Andrew: I’m not sure I know enough to really give a good review of the two prototypes I mentioned. There might actually be some trick to that CityMaze thing to allow entertainment buildings to work and that’s probably the main reason I mentioned it here, to see if anyone had figured it out. There also might be ways of modding that Space thing via the text files in some meaningful fashion to give it more replay value or complexity, but it’s beyond my capability or enthusiasm. It also doesn’t help that it’s about 105 degrees outside and my temperature tolerance and air conditioning aren’t quite up to the job of letting my brain work in this heat.

What I wrote is more relevant to how the prototypes might relate to the final game, in this small window of time where nobody outside Maxis knows the answer, but interest in the prototypes might be just as timely so I could see how they would still be relevant. You can re-use them.

I thought the worry always was that it had no features/mechanics?

Seriously, I didn’t follow it that closely, what has been dropped, and how did the GC 2005(?) video someone mentioned differ? My interest levels started to rise (and significantly so) when I watched the Comic Con presentation video.

That’s no problem. I was playing Counter Strike Source with my groomsmen in my apartment less than an hour before my wedding :D.

Uh…Spore…nope not interested.

I’ll spend my money and my time elsewhere, thanks.

The only thing I’m worried about Spore is that, in the wide-reaching scope of the game, the actual details may be a little washed out. Will the Civilization mode be as deep as Civilization? Probably not, but I’m hoping it won’t be a shallow imitation either.

Also, the amount of thought that’s gone into these little dev tools gives me hope that Spore is definitely something above the norm.

The Space prototype was really a lot of fun though, there’s really nothing to the technology or diplomacy ‘game’ of it, but terraforming, seeding, and colonizing new worlds is crazy fun. I’m sure from videos that Spore has the same complexity on the terraforming part, and probably more complexity on the colonizing part, but I wonder if the more graphically-intense real game will be able to give me this sense of the creatures and plants spreading all over the plant in a gradual way, and sometimes failing because the environment isn’t /quite/ perfect for them.

What I fear, in short, is that in Spore once you drop a plant and some critters on a suitable planet, and maybe zoom away for a minute, suddenly they’re going to exist all over the planet. That’d leave no apparent way to build separate ecosystems and environs, unless there’s actually localized climates (hot, cold, humid, dry and variations inbetween) to restrict different plants and animals to different areas. It’d also deprive me of that special joy I feel when I see weeds and camels spreading across a once-dead world.

I hope they’ve taken the right elements specifically in the terraforming game in the Space prototype because that’s what felt most like an enjoyable game. You can’t just plop down some volcanoes and slam a planet with a bunch of comets, you’d only get a dead world of peaks and frozen oceans. In some ways it could stand to be harder though, for instance there was seemingly no way to fail by having /too much/ atmosphere, and apparently planets don’t actually need much if any water to support life so you can basically skip the ‘comet’ step if you don’t want oceans. Following that, you also don’t have to worry about rain shadows or any other localized weather effect, or weather at all for that matter.

I could see Spore being massively more complicated in the terraforming stage than the Space prototype, they call it a prototype for a reason, but I just can’t know until I see more of it.

But I’d still rather play the game Wright showed at GDC 05 than whatever is coming out next month.

If it every really existed. Wright said it himself at that keynote– the demoed version was basically held together with bits of tape and string.