'Spore' stages: From single cell to space traveler

— -- Spore creator Will Wright breaks down the game's five stages:

The cell stage.

You start as a single-cell organism. "This is kind of a tutorial for the rest of the game, so you learn some of the basic aspects of how you eat, how you survive (and) how you reproduce," Wright says. "You use a very simple version of our editors to redesign your next generation. Gameplay is very much fight or flee."

The creature stage.

"Now you are up on land and evolving in 3-D," he says. You gain appendages and begin to adopt a personality. "At this point, the player has the abilty to be more social, if they choose to be, or continue down the path of a predator or a scavenger."

The tribe stage.

Interaction with other creatures is more elaborate; you can ally with tribes or become enemies. At first, you focus "on your own tribe's internal needs: 'How do we get our food?' 'What's our structure?' Later on, you start dealing more with other tribes, and it becomes more of a social management diplomacy game."

The civilization stage.

"Your large tribe turns into a very small sort of city. You go in and try to make trade agreements (with other cities and nations) and make friends," Wright says. "If you are (a) military (race), you attack them, and if you are religious, you are actually targeting unhappy cities."

The space stage.

Once you unify the globe in civilization, you learn how to use your UFO for space travel. "You can come in as one of about nine archetypes," Wright says. "A warrior, an ecologist, a scientist or a shaman. … You might specialize in building space colonies or terraforming raw planets or trading, or attacking and conquering."