I played the simple shape demo of the creature world.
It was vastly superior to the crap they launched. It had an actual ecosystem, but admittedly led to you dying a lot at low tiers because you were the equivalent of a meal worm.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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the simple shape demo of the creature world
What game is that? Searching any of those terms give me nothing
I think they are referring to one of the showcased demos of Spore, of which the most prominent is the 2005 GDC one.
https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Removed_features#Creature_Stage
Behavior of creatures
The behavior of the creatures also had more depth than the final game. In today's Spore creatures rarely leave the perimeter of their nest, and possibly has a simpler ecosystem (until Space Stage). This feature was prominent in earlier versions, as in the footage of the 2005 version, small creatures hopped around, grazed, or simply wandered off with no nests for them.
I love Spore, but replaying it today I see how much is missing from making each stage really fleshed-out. Being honest, the Creature Stage is clearly what received the most attention, while subsequent Stages are not as fun.
A lot of it is to be attributed to Maxis and Will Wright: apparently much of what was shown in 2005 and 2006 was never really playable.
But things like this suggest a heavy involvement of the publisher as well:
During the SXSW 2007 demo, Will Wright said that the Aquatic Stage was on the verge of being cut. He also said that, if cut, the Aquatic Stage would be one of the first things to add via an expansion pack, though ultimately no such expansion was released.
There was a plan to add the Aquatic Stage into the full game via an expansion pack titled "The Depths", although it was never publicly announced. except for one advertisement.
It was a downloadable demo, yeah. Just had various polygonal shapes on a black background, top down and could move with WASD and could interact with plant sprites and creature sprites. Very simple graphics, but had different level creatures wandering around, so it was hard to stay alive when you had level 5 creatures hunting near the starting beach.
Electronic Arts deserves every bad thing that happens to them. Vulture capitalists.
Fuck EA.
The only fantastical promise about the game I ever remember reading was the animations were supposed to be kinesthetic based on how you made your creatures; kinda like how GTA's Euphoria physics engine works.
And as far as I had read regarding that, they were struggling with it and had to abandon it at the behest of management not giving them more time to figure it out.
I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.
Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn't surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they'd actually solve a well known industry challenge.
If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn't be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.
You should have written the last paragraph first, would have gotten less downvotes.
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Spore taught me a lesson on not trusting hype.
It was my first experience with a hyped disappointing game.
Also I do not think it was something technical. It was just EA evilness to their marketing team though that a more child oriented game would sell better than the hardcore simulation the devs wanted to make.
I still remember that E3 trailer with the willowsaur, it showed more advanced characteristics that the final product. They straight up downgraded their game.
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I mean, they did have some interesting ideas early on that I was surprised didn't make the cut. https://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes
Spore devs say the evolution game's previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making
Not often they just casually admit to false advertising like that.
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It's cool, we have Thrive
Have you played it? The main setting of Spore is the Creature Stage. So far, in Thrive, only the microbe stage is available.