Project Spark bolsters Xbox One’s launch lineup by letting you make your own games

There’s a touch of Fable about Project Spark’s base character models. Each is highly customisable and you can even build your own from scratch by bolting props onto a skeleton

The first hurdle any creative endeavour faces is the blank canvas. Even if you manage to overcome that obstacle, it takes time to make something new, and when videogame store shelves are full of deep, open-world adventures, a player’s time is a valuable resource indeed. But game-creation sandbox Project Spark differs from the current big names in user-generated content – Trials Evolution, LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft – in that it doesn’t simply want to provide you with tools with which to be creative. Instead, it wants to inspire you.

Team Dakota’s labelling of Project Spark as an “open-world digital canvas” is awkward, yet the game itself seems anything but. It’s already proving a success among an alpha testbed of thousands of players, resulting in such varied output as animated velociraptor models, comedy Star Wars machinima, and even fully fledged RPGs.

“It always struck me that it was unfair that I got to work on games, but everyone else didn’t,” says Team Dakota studio manager and executive producer Michael Saxs Persson. He’s spent two decades in the industry, which has included stints at Double Helix and Microsoft Studios. “The feeling of making something is just amazing. So we wanted to make a game about creation, not just a game where you happen to be able to make a level.”

As blank canvasses go, Project Spark presents perhaps gaming’s most dauntingly massive one yet. Its voxel-based worlds can stretch to around five square kilometres, and encompass vast heights and depths. And if that’s not enough room to hold your ideas, you can link to as many other areas as you want, with a virtual property bag allowing you to bring various items with you between worlds. To put each world’s size into context, everything that Team Dakota showed at E3 was crammed into the game’s earlier 300x200m boundaries.

Persson on Spark’s multiscreen experience: “We’re not leading the charge, we’re just designed from the ground up to take advantage of it. I think there’s a big difference there. We’re made for this.”

Alongside community support, the game has three other crutches for new players, the first of which is classic tutorials. Rather than teach you the use of a particular type of paintbrush, however, they guide you through the broad selection of tools on offer within the context of making a game. They should get you up to speed with Project Spark’s lingo, too, so you’ll learn that every object from the humble rock to the mighty velociraptor has a modifiable ‘brain’ that dictates how it acts. The tutorials are the functional equivalent of learning a new language by understanding key phrases and the underlying grammar, rather than trying to memorise every word.

Assemblies, meanwhile, are collected objects or behaviours that will function both as shortcuts and as a way for players who aren’t yet ready to tinker with AI or health bars to add mechanics to their creations. “An assembly could just be a brain to put in a character that [makes it exhibit] avoidance or flocking behaviour,” Persson explains, “or it could be a house glued together from ten different pieces with particle effects already attached and a working door.”

Team Dakota will also provide a selection of its own assemblies for players to reverse engineer. A locked door with matching red keycard, for example, can be quickly repurposed into one that works with a yellow or blue keycard. And in the process of doing so, Persson hopes, you’ll gain some insight into how it was built in the first place.

Player and enemy characters can be constructed in the same manner, scaling and clipping together objects to make custom shapes. One level we see features a Shadow Of The Colossus-like sand snake, fins protruding along its length and a fire breathing skull at the front. The body is simply a rubber ball with bone fragments attached, which is then duplicated by the object’s brain to give the illusion of one long cylindrical body.

The game features three preset biomes. While more are planned, it’s entirely possible to create your own ad-hoc solutions

Finally, Project Spark offers a mode called Crossroads, which is the choose-your-own adventure process applied to game making. Each step of the creation process is distilled into three choices. Do you want mountains, tundra or forest? Will your game be about resource gathering, protecting a village or hunting down a boss? You’ll design everything in the game, right down to what the hero is wearing and whether or not there are any cutscenes, but will be freed of more complex concerns, such as designing logic. At the end of the process, you can choose to publish the result or use it to provide a jumping-off point for more tinkering. While Crossroads might focus your creativity, Team Dakota doesn’t want to curtail it, and so the system will evolve along with the game as new modes, characters and assets are added over time.

