Topic: Game, Spore

Got this from SL. The video is 35 minutes and I enjoyed it very muchly.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore
http://spore.ea.com/

drool...

Is this not the future of the computer mind? a program making procedural decisions based on its own ideas and information. I cant wait to see how this evolves. (not making a pun...)

Plus user-generated content! This is going to be awesome...


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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Spore looks promising. I'm curious about the controls and the level of interaction among the players ... and the coder in me is also looking forward for the file size of the final product.

It could be nice to see Spore ported on many platforms. There's no real need for 3D beside for the phase in space, and the game logic could work on any device : from a bad ass 5Ghz computer to a C64 or a Mobile phone.

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almost like a drug-induced epiphany with a computer

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poi said:
I'm curious about the controls and the level of interaction among the players ...

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Actually, judging by what he says in the presentation, there will be no real "interaction" between players. That is, you will not be able to affect other players' worlds and they will not be able to affect yours. Data is retrieved asynchronously, so you will have access to buildings, creatures, and other user-created content, but it's not going to be like a MMORPG or anything like that, where everyone is inhabiting the same universe and interacting with each other in real time.

And, design issues aside, that's really the kind of game I think most builders or god-game players would prefer. Personally, I'm not into the MMORPGs because of the amount of time you have to invest in them. But a game like this I could pick up whenever I felt like it and advance my creature(s) a little further along the evolutionary scale. I really wouldn't want to have worked so hard to build up my little creatures into a thriving civilization just to have some guy in a UFO come along and blow up my planet in the blink of an eye.

(I gave up computer games for Lent... so now I'm reduced to speculating about them. )


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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Which is a good point, Suho. See, I would hate it, as a budding gamer, if this *was* like a MMORPG. Those who got into it first owuld have the biggest civilisations, and would basically rule everyone, blowing up whole worlds if they don't like you. That's just not right. If, however, it downloads their data to you, and your changes to their data don't go anywhere but into your own data files, then that's a different matter.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

yup. It pulls content from other players worlds to build a balanced ecosystem in your game. User created content is going to become pretty standered I think. Will Wright once said that if 1% of the players of a game were creating content. I would be more manpower than the entire microsoft workforce. And youd have to be crazy not to harness that.

Sure it'd suck to be anihilited by other players. But I was a bit surprised by the small number of different species visible in the video at each stage of evolution. But I assume not everything is ready, they probably haven't had time and/or the will to show the full potential of the game.

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poi said:
But I was a bit surprised by the small number of different species visible in the video at each stage of evolution. But I assume not everything is ready, they probably haven't had time and/or the will to show the full potential of the game.

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And you have to remember, too, that the full potential of the game will only be realized when people start playing it. There did indeed seem to be a rather limited number of species in the game in the video, but I imagine that once the game has a stock of creatures, buildings, etc. created by other players, the diversity will explode. In fact, I think balancing that diversity may turn out to be one of the biggest challenges faced by the designers, assuming that the game works as planned.


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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup