Apple's SDK opens the door to a new age of mobile gaming

Mar 7, 2008 12:29 GMT  ·  By

So it's confirmed then. Spore is heading the iPhone's way. The news came straight out of Travis Boatman's (EA) mouth, and not only that, the engineer behind the iPhone version of the game also showed off a demo on the big screen. iPhone's Spore hits all the right spots, and it was all achieved in two weeks' time. Can we even begin to imagine what the final version will be like?

What I particularly liked about EA's presentation was that engineer Travis Boatman started his speech by saying "the game that [they] chose" for the demo "is a game that [they] have in production, called Spore." Not "this is the moment you've all been waiting for...", not "we just couldn't help ourselves revealing that Spore is indeed coming to the iPhone...", but just "a game ... called Spore."

It's only like the most anticipated iPhone games, so yeah, modesty is EA's strong point to say the least. So, you probably want to know what the iPhone version of Spore is capable of? Well, sure enough, the handset version doesn't include all the editing features or the gameplay characteristics that make the Mac version so anticipated, but hey, they raced against the clock in creating it for the phone - two weeks is the time it took to develop what you can see in the images on the left.

Images don't do? Very well, check out the whole presentation right here, or fast forward to 44' and see the demo in motion.

Now, when we said that Spore's editor doesn't include all the features on iPhone, that doesn't mean that Spore doesn't include the evolution editor at all. Bear in mind that the guys at EA not only wrote the code for the Spore iPhone Demo so people could see it worked great with the touchscreen and motion sensitivity features of the device in two weeks' time, but they included the evolution editor too, specifically to show off the use of touchscreen in Spore.

As for the motion-sensing features, Spore players will use the iPhone's accelerometer to guide their creature through the bottomless pit of what is known as the "primordial soup," avoiding enemies and feeding on plancton.

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Screenshot from the Town Hall event (Apple HQ, Cupertino, Calif.)
Screenshot from the Town Hall event (Apple HQ, Cupertino, Calif.)
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