Spore Gameplay

Contents

• Spore
• Gameplay 
• Stages
  • The beginning.
  • Cell
  • Creature
  • Tribal
  • Civilization
  • space

Spore

Spore is a multi-genre "
Massively singe-player simulation and online god game
" under development by Maxis and mainly designed by Will Wright. The game revolves around evolving your creature through several stages.
In the beginning you start as a unicellular organism, and you "end" as a interstellar exploration, spacefaring culture, with all several stages of life and cultures in between.

Gameplay

The objective in Spore is to evolve the species you created. Starting as a single cell organism, evolving into a complex land based animal, its emergence as a social, intelligent being, to its conquest of the planet and finally to explore the stars and other planets as a spacefaring civilization looking for alien species across the galaxy.
The game is split up into separate yet consistent and recognizable stages.  Each stage affects the next stage. However, it's still up to the player when the next stage starts, as you're free to choose when to advance, though the opposite is possible.

Stages

Will Wright, the main game designer associated the stages with several games and films.
   1. Cell stage: Pac-Man
   2. Creature stage: Diablo
   3. Tribal Stage: Populous
   4. Civilization stage: SimCity and Civilization
   5. Space stage: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third kind.
You can set the difficulty for each stage, which defaults on the easiest level, And the first four stages are rumored to take about 10-15 hours to complete.

The beginning

The starts with a intro showing a comet crashing into the ocean, which brings the seed of life and creates the primordial soup from which you'll crawl and starts the Cell stage.

Cell Stage

The first stage.
Here you'll be guiding your fresh to life microbe around in a 2D environment. The objective is to feed on weaker microbes and/or plants while evade enemies and natural currents.
Once you've eaten several cells, you can choose to enter the Spore Creature Editor and "evolve" the appearance and abilities of your creature by spending your DNA points.
if you die, you'll be returned to the editor.
In order to get more DNA points, you'll have to eat, but in order to spend those on new abilities you'd need too seek out special "
Golden shields
" which open up new parts for you to use in the editor such as new mouths or limbs.
As you grow, your environment changes. Objects that were in the background, slowly move to the foreground, which can mean being eaten by a enemy in that had previously been swimming in the background. The surface slowly becomes more prominent, and the option to move to land eventually presents itself, allowing you to crawl out of the primordial soup.
[wegame]http://www.wegame.com/watch/SPORE_Cell_phase/[/wegame]

Creature stage

The creature stage basically resembles the cell stage, however with several important differences. for one your world will now be in
3D
. And you won't be alone anymore either, other creatures will inhabit the world, and most of them will be made by other players ( which is possible through the
a-synchronizes online gameplay
)
Spore will adjust the ecosystem to your creature, the stronger it gets, the stronger it's natural enemies be and vice versa.
Another big change is that you'll now have to look for a partner in order to reproduce instead of the asexual method you had in the cell stage.
Once a mate has been found, you'll mate and a egg will be laid.
The egg has to be protected from predators till it hatches, which is needed in order to advance to the creature creator.
This point of this stage is to
evolve your creatures brain capacity
and start development of the creatures social behavior, as it may form a herd or pack with it's fellow kind or another species. Once your creature is smart enough, you'll get the option to progress to the Tribal stage.
Besides brain capacity your creature gets several other stats too, which will be used for different abilities like attacking and being social. Your stats are effected by the way you built your creature.
Currently there are several rumors that flying creatures will be a possibility, though this is not confirmed. One certainly however is, that all creatures will be land-based.
[wegame]http://www.wegame.com/watch/SPORE_Creatures/[/wegame]

Tribal stage

As the tribal stage starts, you'll be unable to further develop your physical appearance, as does your control over individual creatures. You're given a hut, a group of fully evolved creatures, a minimap of the world for the first time as well as two of six possible "
super powers
"  These are unlocked depending on the species behavior in previous stages.
In this stage the game resembles a real-time strategy game were "
Food
" replaces "DNA points" as the currency.
The player can give the tribe several tools, such as weapons and campfires which can be bought with your new currency.
Certain creatures will also be able to wear clothes now, clothes primary function is to show the profession of the creature ( fishing, gathering or hunting ) but rumors are there will be casual clothing too.
You can also attempt to tame other creatures and even use them as livestock.
Not only will you be able to develop your own tribe, you can also start having
diplomatic relations with other tribes
. The way you play your tribe will result in them mimicking your behavior, be it peaceful or hateful. this even is shown in the idle animation of your creature.
Once your tribe reaches a point of superiority, a statue will be built and transition to the civilization stage will occur.
[wegame]http://www.wegame.com/watch/Spore_Developer_Commentary_Tribe_Stage_NEW/[/wegame]

Civilization stage

As you start the Civilization stage, you'll notice your tribe huts have been turned into a city and your currency is now "
Spize
".
You also will have received
two new editors: The building and Vehicle editor
and you need to choose what type of civilization you want to be. ( Militaristic, religious or economical )
At this point the game will try to detect what kind of play style you had so far and download similar content which is created by other players and add it to the buy menu. Of course you won't have to use any of this, you'll also able create all your vehicles and buildings yourself.
Constructing vehicles and buildings, as with most real-time-strategy games, there is a unit cap, which can be raised by building more factories. Building factories adjacent to each other will give a productivity bonus and in addition raise the vehicle cap.
The players territory is marked with a colored border that increases as the player gains more power through militarism or influence.
When you become technologically advanced enough, you'll get an UFO editor.
Once you reach this phase of this stage, the goal will be to gain control of the entire planet, and it's left to you to decide how you'll do this.
[wegame]http://www.wegame.com/watch/GDC_2007_Spore_Civilization_Phase/[/wegame]

Space Stage

As with all the stages, the space stage also offers new objectives for you to for fill. You know have to option to leave the world you conquer and start exploring your neighboring planets.
You'll have the option to
terraform
and colonize these otherwise uninhabitable planets with special tools that you have at your disposal. ( Water tool, Volcano tool, etc ) Terraforming is a way to make planets habitable, one of the ways of doing this is through pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas. However, this is not without risk, left unchecked this can cause the ocean to rise, which will eventually cause it to be evaporated and transforms the planet into a huge desert, followed by a molten rock in space. Another way is to crash ice comets into a planet to bring water, or force volcanoes to erupt to increase atmosphere. but you could also just built a city which is protected by a shield, be it underwater or on land.

Later,
interstellar travel
becomes possible.
Spore offers more then
4 billion planets to discover
, which is way more then anyone can visit in one lifetime. these 4 billion planets are floating around inside a "living" galaxy filled with several kinds of nebula's, black holes and supernova's and other species!

As a player you can make contact with these aliens, most of which are created by other players. Contact doesn't always have to be smooth though, when first contact fails you may be fired upon, however you may also have a positive encounter and beam down a holographic image of yourself to directly interact with your newly found friends..
or just blow them up
!
It's all up to you!