From the Primordial Soup

By Jake Sones

Will Wright is insane. On the spectrum of mental health, he falls somewhere between "with fricken lasers" and "defeated at Waterloo." That is to say, he's well beyond the realm of normal genius. He's the guy who makes the normal genii blink, cock its head to one side and say, "No, that's just not possible." Unlike a certain short-statured Frenchman, Will doesn't want to take over the world. He wants you to take over the universe.

It's been over 15 years since Will Wright allowed megalomaniacs to micromanage a miniature metropolis in SimCity. Since then there have been a bevy of Sim titles, each exploring a different aspect of societal interaction. In his latest project, Spore (currently in development), Will seeks to bridge the gap between SimAnt and SimEarth and then some. The game starts out with the player controlling a single-celled organism, eating things smaller than itself, running from things bigger. As your organism grows you are able to craft every aspect of its evolution. Not only will you choose which appendages to attach to your primordial pal, you'll be able to decide where they go and how many of them you want. The amount of flexibility provided here is a glimpse into the madness of Will Wright's mind. To your standard game developer this raises all kinds of warning flags and serious questions: How do we animate that? How do we ensure that an amoeba with 50 flagella is as viable as one with a single cilium? What would that even look like? Under normal conditions once all of these questions are answered you'd have the basis of your entire game. In Will's world you've just scratched the surface.

Game design follows the mantra that "Content is King"; you've got to have things for the player to do. Content generation is the most time consuming part of the game development process for the artists and game designers. You've got to conceptualize, build and place enemies, creatures and characters within the world. The Holy Grail of increasing a game's shelf life is user-generated content, things that players create themselves in order to entertain themselves and others. The Sims did this very well. There are literally hundreds of thousands of player-created game assets you can download from the Internet to customize your Sims experience. Spore seeks to seamlessly build upon this idea without requiring you to go through the hassle of finding something on a Web site and then manually downloading and installing it. The idea is so well integrated into normal game play that players might not even realize they're generating content. Remember that 50-flagellated amoeba you made? That's been uploaded to a database behind the scenes and will become an enemy in someone else's virtual world, somewhere else in the real world.

The systems created to make all of these ideas possible are just as impressive. When Will spoke at GDC last year (Game Developers Conference) the word "procedural" kept coming up. That's kind of a nebulous word, but he went on to explain how it applied to each aspect he attached it to. First up was procedural animation. You build your creature however you want and the game takes what it knows about each piece you used, and how you used it to generate animations appropriate for your creature. This complex system of evaluating each part will be able to handle any combination you come up with, eliminating the need for animators to create custom animations for each possible creature type, thus making creature creation more accessible to a wider audience.

In addition to the animation system being done procedurally, so is the population system. Normally a level in a video game will need to have each enemy and creature hand-placed and of appropriate difficulty for that level. In Spore, the game will populate an area with creatures that it pulls from the database in a ratio so that your creature will have plenty to eat and some things to run away from, ensuring that you're never at the top of the food chain.

Okay, so that about takes care of the first layer of gameplay. You've got a creature that eats other creatures and evolves to do so more efficiently so it can eat larger creatures. Beginning with a single cell, you eventually evolve to the point of a fish, and further into a land dweller. The next major milestone is that of a tool user, and here is where the game begins to shift gears. Your creature has finished physically evolving at that point. Instead of focusing on your creature as an individual, you begin to interact with your species as a society; deciding how they react to other species of a similar intelligence level, what tools they deem appropriate, basically influencing their personality. From here the game becomes like SimCityLite. You create a small town and manage how they continue to evolve as a people through what types of things they develop.

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