Quote: Spore™ has been a huge undertaking. Along the way we ended up exploring countless design directions in gameplay, simulation and user interface. One of the ways in which we explore possible design directions is by building simple, playable prototypes that we can play around with to get a sense for a particular system. Usually these prototypes are never seen by the public, but we thought some of the more intrepid players out there might enjoy playing around with a few of our early Spore prototypes. Keep in mind these are not tested, supported or even easily explained.

Link


I'm downloading these now, it should be fairly interesting. And Kudos to EA/Will Wright for thinking of this.

Also the game's gone gold---it'll be out September 5 in Europe, September 7th in the US.

Cheers


ADD: Here are the protoypes availible:

SPUG:
SPUG is a tunable gameplay prototype for the Creature level of Spore.

The player controls an avatar creature on a simple planetary terrain where they may hunt prey, evade predators, eat, rest and level up their stats.

No limitations are placed on leveling up or cheating stats. This tool was intended to give designers the opportunity to explore different economies for the creature game, so limitations on power ups and level ups are self-imposed.

Space:

The player explores a galaxy of stars with a spacecraft, discovering new worlds to terraform and colonize and encountering alien species to fight or befriend.

Successful colonies provide the player with resources and income which they can invest in technological research. Advanced technologies allow the player to terraform, colonize fight and explore more effectively.


City Maze:

City Maze is an agent-based city simulation prototype. The player controls a city of sim creatures.

Players may place residential, industrial, entertainment and defense buildings. When sims enter these buildings, they rest, produce income, improve their mood or defend against raider attacks.

Happy, safe, rested sims will multiply and produce income. Miserable, threatened, tired sims will get fed up and leave the city.

BIOME:

BIOME is a programmable cellular automata simulator that allows users to develop simple "SimCity-like" grid simulations.

The grid-simulations in SimCity were inspired by Conway's "Life" program, which produces amazingly intricate patterns from simple rules

BIOME uses a language based on chemical stoichiometry, the notation system used to describe chemical reactions. Cells in a BIOME simulation change state the same way that chemicals change when exposed to other chemicals

Systems such as this can be used to simulate phenomena such as forest fires, disease epidemics, animal migration patterns and crystallization

BIOME supports both rectangular and spiral cellular automata configurations. The spiral configuration was used to study stochastic, self-propagating star formation (the process whereby the ignition of a star promotes the creation of more stars) on the galactic scale.


Particleman:

ParticleMan simulates gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud. This system was used to study such gravitational dynamics as orbits, nebula formation, star formation and particle streams from sources like pulsars and black holes.

ParticleMan has the following elements:

• Particles — point masses which interact with each other
• Gravity Wells — fixed point masses which attract or repel particles(depending on magnitude, which can be negative), but do not move or change mass without user input
• Particle Guns — sources that spit particles out at a given angle and velocity
• Gravity Wells and Particle Guns may only be placed on the green grid in the z=0 plane.
• The Iso Surface — an isosurface geometry object derived from the positions and masses (which act as field strengths) of the particles.

Turn 'particle-particle interactions' under physics off and on to see the difference between the more orderly and predictable independent particles and the chaotic interacting ones.

With particle-particle interactions off, you can create some elaborate streams of particles using the Particle Gun and Gravity Well objects.

Play with physics controls to create different kinds of gravitational simulations. High fusion rates can be used to simulate star birth in collapsing nebulae, for example and low fusion rates can be used to simulate interaction between stars in a galaxy.