Hands On With Spore's Creature Creator
Well despite a number of great games having already made a giant scene in their releases over the past few months, there is still one game that is very high on the top of everyone's 2008 list, as it has been for the last 4 or so years it's been in development, Spore. Well next week, to help tide our ravaging hunger to play the full game out in September (the Spore gods willing), EA will be putting out Creature Creator program on June 17th, as we reported back in April. What better way to kick it all off than to invite the press and give them free reign of creating their own creatures? Add free food and drinks to the mix, and you know I was more than willing to cross the bay to head to the Maxis Studio in Emeryville to get some one-on-one time with my own little Spore.
The Event kicked off with a duo-demo of the Creature Creator tools and the new Sporepedia website. In our brief walk through of Creature Creator tool sets, they showed us the Build section, Paint section, and Play section. The Build section is the area that many have already seen in videos where you form the spine, fatten the body, add appendages, and accessorizie your new being (and we all know that a gal needs to accessorize). They then took the new body into the paint shop section of the game and had a wide array of colors and textures to add to the creature to give it its own flair. After building and painting the creature there is also the Play section, in which you can get a feel for how the creature will move and act in the game. After they were done showing us these tools they decided to take movies and pictures of the creature and send postcards and even upload video from the creator to youTube.
After the walk through of the Creator, we then got to see how the new Sporepedia website ties the content you've created into the Spore community. The website launched on Monday and is devoted to allowing users to share content with each other and with other people on the web. Once a creature is born in the creator, it can be shared to all users or you can send a postcard to someone's email, thereby privately sharing the creature. Along with that, once you create an account on Sporepedia, you can track comments on your creatures, update info and icons of your account and creations, post content to Youtube or a comic book creation website, and use RSS feeds to keep yourself updated as to what's going on with yours and other people's content at all times. One fun part of the Sporepedia is just browsing through the many creatures other users have shared on the site. You can even drag an entry in the Sporepedia to your desktop to make a thumbnail of it and then drag and drop that thumbnail into the creator to start playing around with that creature. Overall the website seems like it's well on it way to allow rapid and easy access to the content you and others can make with Spore.
Now for the fun part, the hands-on assessment. After the demo and walk through, we were unleashed upon a number of computers with the Creature Creator setup and ready to go. I was amazed by the simplicity and flexibility of most of the parts available to use in the editor mode. I could bend the spine in various manners, curly, straight, hunchbacked or hunched over. You could also beef up or slim down any part placed on the creature. They had a wide range of eyes and other parts to place anywhere on the creature. The part I like most is that you can take your time creating something or spend 2 minutes and make something almost as interesting. Fruit Brute should be posting up a video of me quickly running through the process a little later today. With my first creation I decide to make something common, a bear. Later I got a little crazy making something that looked similar to a seamonkey. My last creation (and the one that has received the most comments) was one of just a simplistic pear-like creature. It was a blast creating each one.
After the creation I took the paint shop for a whirl and was able to choose skins and details ranging from something a wildcat would wear while hunting to what the dinosaurs might have have worn while laying out in the sun. You can add pink polka dots and black stripes too all with 64 or more shade choices per color. After painting the creatures you get the fun opportunity to walk them around and see how they move, dance, roar, and gesture. I think one of the big hits was that you could also hatch up to three little baby creatures along side your adult one and watch the babies mimic the adult's behavior. In this mode you can also take a snapshot to send to friends or a video to post on youTube.
Overall I was very excited by the hands-on demo of the game we got to play and hope to get plenty of more time playing it when it launches next week. The Spore team made sure to note that on the 17th of June the Creator will be available for both Windows and Mac users, as it will be when the game launches, and that Mac users need not wait months for a port. There will be a free demo that you can download off their main site and also a full retail version for $10 that will have all the available creature content. As a final send off I'm posting below the youTube links of one of Asterick's creatures (My Little Pony) and two of mine (Peary and Beary), feel free to comment on them here and there.
Peary
Beary
PixelPoet
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 11 June 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: creature creator, electronic arts, maxis, spore
I want now
Cock o' the walk and Sparky are my two faves. I've been waiting for this game for four years and I can't wait for the creature editor!