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Wright did a 20-minute demo of the features they plan to include in the game. First, he demoed the creature editor. As he put it, they wanted the player to be able to do in 30 seconds what it takes Pixar animators weeks to produce. I really like the way they’ve moved away from the sliders that so many other games (even the Sims 2) rely on for character customization. Basically, you can add and remove body parts from your creatures by dragging them with the mouse, and you can make them bigger or smaller in a similar fashion. Some body parts, like beaks, will determine if your creature is an herbivore or carnivore, and how successful they will be at seeking food or fighting other creatures.

Your creatures start out wandering around on your planet seeking out food. Eating grants DNA points, so your creature can mate. After mating, you can choose the characteristics of the next generation, and thus causing the species to evolve. Will explained that you might swap out beaks or feet to give your creature an advantage, or you might add arms since “you can never have enough arms.”

Once your creatures evolve enough to develop a civilization, you move on to the city building part of the game. This, of course, has some elements of Sim City in it, but you can actually design buildings too. Wright then talked about how content will be shared among the player community. If I understood correctly, everything you design will be a candidate to be incorporated into the game experience for everyone else. They plan to push the best new designs out to the entire community. That’s a new feature to the Sim universe, since today if you’re playing Sim City or The Sims and you want new content, you have to browse for it and download it. The game will even suggest content to you based on your previous choices, and you can bookmark people so that you can easily see everything they’ve designed.

A la Sim City 2000, once your civiliation is advanced enough, you can blast off into space in UFOs. Wright gleefully showed off the induction beam, which you can use to take biological specimens. If you’re not careful, you might end up flinging animals back down to the ground. In your UFO you can search for other planets and possibly make contact with other species. Depending on their advancement and how nice they are, you might be worshipped as a god, or else they might blow you from the sky.

It was great to see how far they’ve come with Spore. With a release date of 4th quarter 2006, we’ll still have to awhile to go before we can fully experience Will Wright’s grand vision. Personally, I can’t wait.