These created content (environments) can contain mountains, rivers, and towns as well as events such as
It enables game players to download other user-generated content, remix that content to another game, or create content of their own.
There's no release date yet for the title, but it will be in open beta this Fall and will be for Xbox One.Project Spark enables its users to build, play, and share games on Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows 8. With the tools being so simple to grasp and the barrier to entry being so low, we can probably expect to see an army of armchair game developers taking the plunge, and I can't wait to see what they all come up with. And though we don't know anything about the true price of admission just yet or even an actual release date, the promise Project Spark makes is nearly impossible to resist. Nearly anyone who's played games for a few years feels the hunger to create and direct an experience of their own. If MS can manage to execute their free-to-play model without making prospective creators feel nickel and dimed, they might have a real hit here. One can imagine a collection of different worlds featuring different styles of gameplay given what some of the devs have come up with already, but no one's really saying.
There are also still no details on what the single-player campaign will comprise, either. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that selling new objects to make up for the relatively limited item-building is going to become the primary way this game makes money. As Project Spark is free-to-play, Microsoft will need to monetize somehow, and while no one was willing to comment on pricing, they did confirm that users would be able to download new sets of items to toy with. So long as you use some combination of the building blocks they provide, there aren't really any limits on what kind of game you can craft.īut that's going to be the rub for some folks. Entirely functional versions of Angry Birds, Limbo, and Geometry Wars were all presented to me, proving the toolset's versatility.
And any brain can be saved to be applied to anything you build in the future, making it a breeze to transform your isometric action RPG into a first-person shooter.īut I didn't realize the full potential of Project Spark until I started loading up the many games and interactive experiences the devs had cooked up with it. The same tools can be used to define camera perspectives, controls methods, and other global settings as well. It didn't take much effort at all to turn an inanimate boulder into a loyal pet rock that follows you about and attacks anyone who assails you. With a spreadsheet-esque list of “if, then” statements, you can design incredibly specific behavioral routines.
But where you lose some creative fidelity here, you gain so much more in the brain editor, a wildly impressive tool that essentially allows people who've never written a line of code in their lives to assign complex behaviors to every element of their creation. Though Project Spark allows you to create what are called “assemblies” by essentially gluing together pre-made objects, it's no substitute for the true ability to hand-craft every element in your game. That said, in LBP you can create custom objects from scratch with what amounts to a virtual erector set. You'd be lucky to have an object or two built in the same amount of time in LBP. It only took minutes for my demo proctor and me to build a tree-dotted grassy plain with moat surrounding an island in the middle. Even more powerful are texturing tools called biome brushes, which collect matched sets of textures, props, and environmental features together so you can quickly populate large areas with objects that look organically placed.
You can file your tool down to a finer point for some articulated landscaping or blow it up large enough to cover entire mountain ranges with snow in seconds. It starts with the ability to sculpt and texture 3D terrain in real-time with a wide variety of options. It's a largely different set of tools than LBP presents, and while it doesn't offer quite the same level of auteurship at the micro level of object creation, it boasts far more robust and user-friendly controls for building a game world and defining how the objects within it behave. Perhaps that sounds more like the opening of a marketing pitch than a video game preview, but after spending some time with Project Spark, I couldn't help but be hopeful.