Development of Spore

The player then begins molding and guiding this species' society, developing it into a space-faring civilization, at which point they can explore the galaxy in a space ship.

"[2] Spore was originally a working title, suggested by Maxis developer Ocean Quigley, for the game which was first referred to by the general public as SimEverything.

[7] The earliest version was inspired by the SETI Project, as Wright admitted, "The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore.

"[5] Spore's design documents were published in an issue of Wired in 2004 as a layout portraying the cycle of evolution, unbeknownst to the magazine and the general public at that time.

[9] A video released on YouTube[10] shows "unedited footage of Spore that will be going to TV networks covering E3 2006", and includes an overhauled creature editor, a first look at the texturing tools, as well as glimpses at other aspects of the game.

"[14] The New York Times reported a projected development cost of twenty million United States dollars on October 10, 2006.

[18] A projected 2008 release was revealed three weeks later at an EA conference call, corroborating the speculation that a significant amount of development was still left to be completed.

[19] In a GameVideos interview with Garnett Lee, Wright explained, "I credit him with, basically, you know, being able to present [the Civilization phase] that has that many, ah, strategic possibilities but not have it being overwhelming from a gameplay mechanic sense.

He also announced a partnership with SETI, taking part in the Celebrating Science 2008 activity on July 16, 2008, where Spore betas were available for play.

The most visible change was in the cellular phase, which transformed the unicellular organisms into strange insects with cartoonish, human-like eyes, which were used "to make it cute", according to Wright during the 2007 TED seminar.

During the annual Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences DICE Summit on February 7, 2007, a slide was displayed (see image, right) which listed a total of eight phases.

This created uncertainty as to which method would be used in the final game; particularly as a later video demonstrated the essence of the cell creature emerging from a pond.

The 2007 TED Presentation in March 2007 again depicted a legless, slug-like creature emerging from the water, leaving a trail of slime in its wake.

Similarly, the underwater phase featuring swimming creatures had vanished since its appearance in the original 2005 GDC demo, which led to fears that it may have been cut.

[34] However, in the July 2006 issue of PC Gamer (UK) their preview of Spore suggested that players would not only be able to create aquatic creatures, but would be able to develop them into a fully underwater civilization.

Though the final version of Spore released to stores had indeed proven the underwater phase had been cut, it is still possible for the player's creature to swim above water.

CFO Warren Jenson stated that the game will not be included in the company's financial plan for its current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2008.

Comic books with stylized pictures of various creatures, some whose creation has been shown in various presentations, can be seen on the walls of the Spore team's office.

[46] The utility was revealed at San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, 2008, as the Spore Comic Creator, which would use MashOn.com Archived 2008-12-10 at the Wayback Machine and its e-card software.

Wright expressed the desire to release the game on other platforms, such as seventh generation consoles, the PlayStation Portable and the Apple Macintosh.

Other animations of the lizard including hunting, eating, swimming, dragging objects, mating, playing a drum and dancing, all of which were procedurally generated based on the model that the player created.

Wright also humorously demonstrated a creature that looked like a Care Bear (claiming it would be a vicious carnivore), indicating that players could create animals similar to those found in nature or popular culture.

[1] This also applied to vehicles such as space ships, as demonstrated in the Gadgetoff video, in which Wright was seen piloting a UFO similar to the USS Enterprise.

Sean O'Neil worked as a consultant for Maxis "to assist with R&D involving dynamic generation and rendering of a fractal-based world".

The official site allows users to sample a number of Spore prototypes, which include ParticleMan, SPUG, City Maze, and other software, all under 1000KB in size, save the 20MB Space, and the 45mb Gonzago.

[citation needed] Specifically, as the demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit home computers such as the Atari ST and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data.

On August 9, 2007, SIGGRAPH 2007 featured a seminar titled Spor(T), including segments Player Driven Procedural Texturing, Creating Spherical Worlds, Fast Object Distribution, and Rigblocks: Player-Deformable Objects, given by Spore development team members Andrew Willmott, Ocean Quigley, Henry Goffin, Chris Hecker, Shalin Shodhan and David DeBry.

Gibeau stated, "What's so beautiful about Spore is that it's extremely malleable... you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii.

Eno has worked with Kent Jolly and Aaron McLeran to implement a simple piece of software in Spore called "The Shuffler", which procedurally generates fragments for the soundtrack from a number of samples, based on the programming language Pure Data.