A Clouded Vision

The pictures and stories about this latest game from Will Wright's creative mind have been going around for some time now.

But until recently, that's also where it ended. With the release of a short movie (35 minutes) that changed!

Let me fill you in about exactly what Spore is. Spore is a new game (in development) from Will Wright. You might have know no clue whatsoever about who he is. But you will most definately know his games. He is the creative mind behind The Sims and The Sims 2 and all the expansions.

As you probably know, the Sim-series weren't the smallest of games, with installs going far beyond 3 gb of needed diskspace. This was because of all the animations, textures and models that had to be created for each and every character or object in the game. To keep a story short; the games were huge because of the broad range of different content in them.

This got Will thinking, how big his games will be in the following years. Accidently he came across sites from the demo-scene. This fairly unknown programming 'sport', is based on 'making as much as possible, as small as possible'. Top programmers would make movies well over 10 minutes long, in an .exe-form which would be no more than 64 kb. Yes, that small indeed.
'Wouldn't this technique be something for me?', Will thought. And it was indeed.

In spore, none of the animations are created beforehand. Neither are the textures, or models. Only the basic shapes for a tree and such were defined originally. Instead, based on the shape a certain creature has (the number of legs for example) the game calculates the movement of the creature by itself. And this is done with just about everything in the game.

I could blog on for ages but I think you just have to see for yourself, just how amazing this game really is. There are lots and lots of interviews, pictures and such out there, which you can easily reach via Google. I will only give you the link to the movie. Have fun!

Click here!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 12:36 and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.