IGN stopped by the Spore booth at the NYC Comic Con to spend some time with Spore producer Caryl Shaw as well some hands on time with Spore Galactic Adventures. Here’s a little of what they had to say:
The game will, of course, ship with several pre-made adventures from Maxis, but the idea here is for players to create their own challenges. This is done with a very simple context tool that lets you assign goals to certain objects. Simply click on an object in the game world and you can assign a goal to it. It might be that you want an NPC alien to wander around and attack the player on sight. Or that you want the player to meet a certain member of an alien race. Or that you want the player to find, collect or deliver a certain object. You can even stack multiple objectives together, giving the player a task to meet an alien species, kill a certain number of their rivals, recover an artifact from within the enemies’ camp and return it to the aliens it belongs to.
You can create several acts with a single scenario, so players can progress through a fairly large campaign that has them interacting with the world in very different ways. And since the adventure’s creator has full control over the basic layout of the world, the content that it contains and the terms of the player’s interaction within that world, they can really create a wide variety of experiences. We saw one level designed by a Maxis employee that recreated Duck Hunt with hopping creatures.