devs wanted to make.
I still remember that E3 trailer with the willowsaur, it showed more advanced characteristics that the final product. They straight up downgraded their game.
Same here, I remember being 15 and sharing the video around school on this amazing new website called Google Videos. I watched that demo multiple times and ate the hype big time, and then we know what happened next.
A few years later, EA ruined Battlefield and I’ve never bought a game from them since.
The only fantastical promise about the game I ever remember reading was the animations were supposed to be kinesthetic based on how you made your creatures; kinda like how GTA’s Euphoria physics engine works.
And as far as I had read regarding that, they were struggling with it and had to abandon it at the behest of management not giving them more time to figure it out.
I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.
Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn’t surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they’d actually solve a well known industry challenge.
If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn’t be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.
No, that’s a problem we’ve already solved, with math.
You can make a rig like that yourself, just by following some advanced tutorials.
It feels like you’re saying “this is hard, let’s throw AI at it”.
That’s not the fun way for humans to do things.Can you link what you’re talking about? Because I’m not aware of any animation system that’s purely mathematically derived AND that can generate aesthetically pleasing animations for arbitrary body shapes.
There are certain techniques like Inverse Kinematics that might vaguely fit your description, but that’s a tiny piece of the puzzle - it might get you 5-10% of the way, but given arbitrary body shapes it’s gonna look horrible in most cases, and it doesn’t give you actual animations since you’d still need to purposefully move the creature’s extremities.
You should have written the last paragraph first, would have gotten less downvotes.
I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games
And everyone just immediately stopped reading your comment.
Spore devs say the evolution game’s previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making
Not often they just casually admit to false advertising like that.
The devs didn’t handle marketing.
That doesn’t vindicate the marketing.
Never said it does, just that it’s not so much an admission as pointing the finger.
