GonzagoGL

This is a sub-page of Proto:Spore.

To do: Investigate GonzagoGL some more. Theres a lot of unused content, like a pretty well-programmed tribe, city and civilization stages, unused models (including an aquatic stage Willosaur), and others. Might be good to find a way to actually play the other stages and find out what sniff test actually does.

When Spore released in 2008, Maxis released some gameplay "prototypes" (not early game builds) meant to explore potential features for the game. http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

GonzagoGL is one such prototype, but with an emphasis on gameplay structure as opposed to cellular automata or fluid physics. Spore's code even contains several references to "Gonzago". (Use Ctrl+F)

Watch on YouTube

General#

The game contains a bare bones version of the Creature Stage, with the Tribal, City (no longer in the final game) and Civilization stages accessible via command line arguments. The command line arguments are:

• -exception
• -noautopause
• -loadgame
• -flocktestmode
• -spacemode
• -civmode
• -citymode
• -tribemode
• -noedgescroll
• -fullscreen
• -twomonitors
• -nosound
• -usecivtestcamera

Watch on YouTubeGonzagoGL also contains a few "Fly/Swim" experiments, including Fish, Bird, and UFO modes (the first two also have "Tribe" variations with multiple creatures to control). The "Fish" mode is particularly interesting as it simulates aquatic creature gameplay with multiple background details similar to those from the GDC 2005 Spore demo.

The only way to launch this mode is to patch the GonzagoGL.exe by replacing the byte at 0x155e8 with 0xb8 instead of 0xac. To prevent the automatic loading of an existing game save, it is also mandatory to remove the line "load_game = predators" from Data\Gonzago.ini.

The prototype also contains model files that appear to be remnants of the GDC 2005 build's Aquatic Stage.

Found in GonzagoGL\Data\Models\Underwater: