Jon Ippolito sent me another link, but this time it's to a "dated" article (March 2005) that previews a game code-named Spore (The game, developed by the people who created the Sim games, were originally planning on calling the game Sim Everything, but the code-name Spore stuck).
Spore is an evolution simulator, where you begin the game as a small microbe and eventually evolve into a creature. As the game progresses, your fully-customized creature becomes sentient and starts a tribe, and eventually a civilization. Ultimately, you acquire the technology to travel to other parts of the world, and even one of millions of planets, many populated by other beings. These other beings would be creatures created by other players, which have been automatically uploaded to their server and distributed around to other players, thus creating a unique "massive single-player online game".
The article talks about Will Wright's thought behind designing the game, and how he pushed away from having enormous teams of artists and animators creating everything needed for the game, and instead focuses on code-based procedural creation of not only the creatures, but the buildings and worlds they inhabit. The procedural generation doesn't rely on pre-designed images, but instead uses complex mathematical formulas to create everything; this effectively reduces the file sizes of other players' creatures down to under 1 kilobyte, making distribution of characters incredibly easy. The procedural generation doesn't stop at just the looks, however, it also can be used to smartly predict how the character would be animated (two legs vs. four legs vs. ten legs, how fast it moves, what limb it uses to hold objects primarily, etc.). And suddenly, a game that would normally require a gargantuan army of artists and animators and would take up a huge amount of disk space is instead able to be created by a significantly smaller team of coders and will take up much less hard drive space. On top of that, the creative possibilities open up, and are literally endless.
This is relevant to my Anarchy MUD idea because it's basically a game where the players create the world (or in this case, the universe) around them. This also has a playability advantage over my idea, in that the players aren't able to break the game and ruin it for everyone else. I haven't decided yet if I will keep the easy destruction of everything ability in later approaches of my idea, or if I can somehow incorporate a way to limit it, and if so, how would I go about limiting it. Just more things to think about.
1 comment:
I want to play that game so badly. The idea of it is just incredible. You say that it has an advantage over yours in that the characters can't destroy other characters, correct? First of all, (because I don't know much more about this game than what you outlined in your post) in what ways can the characters interact? Secondly, wouldn't it be more realistic if a more advanced character/organism *could* destroy a weaker one? Maybe your game could be set up like that in some way? But still, I think it would be interesting to see if that happened naturally--if everyone is an admin, is there a way they can limit other characters in your game? Like, as they grow they gain power and you have to work your way up a social hierarchy as a newbie? I sort of hope there would be characters who would see an advantage in protecting beginning players somehow so that older ones/meaner ones wouldn't be able to delete them so easily. Maybe like a voting system--a certain amount of characters have to vote you off before you are deleted. Although now it's sounding like a reality tv show . . . but how different is it really?
Post a Comment