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Posts Tagged spore
extrinsic
Feb 18
Spored
May 9
As if no one saw this coming. Spore will most likely be delayed until next year, or later.
Electronic Arts said it taken out “Spore,” a game where players build organisms from scratch, from its financial projections for the fiscal year ending in March 2008, adding that the game could be delayed until fiscal 2009.
Sure, many can say they never delayed a release date before, but that’s because they never really officially posted one. Hinting counts!
Here’s Will Wright displaying a creature sequence from beginning to end in Spore at SXSW yesterday. It’s much like the original videos he showed when introducing the game a year or so ago, but obviously it’s being demo’d with the current engine and with a new creature being made up on the the fly. He gets all philosophical in the middle, as game designers are wont to do, and skips over village creation. But he goes much more into planet and space modes than before. The 17 minute video shows off planet weather, terraforming, planet invasion, creature encyclopedia, and galactic and intergalactic exploration.
Looks like the game is coming along just as expected. I’m hoping the replay value turns out as good as it seems, from the videos. And I hope the release date doesn’t get pushed back anymore (it currently resides at Q2 ‘07).
Living in Austin since the 80’s, it’s bittersweet for me to see what SXSW has become. On one hand, we get the best of all media worlds coming here: started with music, and expanded into movies, and now is huge on electronic entertainment. On the other hand, as a perpetual student, I can’t afford even a portion of the events anymore, much less the one grand fee of seeing everything.
Le sigh.
Games that age well
Jul 12
Games That Never Age: The Unrecognized Potential of Procedural Synthesis.
Procedural Synthesis (PS) is not a new technology. In fact, it isn’t really a distinct technology at all. It’s a way of taking advantage of algorithms to generate graphics instead of humans manually doing so. PS has been evolving in game deisgn for a long time. Even many old tile based games would have some random generated pattern tiles.
The best example for what you can do with this is the title .kkrieger. It is almost entirely PS generated, even down to the sounds and music. And yet, it makes a game that reminds me heavily of the Tenebrae upgrade to the Quake engine. Which brings us to the point altogether, making old games that upgrade themselves as computing and graphics power increases. A concept not all that foreign, as SOE tried this with their Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest 2 titles (although they did not use PS, per se).
I am excited to see games such as Spore coming out. These titles not only use PS for upgrade paths, but to make the game as open ended as possible. And we all know how fun and popular truly open ended games get (GTA, anyone?).
if your CPU were faster, upgrading your graphics would not necessarily be a process of creating new high-resolution textures, but of writing new, more complicated algorithms. Then, you use the new algorithms to generate your content, and you’ll find yourself with a graphical improvement that didn’t come packaged with a gigabyte of data.