That the studio has thought so much about getting players up to speed with Project Spark’s potential says much for the game’s versatility. Sculpting landscapes is made manageable with a selection of scalable brush tools that produce hills, cliffs, plateaus and caves in short order. Switching to the biome brush will allow you to quickly carpet an area in lush forest or shards of ice, but if you have the time then you can also choose to layer brushes and build up your world in a more granular fashion.

Props such as houses and rocks can be rotated, scaled, placed individually or clumped together to produce even more complex shapes. You can keep adding particle effects, light sources and other effects to the world until you hit the buffer limits, which are telegraphed by a set of sliders that make themselves apparent when you’re nearing a maximum. The team is still optimising and learning what’s possible, but Persson assures us that those limits are extremely generous – it’s unlikely that you’ll clatter into a ceiling with anywhere near the regularity that ambitious LittleBigPlanet creators do.

So far, three biomes have been shown: woodland, desert and tundra. Even with just these three aesthetics, the alpha community has produced a Geometry Wars-style shooter and a homage to the monochrome Limbo

Second-screen experiences remain a divisive addition to gaming’s future, but Team Dakota has built a multiscreen experience from the ground up. “When we saw SmartGlass, we weren’t thinking, ‘Let’s have a companion website to help me on the tutorials while I’m using the console,’” says Persson. “We thought, ‘We have a touch input; now you can have all the power of Xbox One on your tablet, and switch between touch and controllers to [make] your creation.’”

It’s an appealing prospect, enabling the kind of free sketching that just isn’t possible with an analogue stick. And you can use mouse and keyboard, too, or even dip in via your 360. No matter which version of Project Spark you have, or how many inputs, you’ll have access to the same core toolset. There’s also Kinect functionality, which will allow you to switch between brushes and modes using voice commands, and act out your own cutscenes using facial and full-body capture.

But while the landscaping and narrative tools are noteworthy, it’s the potential inherent in the game’s brains that’s really exciting. Based on the team’s own Kodu Game Lab, an education-focused visual programming language, brains enable you to imbue objects with complex logic or AI by combining simple When and Do instructions. By mixing together both, you can, for instance, make a door that plays a sound but stays locked when players try to open it, unless it detects they have the appropriate key. You can nest commands, too, and split your instructions across multiple pages, which makes room for some incredibly complex sets of instructions.

Persson is excited at the prospect of players’ creations, but he stresses that making a fully fledged game needn’t be the only route you can take. “Making games is certainly important, but that’s only part of what we see people doing,” he says. “Lots of people love to just fool around. [They] simply sculpt, make stuff, put random brains [into objects] and see what happens, with no particular purpose other than having fun. And we see that from all ages. Our goal is as much about you having fun in the moment as it about you making that jewel that you want to put up in the community and share because it’s perfect.”

“Our ambition is that, whether we push for it or not, Spark is going to end up in classrooms,” says Persson. “We’re pretty sure it will from the reaction we’ve seen from teachers and universities.”

Persson doesn’t look at Project Spark as a game, but more of a play system along the same lines as Lego. His team, he explains, will provide the first few boxes of bricks for you when the game ships, which you can combine in billions of different ways. And while the team isn’t ready to talk about it in detail just yet, Project Spark’s multiplayer aspect will tie into that conceit by allowing for ad-hoc drop-in/drop-out sessions.

Community will be at the core of Project Spark, whether it’s sharing levels, providing assembly solutions or simply broadcasting tutorials or webisodes on Twitch.tv. And in that respect, even disregarding the tech under the bonnet, it is a truly next-gen game. If Team Dakota can effectively balance the system’s daunting complexity with broad accessibility, then Project Spark could well inspire a new wave of bedroom coders.

“Fundamentally, people love to do stuff together,” says Persson. “And they love making stuff. If Minecraft has shown us anything, it’s that together is better.”

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