LOS ANGELES–The Xbox One is getting plenty of racing and action games, but one unique title stood out during Microsoft's press conference and at its booth here at E3. Project Spark is an ambitious, open-ended game and game development toolkit that lets players craft their own gaming experiences. I tried it out at Microsoft's booth, where I picked up an Xbox One controller and started making a game.

The process begins with map creation. Project Spark offers several options for making a world, including the shape of the map, the layout of the landscape, and the type of environment it uses. With a few button presses I generated a hilly desert wasteland, then added a few patches of grass and strangely placed icebergs using the controller to "paint" the environment over the desert. Besides changing what the landscape looks like, I could also use the controller (or a connected tablet, with Smartglass running) to reshape the land, drawing rivers, valleys, and cliffs. The process was simple, intuitive, and deceptively powerful.

As I started making the game itself, "simple," "intuitive," and "deceptively powerful" became the main aspects of the game I noticed. After I made the level, I created a player character with a certain type of brain (the way objects behave). I had choices like brawler, shooter, and platformer, and each preset brain made the player behave differently. The brain maps different player behaviors to button commands, so I could have concievably made a character that jumped when I pressed up, did a dance when I pressed X, and exploded when I pressed the triggers. I chose the third-person shooter brain, and after discovering it automatically mapped the A button to shoot, I quickly remapped it to the right trigger to behave more like a shooter.

With the level and player set, I populated the map with props. These objects covered everything else in the game, and each could have its own brain. I put a few buildings on the hills, dropped a few aggressive goblins near them, and placed a warrior that looked exactly like me nearby. The buildings didn't have any behaviors set, the goblins automatically attacked when the player got close, and the warrior could be called to follow the player. These were the default brains, but they could be reprogrammed easily through a tile-based series of commands.

Every brain has several WHEN/DO combinations that trigger different actions based on different elements, like when a player is nearby, when an object takes damage, or (for the player) when a button is pressed. A few tweaks in the brain and a few adjustments in the object's physical properties (determining how the physics engine acts with them and how they move), and any object can become a friend, an enemy, an obstacle, or a tool.

All of these elements are deeply customizable, and I was impressed by how deep the brain programming sysstem was while staying very accessible and intuitive. The most obvious comparison is to LittleBigPlanet, which has a robust level editor with ways to program the "brains" of objects to act in different ways. In fact, Project Spark seems like Microsoft's answer to LittleBigPlanet, though on a 3D rather than 2D plane and without Stephen Fry as the narrator. Project Spark presents a powerful toolkit for gamers to make their own games, and while the choices I saw were limited to a few fantasy objects and three types of landscapes, the representative who showed me the game said the final version will have "everything," including sci-fi elements and environments.

Project Spark will launch for the Xbox One and the PC.

Further Reading