Will Wright The Creator of Simcity and The Sims was scheduled to give a GDC presentation on Friday featuring the future of game design. His demo was to show how multiple styles of gameplay can fit into one title.

As the presentation unfolded the press began to realize that this was 2 presentations in one. Will was showing off his next opus - Spore. A game that leads you from arcade-like gameplay as microscopic organism, all the way through it’s evolutionary process, the creation of its race, the colonization of its planet, and eventually to a grand space-opera game where you command your civilization to take over the Galaxy. Ambitious.

Because this took everyone by surprise, stories are popping up slowly on the net. I believe 1Up.com was the first to report, but since then IGN.com has also posted a preview.

Here’s what we know so far - the game was working during the presentation. A lot of the core of the programming seems to have already been done and the title already exhibits “polish”. The game moves through 6 phases - Cellular [arcade] -> Physical Evolution [Hack and Slash] -> Social Phase [Populous] -> City Management [City Builder/SimCity] -> Global Domination [Strategy] -> Galactic Colonization [Space Opera]. In a great stroke of design Wright will incorporate the Internet into the game - Civilizations can be uploaded to the Internet by everyone. The game will then download civs to populate your galaxy with - so you’ll be playing against the creations of other players. Very cool.

In the creature design phase you’ll be given a lump of clay to mold your critters. You’ll also have stencil tools that are “Mr Potatohead-like”. Expect to play against wide variety of original creations. Apparently they’ve also spent time minimizing the data footprint needed to store whole galaxies - so they’re targeting not only PCs and consoles, but portable devices as well (and with the Nintendo DS going online… )

Early information about this title looks very cool. We should expect more news at E3 including screenshots, release date and a helluva lot more in depth previews and Q&A sessions.