Archive for the ‘procedural music’ tag
Next Stop…Spore!
Well, I’ve spent the last week playing Spore repeatedly in an attempt to analyze the procedural music generated by Spore. The game is organized according to several different stages–life as a cell, life as a creature, life in a tribe, etc. You start the game as a cellular organism that has to eat to survive–or be eaten & perish.
Along the way, you get to ‘customize’ your organism, ‘mate’ with others from the same ’species’, and eventually ‘evolve’. From a musical point of view, there are several key ‘hitpoints’ worth noting. My analysis of Spore necessitated playing the game long enough to be able to restart a new creation at the ‘creature’ level, and figure out a sequence of duplicable steps to test the results of the audio as initiated by my choices in the menus.
Since there are an enormous amount of combinations of choices that one can make (especially at the creature stage), I decided to fix a single path of interactivity from the very first menu selection. Here’s a summary of the overall process that I followed several times in succession:
1. Choose an empty planet; select a new ‘creature’ stage to begin.
2. Use the creature selector to choose a creature from Sporepedia (the online gallery).
3. Select the ‘Krinkut Maxis’ creature because of its flexibility and attributes.
4. Select the ‘easy’ difficulty setting.
5. Choose the default planet name that appears (this is randomly generated by Spore).
6. Spore now randomizes the creatures that I will encounter in the game.
7. The game environment appears. Follow the beginning ‘entry pop-up’s’ that appear.
8. Feed the creature by letting it eat fruit from the closest tree.
9. Head in a Northeasterly direction & interact with the first set of creatures encountered.
10. “Sing” to the creatures to “Impress” them. Earn DNA points to spend on enhancements.
11. Head back to the “home nest” to mate. This brings up the creature editor. (the idea is that you can ‘evolve’ if you have enough DNA points to spend on an enhancement.
12. Don’t make any changes to the creature, and exit the creature editor.
13. The creature will automatically get the ability to ‘charm’ at a higher level. Practice this ability by following the prompt.
14. Exit the game.