Project Spark is kind of a hard game to review. The reason for this is that it’s hard to describe it as a game, per se. It’s a game that allows you to create games, and some pretty complex ones at that. It’s another in a flurry of titles in this post-Minecraft world that are about encouraging creativity in whatever form it may take.
Project Spark is divided into a few categories but it’s main facet is as a powerful but user friendly set of programming tools. Choosing the “Create” option from the main menu drops you into an open, untouched world that is yours to alter and shape according to the kind of game you want to create. Your choices in this regard are, like the rest of the game’s options, incredibly broad. First person shooter? You bet. Third person action adventure? Why not? Fully functional reconstruction of Minecraft and Tetris? Easy peasy. Single player? Multiplayer? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Modern? Art deco? It’s up to you. Project Spark gives you everything you need to create any kind of game that might pop into your head. You really are limited only by your imagination. My game developer flatmate described it as “Unity for kids”, and that’s as apt a description as any, I think.
To build these worlds of yours, you will need utilize a number of different tools. There’s the standard world-shaping tools that will allow you to build the environment for your game, whether you want buildings or rolling hills or heaving oceans. The world-building is as gorgeous to look at as it is fluid and seamless. Texturing each element of your environment as easy as highlighting it and painting – the game will fill it in contextually with dynamic, high resolution textures so cliffs will just look like cliffs without you having to do too much finagling. Project Spark wants you to be able to create with a minimum of hindrance and the experience is much more pleasant for it.
The other system is built around character creation. When building a character you must give them a “brain”, so to speak. That is, you need to tell the character on-screen what to do when they receive input from the player. To do this, you utilise a system that the game refers to as Kode, a simplified variation of Structured Query Language (SQL) broken down into “When” and “Do” statements. “When” the analogue stick is pushed, “Do” move the player character around on screen. It’s remarkably simple and intuitive and there’s really no limit to what you can achieve with it. The same goes for enemies and other non-player character elements. You build them all from the ground up. Your foes can be as easy or frustratingly difficult as you want them to be. The character models are all well designed, in addition to fully customisable, and have an awesome cartoony vibe to them.
You build your games from a number of prefabricated resources built into the game – my flatmate and I started with a simple third-person platformer about an extremely small squirrel in an overly elaborate and hostile world, with a simple goal of collecting coins and climbling a frankly impossible tower to reach a hidden flag and end the level. It took us about twenty minutes to build and around two hours to actually play it to completion. And that was just us passing the controller around. You aren’t limited to creating by yourself – there’s a multiplayer component too. The Xbox One version allow you to create a 4-player party from your Xbox Live friends list and you can all create a game together in real time. It’s wonderful.
But Project Spark isn’t just all about game dev. There’s a social aspect to it too. From the main menu you can jump into games created by other players, give them a try and then give them either an up vote or a down vote depending on how much you liked it. And there are thousands of games already available to play. I played one called Hulk vs. Hell in which you started the game as a nerdy looking guy, you pressed R2 to make him turn into the Hulk (a giant fat man painted green with purple shorts) and then you just punched demons for as long as you wanted. Honestly, it was everything I never even knew I wanted. To the mad genius behind that little game, I owe you a significant debt.
Everything you do in the game is rewarded with a little bit of in-game currency. This currency allows you to buy further resources to use in your games down the track. You can, of course, purchase these same in-game resources with real world money if you’d rather take the fast track but you seem to make so much credit from the game that, if you’re really into designing games, it might not be such a problem. That said, for a game that’s clearly aimed at a younger audience, it felt a little mercenary. Yeah, there’s a lot of content available from the get-go – and I mean a lot – but all of the DLC is displayed in-menu as well, denoted with a small icon in the top left of it’s window. It’s bound to make life hard for parents of dedicated, budding game developers everywhere.
I had a great time with Project Spark. It’s smart, simple, powerful and an incredible educational tool for anyone who is interested in exactly how you make a video game, regardless of age. This is an important step forward in the way that gaming is evolving as a medium – more and more, there is a premium that is being placed on creativity over spectacle, and it’s virtual playgrounds like this that will inspire a new generation of creative minds to enter the gaming industry. As I say, it’s hard to call it a game but as a piece of design software it is state-of-the-art. We can only benefit from titles like Project Spark. I wish we’d had this kind of technology when I was kid. I would have never stopped playing this.
Review Score: 9.0 out of 10
Highlights: Beautiful visuals, intuitive interface and design, near-limitless possibilities
Lowlights: The paid DLC situation is going to be a headache for parents
Developer: Team Dakota
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Released: October 7, 2014
Platform: Xbox One, PC
Reviewed on Xbox One
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