Dare to dream?
In their purest and best form, the job of a video game is to spark the imagination and get people dreaming. Dreaming about being a roguish, ass-kicking, adventurer or a Goomba stomping Italian former-plumber; or maybe even about being an astronaut or a Star Citizen who has their wallets constantly pillaged in a never ending attrition of endless feature creep. (Wait, I think I lost my point a little with that last one; where was I going?) Some games take this to the logical conclusion and give us all the tools to feed our wild imagination and creativity however we so want. Which forms the general conceit for the love around the God Game genre: a type of game where the player assumes the role of omnipotent arbiter across anything from a small tribe of god-fearing faithfuls to an entire budding species. The game I want to talk with you about today is from that latter distinction, a game which proposed to simulate the genesis and evolution of a species from microbe to intergalactic superpower; I'm talking about Spore.
Spore is a game from Maxis, the kings of this sort of game, which really bigged up the idea of becoming the sentient mind behind evolution. Following your species across the various evolutionary stages and making gameplay and creative character building decisions that forms their genetic makeup. Maybe you give your monkey race a herbivore mouth and thus make them capable of only eating plants; how does that inform their intergalactic polices a few thousands of years later? This is the game in which you'll find out! Quietly about consequence and loudly about imagination, Spore captured the hearts of those who saw the cool animations in those daytime history channel documentaries and wandered about the journey of how these microscopic entities could develop into who we are today. In some ways its a educational game, just one with purpose and content, which inherently disqualifies it from being defined as an educational game.
You start off as a Spore on a asteroid that crashes into a fledging planet, and endure one of the most chaotically interesting stages as you battle for food sources in order to grow, as well as to harvest DNA points that can be used to add-on body parts from other slain spore microbes. A coherent gamification of the selective process. This carries onto the more expansive 'creature stage', where you grow legs (or don't if you want to be a slug) and guide your newly minted animals through the world above water, a less frantic 3D version of the spore stage. The tribal and civilisation stages play like RTS and 4X games respectively, with the focus being more on establishing a society and culture from an ostensibly intelligent race. And the Space Stage was the end of the line; an exploration based adventure mode with a slightly undercooked civilisation management meta game tagged on top of the package, this was the reward for enduring the trials of evolution.
So essentially the game was a collection of minigames strung together to tell a single narrative, but it was an ambitious narrative from start to finish. Each stage could have been further fleshed out into an individual game of it's own, and by tempering the scale of those mods the team built a diverse, if somewhat linear, journey to the stars. Of course the belle of the ball in Spore was the creature maker, which proved to be one of the most impressive feats of design I've ever seen in a character creator. The player could form the shape, spine and appendages of the creature using completely accessible free-form tools, and the resulting abomination would animate and move to the player created specifications. It was marvellous, adaptable, easy-to-use and too impressive to only be used once for one game. And yet it was. Spore launched, didn't do as well as Maxis had hoped, led to the cancellation of 'Dark Spore', and was ultimately never touched again.
Until recently, it would seem. Youtuber and programmer Callum Upton, who apparently also had a space for the majestic Spore game in his childhood, shared his love for the game in a video and, in doing so, inspired one entrepreneuring indie developer to try and make a spiritual successor of their own. Wauzmons, of Seven Ducks Studios, on Itch.io is heading their own title 'Elysian Eclipse' to fill that evolution-game void which has been in our lives, and already we've got out a first demo for what they've been working on. Right now we can see that they've tackled probably the hardest ingredient in this recipe; the creature maker framework itself. The original Spore's systems were marvel's of creativity and ease-of-use, and from the impressions so far it seems that this developer has performed remarkably in their work.
The way that spores systems worked was through these modules of manipulation attached to the core 'body' of the creature that represented it's spine. The globules of matter attached to these modules could be stretched, shrunken or enlarged at the player's whim to form the core shape of the creature. Arms, legs, eyes and stat-granting accessory features could be stuck ontop of this core shape to provide utility, and each limb could be manipulated to a lesser extent, with core modules at points of articulation such as the shoulder, elbow and wrist of an arm. It's simple, but limited. Elysian has done away with the concept of modules and in it's placed introduced a free-form placement system wherein you stick random globules of matter into a conflux, essentially eliminating the original Spore's limitation of a singular core body piece to build off of. If the developer can figure how to make these custom creations actually move with a sensible skeleton (which I haven't seen shown off yet myself, but seems to be the hardest challenge here) then we'll actually have a marked improvement on something the Maxis team did back in 2008. That is an impressive point to build from already.
From the strength of this core system alone I'm encouraged to take this project with a modicum of seriousness, especially given that the breadth of Spore, at least in it's original package, is a collection of connected genre-microcosm-minigames; not exactly reinventing the wheel here at all. The creator system is the huge hurdle, and having mastered that it's might exactly be a downwards slope for the rest of the game, but certainly a even-ground progression for the rest of principle development. Of course then comes the wizardry of bug fixing, optimization and tying systems into one another and that stuff is totally beyond me so I couldn't comment. Also, this is assuming that Elysian Eclipse is intending to follow the Spore formula of basic minigames of grander genre titles, or dev may go crazy and decide to flesh out their minigames and then this game will become the next Star Citizen. But you know what, as long as it doesn't get as greedy as Cloud Imperium did: I'm here for the process.
Serious scope has gone into the planning stages already, with the plan for this game teasing two more stages than Spore even had! An 'Aquatic stage' directly after the cell stage and a 'Medieval' Stage tucked in between 'Tribal' and 'Industrial'. (I assume 'Industrial' is this game's shorthand for 'Civilisation stage') Throw in the planned modding API and multiplayer support, and I'd understand if you find all this to be a bit fantastical of a prospect for an independent team relying on backing from a community for a niche game from The Noughties. I'm torn. I want to believe, but these guys are shooting for the moon. But you know what they say, aim for the moon and end up in stars, right? (Even though that makes no sense on an interstellar level as the stars would be, comparatively, higher than the moon which undercuts the point of the proverb.) It looks interesting, and Spore needs a sequel. I wish the team luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment