it's a known game but most people feel it was a fiasco, i think some developer will make a competitor game, and this are my ideas: The other creatures would evolve. If a species gets extinct another will replace it, you can also have evolutive cousins. The species would be sorted in lineages, each lineage would be pointed by the AI to some kind of creature, like brids, insects, reptilians, etc. It would start with a message saying something like "In the oceans of a planet rich in carbon complex molecules formed and and combined to create a chemical structure known as DNA with the unique capacity of self-duplication. This structure copyed itself many times but some copies were different and with time there was a large diversity of these. These structures became more complex and became living cells, bacteriums. Bacteriums continued to evolve until they assimilated another organism inside them, the mitochondrion, wich turn the into eukaryotes and gave them increased energy." First stage: protozoo Then you start out with a small single cell protozoo, it has some organelles, the nuclei, the mitochondrions and a couple generic digestive vacuoles. There arent any "DNA points", you evolve with time. Starting with a "newborn cell" you have to eat and avoid getting killed to reach maturity and duplicate, then you're able to make evolutive modifications, each time you have a limited variation range, this works a little like the DNA points, but you don't have to earn them, you have'em for each generation. When you're done with evolution you play the next generation, again from "newborn cell". You repeat this cicle changing organelles types and how many you have, also you can change the size, this is a key point, if you make your being larger, it will have a longer lifespan and thus will evolve slower, but will be harder to get killed and easier to kill others. In the other hand, if you are smaller you are weaker, but more adaptable. In some point you will be able to develop an adaptation called "connective cell wall" wich allows you to become pluricellular. Then you are a bunch of cells instead of one alone. When you evolve to have something like 100 cells you get a message saying that you're now macroscopic. Second stage: animal Start as a little lump of withe invertebrated flesh, a colonial organism with no cell differenciation. As you evolve you differenciate cells to crete vital organs. The first organs are the muscles, the skin, nerves and the stomach. The other organs are made out of the organs you have, for example the hearth is derivated from muscles, brain from nerves, eyes from skin, etc. To grow larger, because you're really small you need the organs and you keep developing and competing with the others with the same evolution mechanics based on size vs adaptability. You can leave water as soon as you are prepared, it's not another phase, and also you can come back to water if you need to, remember whales are mammals, so they were something like dogs and then came back to water.The planet would no be single-biome, they have climates like deserts, forests, mountains, tundras, etc. This affects the evolution of your species as they have to adapt to climates, climate changes, continental drifts, and cataclysms. About the brain you decide its size too, a larger brain needs more food and is easier to kill, so it's not to be hasty about intelligence, also for each organ you put after some level of complexity you must have a part of the brain to control it, so if you have conplex hands you'll need a big portion of the brain just for them, also applies to the senses, the part of the brain that is not used by organ control is dedicated to intelligence. In the case of senses there would be three, vision, audition and smell. Vision allows you to detect prey or predators in the screen, while audition and smell are like a radar. You can make each sense more complex, the more complex, the more brain it uses. While you develop inteligence you can make them become social and live in groups to better protection. Also you can make parents to care for their children, since more intelligent species are weak when young becouse they learn, as oposed to less smart beings who are birth "programmed and ready". You'll reach a point in where your species becomes so smart that it can make and use tools, fire, and language, still this won't make'em sentient yet, in the case of our species we evolved from the homo erectus, wich was like a standin monkey, but it is belived that it was able to make fire, still it never started a civilization. Also near the end of this stage you will be able to form symbiotic bonds with other species allowing you to ride'em, and use'em as steeds in the next stage. Third stage: civilization When you develop "culture" (the last of intelligence based adaptations) you get the message "Your species is now sentient! Civilization has started" you'll have a small village in a world map. If your species lives in water it will have no fire, maybe they will need bioelectricity, something that no land species on Earth has.Since your species was alredy spread around a large area there are other villages. The game contines much like Sid Meyer's Civilization, with many changes but that general feeling. First of all there would be no more grid, strategy games can be made without grid. Also militar units would not be so rigid, you found an army and the add soldiers and war machines from cities. You don't build the bildins on cities, local governors do that, you only assign a percentage of the population to functions like commerce, construction, manofacturing, public order, etc. You expand you empire, contact the others make war or peace, wich depends in part on the natural aggresivenes of your species, not directly on their diet, because there are really aggresive hervivores and rather peaceful carnivores. You finnish this stage when you develop starfaring technolgy and either conquered or unified the world, or either escaped to another planet. Fourth stage: space civilization This one would be like Space Empires, actually the unit creation system of the civilization stage would be like in Space Empires. You continue to expand your civiliation thru the stars contacting others, you finnish this stage when you either killed everything else, or either created/joined a gallactic alliance of evry sentient life form in there.

Whenever someone says "someone should do X," my immediate reaction is, "then YOU should be the one to do it."

