Product Reviews

Electronic Arts’ much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a towering road from concept to completion.

The game’s creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not faraway after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all day.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore’s origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

“The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore,” Wright told me last month. “As we thought about, it became obvious that evolution was a very fundamental component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy.”

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore’s release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., nearly all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many citizens, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it’s notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

“The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing whether we could teach the computer to prepare them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior,” Wright said. “We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or whether some part of it wasn’t doable, where we have to scale it back.”

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he’d been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

“Even though SimMars never quite jelled for us, much of the technology we developed there made it into the early efforts on Spore,” Shankel said. “We had systems for simulating planetary climates and things like that.”

All told, Maxis produced within 30 and 40 prototypes, of which Shankel said within 10 and 20 are “unique and interesting.”

And they’re fundamental for the development of games like Spore considering, as Wright noted, they can help the designers figure out precisely what works and what doesn’t as they move forward with a larger project.

“Game design prototypes are small, lightweight applications designed to explore specific questions or risks in game development,” Shankel said. “You can think of them as screen tests in film, or sketches in art.”

The value of making the prototypes is that they supply a way to inexpensively pop quiz out whether an concept works or doesn’t. As Shankel points out, the creation of a large-scale game like Spore is tremendously expensive, and there’s not much room for error in a finished product. But along the way, there’s plenty of opportunity to break out small ideas into prototypes.

“Prototypes can be developed by small teams working rapidly,” he said. “We don’t typically anguish bout things like bullet-proof stability, cross-platform issues or compatibility across multiple PC configurations. They’re just little toys that help us decide what we’ll really want to do when we roll out the big guns.”

The practice of prototyping along these lines is not different to Spore. But that project differs from most in that the folks at Maxis and EA decided to manufacture some of them available to the public.

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Original post by Daniel Terdiman