FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
LIFE SPAN, MATURITY, AND NATURAL SELECTION
Each of your creatures needs a natural life span, or your population will explode. (In Creatures, the life span of a Norn is about 30 real-time minutes.) If you want your population to evolve through natural selection—that is, to become better adapted to its environment—then your creatures also need a period of immaturity, when they are not fertile, followed by a period of maturity, when they are. Natural selection works only if it kills off creatures with maladaptive genes before they mature enough to reproduce. If creatures could reproduce immediately after birth, maladaptive genes would never leave the gene pool.
If there's one thing we know about random mutation and natural selection, it's that the effects of these processes appear slowly. The life span of the Norns in Creatures is really too long for the player to breed hundreds of generations. If you want evolution to be a part of your game, you'll need to find ways to make it work nonrandomly or you'll need to keep the life span of your creatures very short. Of course, the shorter the life span, the less chance you give each creature to exhibit an interesting behavior, so there's a balance to be struck.
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WHERE DOES SPORE BELONG?
Spore is a five-level game in which the player starts with a customizable “single-celled” organism in a 2D world and builds it, in stages, into a civilization of creatures that roam the galaxy terraforming planets to make them habitable and fighting, or negotiating with, other species. The first two stages of the game most closely resemble an artificial pet, because in those stages the player designs and cares for a single individual. (Even if it is killed, it spontaneously regenerates at no cost.) The remaining stages are more like RTS games, although the player does not have quite as much direct control as in a pure RTS. In these stages, the player interacts with a population of creatures who are semiautonomous.
Spore is in fact five games rather than one, with different camera and interaction models for each, a different economy, and different victory conditions. As a result, it's not easy to categorize. It's not a genetic A-life game; despite references to “DNA points” and a cute form of sexual reproduction, it does not support natural selection. (Early publicity for the game led some biologists to expect a serious simulation of evolution; they were disappointed.) Spore is probably best characterized as a hybrid combination of artificial pet and RTS, with some god game qualities as well.
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