That line from the Simpsons comes to mind: "Somebody's got a case of the shouldas."

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Original post by Tom Sloper Whenever someone says "someone should do X," my immediate reaction is, "then YOU should be the one to do it." That line from the Simpsons comes to mind: "Somebody's got a case of the shouldas."

you're so right, i'm alredy working in it, I just had these ideas and wanted other people to see'em and say what they think

I don't know. This is probably my most favorite topic and yet I'd like to see a fresher take on it than what Spore has already done. A game that's about the evolution of an entire species just doesn't seem to fit in the confines of a strategy game. If a game like this can already handle the scope of billions of years of galactic evolution, why can't it go forward in time to the same degree? Why not endeavor to find where you come from, or what the ultimate fate of the universe is?

Turning the game into a lame "conquer the galaxy" game goal, then, is making a statement: You're saying that the point of all of your struggle, the penultimate meaning of your entire existence is to either... make war or forestall the making of war.

For a game with visionary scope that's a pretty underwhelming ending goal. Why not use a theme tightly tied to physics that emphasizes the role of energy-- maybe different strategies for acquiring it from the environment and how it constrains you at every step of the way. For example maybe you're always an amorphous group that gets no say on how you evolve-- choosing features smacks of Intelligent Design-- but rather in how you respond and find strategies for liberating the energy you need. In prehistoric times, for instance, your range and abilities are limited by caloric intake. Later you discover agriculture, which ties you to certain areas; after that energy is constrained by muscle, wind and water power, then timber and fossil fuels. Escape to other continents, the solar system and interstellar space are again and again constrained by energy barriers.

As all of this is going on maybe all the while you have twin goals of keeping your population high enough for genetic diversity but not so high that maintaining it consumes so much energy that you become a stagnant species.

You can carry this further out into the future. A solar civilization will consume a certain amount of energy, yet the sun itself only can give so much-- yes a staggering amount by present standards but still fixed. If you converted all the matter in the solar system into fuel (ridiculous to us by not maybe to an energy hungry species growing exponentially) you'd still run into a hard limit. As Stephen Baxter in his book Deep Future points out, even a stellar civilization could overpopulate itself into oblivion, and even billions of years in the future it's conceivable that, if we're still around, there'll be energy barriers to surpass.

Gameplay that centered around energy and resource consumption by itself might be stale, but if you took on culture and made it a form of gameplay I think it would really fulfill this vision. A species culture determines what it does, whether it's wise enough to shepherd its resources and how it approaches problems common to all life. 4X strategy gameplay usually falls flat here because it's usually a zero sum game even with diplomacy-- you don't get everyone to be friends because cooperation is a necessary and useful survival trait when species command enough energy to destroy entire biospheres with a single bomb--no you do it to hem other species in, force them to take certain actions and ultimately so that you can win.

Anyway, I think it's a noble idea to try to take on something with the scope of evolution and civilization, but it probably would be easier to play and enjoy if the spirit captured what life is actually doing.

this is what i posted this in first place, to see a healty exchange of ideas.
yes, i would put energy boundaries, actually i was thinking about a calories energy system for animals.
about that on space stage, it's true that making it a struggle for dominance is cliche and all, but then what else could keep people playing the game? and what you think our own future is going to be? i'm not the only one who sees humanity fighting some pointless gallactic scale war in ten thousand years. but variety is what makes the good things, maybe something like bhuddism, wich says you live, die and reicarnate ad infinitum until you achieve illumination and go to the nirvana to... i don't remember what nirvana was about, anyway its like doing what others do or finding your own way. for game development an example of this would be all other races engaged in a large war and asked to join'em, but you don't care about that, your only concern is to prove or refute panspermic theory and you travel across planet looking for primitive organisms and comparing them, it's just an idea.

I think it was a mistake for Spore to try to do all that it did -- it should have picked one of the sub games and made that subgame really good.

I thought that a different approach might be to have evolving creatures that you can't directly control. Instead, you would control the environment -- you could change weather conditions, temperature, nutrients available, maybe introduce new predators or prey into environments.

In doing so, you create the selective pressure on the evolving organisms in a way that more closely mimics actual evolution.

Because most evolutionary branches are dead ends, I guess the tough part would be to create an environment in which at least one species achieves sentience.

It's sort of like the marble maze toys -- your goal is to get the marble through the maze, but you don't control the marble. You control the maze.

Pete Michaud, what you are talking about is SimLife, an old game by Will Wright, it was just that. I played it, really boring, not for the graphics, it was just like it played itself.

[Edited by - klefebz on January 14, 2010 9:25:53 AM]

kefebz: You don't have to manually insert linebreaks. Just hit your return key twice (or type in the html <p>) when you want to begin a new paragraph.

sorry, i wrote it first in notepad

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Original post by klefebz Tom Sloper, what you are talking about is SimLife

I think you have me confused with someone else.