Gameplay
Spore will be a simulation that "ranges from the cellular phase to the galactic phase." It will consist of several long phases, each with its own style of play, with a range of gameplay styles, including elements of life simulation and real-time strategy. Wright also mentioned that he wanted players to be able to spend as much time as they prefer in each stage, without being forced to move to the following stage. In a February 12, 2008 Newsweek interview with N'Gai Croal, Wright mentioned that they added a difficulty selector to each stage, allowing players to choose the difficulty for each part of the game.
The games and films with which Wright associated the various phases are:
- Pac-Man for the tide pool phase
- Diablo for the creature phase
- Populous for the tribal phase
- SimCity, Risk, and Civilization for the civilization phase
- SimEarth, Destroy All Humans!, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the space phase, with elements of sandbox gameplay. DICE 2007 referred to it as similar to Master of Orion.
Each phase of the game determines the starting point of the next phase. In the Game Developers Conference presentation, the creature that Will Wright was "guiding" through the creature phase was based on his earlier cell creature. It had three legs, a tail, eyes and a mouth in roughly the same position. He had evolved this creature through gameplay of the prior phases.
He mentioned that the creatures' personality, whether it be logical or emotional, peaceful or violent, etc, is also affected by this gameplay.
During the 2007 TED conference seminar, Wright revealed that all phases could be accelerated, even having eons pass by in moments during the experimentation of a planet's biosphere. Furthermore, during the aforementioned Newsweek interview, it was revealed that players will be able to jump to any stage of the game, using pre-generated creatures if needed.
Start of life
The game opens - and the dawn of life - with a comet plummeting onto a chosen planet, which hints at the concept of panspermia. The comet ostensibly supplies the complex molecules (i.e. proteins) from which life will develop. For the next phases of gameplay, choose the desired page.
Elements of gameplay
Editors
Spore's major concept is that nearly everything is created by the players. Will Wright has stated that in addition to being simple, all the editors will be as similar as possible to each other so that content creation skills are easily transferable from one editor to the next. There are several different editors, each one dealing with a different type of content.
In concept, the editors start simply in the cellular phase and move to higher levels of complexity acting as tutorials for progressive levels of gameplay. For example; the tide pool editor as demonstrated so far has a small set of choices (three sensory, three movement, and three attack options) and a two-dimensional structure compared to the E3 2006 creature editor demo which, for sensory alone, had nine options of four tiers each for a total of 36 options as well as three-dimensional structure. Editors move from a spine or body model in the early editors to presumably more free-form editors for the civilization phase. Planet-molding is perhaps the most ambitious, free-form and least detailed editing option; whether or not it will involve a true editor or an array of tools available to the "UFO" is unknown.
At E3 2006, Wright showcased the creature editor. It allows the player to take what looks like a lump of clay with a spine and mold it into a creature of their choosing. Once they are done molding the main form, they can then add legs, arms, feet, hands, eyes, mouths, decorative elements, and a wide array of sensory organs like antennae. Many of these parts affect the creature's final abilities (speed, strength, diet, etc.), while some parts are purely decorative. Once the creature is designed to the player's satisfaction, they can paint the creature using a large number of textures, overlays, colors, and patterns. After the player feels their creature is complete, it can be tested in a small enclosed area, showing how it would move around, fight, interact, etc. There is also the hut editor (tribal phase), the building and vehicle editor (civilization phase), the flora editor (from tribal to space phase), the UFO editor (civilization/space phase) and the terrain editor and all work from the same basic software. In the "2012: Stories from the Near Future," the Creature Editor was shown to have been altered so that the hands and feet were already attached to the limbs. There are also some curiously bat wing-shaped appendages added to the editor. At the 2007 TED conference, Wright created a bizarre one-eyed creature with two mouths on its forelimbs and a mace-like clubbed tail.
In the IGN Evolution video, one screenshot of the Creature Editor showed the limbs and hands without claws or fingernails. In the Youtube 2007 Gadgetoff video, it was confirmed that the player can add alternate hands/feet with talons, fingernails, etc. through a separate section with a hand icon.
"Massively single-player metaverse"
Wright calls the game a "massively single-player online game". Simultaneous multiplayer gaming is not a feature of Spore. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database (or a peer-to-peer system), cataloged and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games. The data transmitted will be very small — only a couple of kilobytes per item transmitted, according to Wright. This was due to procedural generation of material.
During Wright's Long Now Foundation seminar with Brian Eno in June 26, 2006, he mentioned that players would receive statistics of how their creatures would be faring in other players' games, referring to this as the alternate realities of the Spore metaverse. The game would report to the player on how other players interacted with them (for example, how many times other players made alliances with their race or destroyed their planet). The personalities of user-created species are dependent on how the user played them.