Little Pink Laptop

So this is about the Spore Creature Creator which I’ve had for a couple of months now. I’ve been meaning to write this for quite some time now, but life (and less demanding posts) have gotten in the way. But now… Spore has my undivided attention.

One of the reasons this post has taken so long is because I wanted to make sure that I did it justice. Spore Creature Creator is the creative building portion of the much larger game Spore (a game by Will Wright the creator of “The Sims” where you take a creature through various stages of evolution, helping it evolve things it needs, which comes out this fall). The basic concept for the Creature Creator is that you build a creature that you can then TEST DRIVE to see how it will look and act during game play. Both the building and test drive are excecuted very well in this teaser/half game.

Building a Creature is very intuitive. You drag an arrow out from the spine to add more vertebrae, and drag it back towards the center of the spine to decrease that number. Vertebrae can be added both at “tail” and the “head”. From there you control how skinny/fat your creature is (and this is controlled by scrolling up or down over individual vertebrae, although what you do to one does affect the others directly beside it to a lesser degree). You can choose to add arms and legs, or not, and from here (well more like from the beginning, but this sounds better so.. just keep in mind that it’s really from opening the program, anyways… again) from here, the possibilities are endless. There are tons of mouths (some of which make great heads all on their own) eyes, noses, hands, feet, as well as decorations which include feathers, grass, pom poms, spikes, hair, antenna…. the list goes on and on and provides many opportunities to create some pretty amazing things.

Zebro and Babies

Scales and Son

All of the pieces can be placed anywhere on the Creature, you can put the Head on the Tail if you wish (that is if you’re crazy!). Which is another key thing, while building your creature, it stays positioned on the platform facing the same way. You can rotate your view, but the head will always be facing towards the arrow on the platform which comes in handy because along with adding vertebrae, you also can shape how the spine sits (within reason) and it’s possible to build creatures that curl over themselves. Without that handy arrow, it would be quite difficult to remember if your pulled the head or tail around.

Curly Doo

Perhaps the best thing about the creature creator is the lack of road blocks you will come across. Every part that you add to the creature is customizable. Everything from making it smaller and taller, to messing around and twisting it. The same antenna part seems to have endless possibilities. On my creatures above for instance. Zebro: the same part makes up both the “Mane” and “Tail” (I liked the feathers), his mouth was placed under a head I created so that only the bottom jaw is visible (I built this guy before the full version was out and so the horse head part was not yet available, I thought about updating him…but…I love him too much). Scales: the same part makes up both his mustache, the spikes on the ends of his wings as well as his horns, and, believe it or not, he uses the same mouth as Zebro. Though in the case of Scales, I used it as a head and made it skinnier and longer (talk about multi-functional!).

Once you’ve built your creature you to choose it’s colors and all of your “parts” will colorize depending on the color scheme you choose (only a few parts go unaffected such as the grass and leaf parts which are supposed to be for camouflage). This, like the rest of the building process is very free, and while you don’t get a paint brush to just go to town, most things you could want are right there including stripes, polka dots, spots, fades…..

Once you’ve got your creature how you like it, it’s time for a test drive (but don’t freak out! if something turns out not to move the way you like, you can always go back and change it, even after you save, that’s the beauty of evolution). The actions your creatures can perform are various and include walking, punching, jumping, dancing (several dances including THE POINT and my favorite HIPPITY HOP) they even have poses like tah dah!

Poonchki (cute name for my first Spore Creature)
Walking, HIPPITY HOP, then the move called CUTIE

Alright, that’s cool you say, but what about when I put this guy in a game and it’s happy or scared? I want to see how it will behave. Well, Will Wright thought of that too. During the test drive, your creatures can also display emotions such as happiness, fear and sadness (which is very sad indeed). Observe…

Vinny
Anger, followed by the SUMO move, followed by Sadness.

In the creator, to see these actions you can click on the button that corresponds with that move, or you can just observe your creature and see what it does. This is especially cool if you hatch some baby creatures because your creature will bend down to say Hi to it’s babies and they mimic it.

After having the creator this long I still love it. I’ve spent several hours just playing around on it, and I plan to spend several more. The game has certainly made me more excited about the upcoming release of Spore and I can’t wait to play… I want to thank the game developers for making it easy to take pictures and video as well as share them (it made this post a lot easier then it could have been). I know that the Creature Creator (and the video feature) is meant to drum up hype, as well as make a few extra dollars on a function that will be in the full game anyway. But, I’m happy to support a game, and a company, that turn out excellent games. Especially this one, that inspires so much creativity…

Creatures created by various people on YouTube.

Well done Maxis… Well done.

Want to pre-order spore or buy the Creature Creator?
Hop over here -> http://www.spore.com/getSpore
It’s well worth the money, I promise!