Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Spore Thread: A Massive Singleplayer Online Banning Experience
Ten
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
It's nearly here! And to make up for PAX being all the way across the world, Australia gets it 3 days before the US! (nearly 4 since we're like 18 hours ahead of you guys)
Not to be a bastard about it but we're used to getting screwed over here so it's nice to have something for a change.
ANYWAY
It is going to be pretty damn cool! Five different gameplay styles, including a sandbox space mode which will keep us going for a long time, kick ass procedural animations, and passively multiplayer creature sharing, which means over that hill is probably a frickin' stampede of dick monsters.
You all know the creature creator was released months ago, and SE++ came up with some pretty damn awesome creatures, so as soon as the game comes out I will be creating a Sporecast for SE++. What's a Sporecast? It's like an RSS feed for Spore creatures, and like an RSS feed you can subscribe to it and have your worlds seeded by whatever is shared!
So among others, you can look forward to running into these guys:
Spoiler:
And the awesome thing is that you can drag those pictures in that spoiler into the game or the Creature Creator, and you've got the creature! The beauty of procedural creature generation at work, folks.
TALK ABOUT SPORE!
Update: I've created the SE++ Sporecast, it's called Social Entropy Plus Plus, if you search in game or on Sporepedia you can see all our creations! Click here to see it in the Sporepedia
If you'd like to be part of the SE++ sporecast, post your Spore username in this thread and I'll add you as a buddy and will endeavour to add all your creations to the Sporecast (at this point I don't think I can do that automatically)
Everybody's latest items don't seem to be showing up in the search yet, so I'm going to list everybody who I've added to the Sporecast; if you add them as a buddy, you should get their latest stuff as well.
SE++ Sporecasters:
Spoiler:
Ten on
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
sid meier right
or american mcgee?
then it'll go downhill from there
I hope I'm so wrong though
Billy Crystal and John Goodman
PC Powerplay, an Aussie games mag, had the first review I believe, and they kind of agreed with what you just said (though I think it'd be longer than a few hours)
They said it was fun as you get to each new stage and gametype, but there wasn't a whole lot of depth to each one (although the space stage looks like you'll have a lot to do)
They said creative types will have a lot more fun with it, playing with all the editors and stuff.
Maybe because it allows joe schmoes like me to make cool looking creatures and space ships without having to buy 700 dollar software suites and spend month learning how to make a fucking beachball.
Damn elitist.
http://www.wings3d.com/
http://www.gimp.org/
Can't do much about the time it takes to learn that stuff though
But you're right, Spore is a good in between tool for creating cool stuff
Will Wright has a long neck.
I am so proud
And holy shit we get it 3 days before the US? ahahah.
So when is the official release date anyway?
Your mum looks boring.
But I actually enjoyed pounding her.
So maybe you should give Spore a try.
will wright 4 king
You know I love you(r shoes)
Also I won't be getting Spore until my birthday in October.
Sep 4 in AU, Sep 5 in Europe, Sep 7 in US
LOL, Jarofmoldymayo.
I've been excited about this game for a long time. Really hate the idea of a game as unique as this getting released to anyone ahead of the U.S. Anytime a game like this comes along, why can't we just get one single release date?
I've never been super interested in it but it does look cool
From 4 years to 4 days...holy shit...
holy shit whatever happened to him
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post | my website
Oh dayum, that's 2 days from now.
I know what I'm going to be doing come Thursday!
Clearly Will Wright hates America. Duh.
I took an RDO on Thursday just so I could go get Spore in the morning and play all day
Yep, they are all SE++ creatures, I went through the first 20 or so pages of the Creature Creator thread and grabbed the ones I liked. You made some cool stuff in that thread Blank, I'm looking forward to running into your creations in the real game
hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post | my website
this guy rules
I have a strong suspicion that you are correct. Wright's work tends to be distinctly this way, with Sim City being a really strong example.
Yeah I get that too.
Yeah, and there's a way to approach this from a gameplay perspective, too. Look at these options:
1) The physical makeup of your creature doesn't matter. The look of your creature and its combat stats or metabolic rate or resistance to extreme temperatures are not related at all.
2) The physical makeup of your creature matters, but the layout does not. So like, more claws = more damage in combat, but it doesn't matter where you put the claws.
3) The creature's abilities are pretty much synthesized purely from the makeup and layout of its bodily form.
In case 1, making your creature is essentially unrelated to the actual game. Just slap on whatever parts you want because it doesn't change a goddamn thing. This option sucks because the player has zero gameplay incentive to put effort into the creature. Yeah, you get to look at it, but that's all, and you might as well just use the creator program if you want that instead of having to play the game. This method completely divorces creature creation from gameplay.
Case 2 is just an extension of case 1. You are encouraged to stack the creature with body parts that provide it the right balance of, like, metabolism versus combat ability, or something. You know, you can make it big and beefy, but then it needs to eat more food and thus hunt bigger game, or you can make it smaller and thus it can survive off of stuff that's easier to hunt. It's an interesting case, although players will quickly stop arranging body parts...just as soon as they realize that it doesn't do anything for them. There's little more annoying than spending 15 minutes adjusting some minor detail and then realizing that it makes no difference. Shitty game designers solve this problem by hiding the stats so players don't know they're wasting time, but that's just a delay of the eventual realization that those actions do not matter. Remember those spells in FF1 that didn't actually do anything? Eventually we all noticed that they didn't seem to help and we stopped casting them and were generally annoyed that they were permanently wasting a slot in someone's spell book.
Case 3 is the most interesting in terms of gameplay, but it means that you are going to be somewhat restricted in what you do. You're going to have to make a creature that would actually make sense. I personally think that this is far and away the best idea; the game simulates evolution, thus the player is rewarded for building something functional. However, this does mean that some of the far-out crazy shit you see coming from the creator will not be usable in the game; it'll be horribly unbalanced since it was built for form instead of function. I doubt that Wright will go full-bore on this path, because this is distinctly core-gamer territory, where the player is actively encouraged to minmax his creature's layout and stats.