Hands-On: Spore Creature Creator
By Nate Ralph -
Wired June 11, 2008
EMERYVILLE, California -- It all started with a pickle.
During Tuesday's
Spore press event at Maxis Software's studios, I grabbed the first randomly generated blob I stumbled across and pulled at both ends, not entirely sure what I was going for, but enraptured by the entire process nonetheless.
Maybe it's the wait: It's been roughly four years since rumors of a sort of "Sim everything" got attached to the name
Spore.It seems like ages since then, with no game emerging to give me the chance to while away the hours creating creatures that stumble out of the primordial ooze to conquer tribes, build cities and explore planets. And then, after years of waiting and wondering, I'm dropped in front of the
Spore Creature Creator.
Now what?
Other guests around me flexed their artistic muscles, crafting elegant birds, ferocious insects or (usually) convoluted amalgams of limbs and claws and teeth. I, on the other hand, oriented my attempt at a serpent the wrong way, so I flipped the spine over and slapped on a mole-mouth and a hefty waistline, because it looked hilarious.
All the body parts in the Creature Creator come with manipulation handles for adjusting, rotating, stretching and molding them as you see fit. Scrolling the mouse wheel allows you to scale parts, shrinking or enlarging limbs and the like. And every part affects your species ability to compete in the game, with attribute points added or subtracted based on the parts you pick.
The purpose of the Creature Creator, which goes on sale June 17 for $10, is to give the world a taste of the main characters of
Spore. That, and to flood the game with user-made content long before it actually hits store shelves.
Spore is
scheduled for a Sept. 7 release.
For the final touches, I attached some hooves, grasping claws and a forked stinger to add a bit of menace to my pudgy mole monster. Color was a no-brainer: I picked the orange and green of the most recent issue of
Wired. And I went with scales, for no particular reason.
The Creature Creator's procedural scripts determine how, exactly, the textures will wrap around your creature's body, and in my case provided satisfying results. Oh, and his name is Trunk.
Elapsed time, from pickle to ... end result? About five minutes, which includes picking up the wondrously simple interface for the very first time. I cranked out Sparky (seen below, dancing with his kids) just a few minutes later, again with ease.
This is the type of game your parents should've warned you about: I can already see meals skipped and engagements missed as players sit in front of screens churning out simple, bizarre creations to populate
Spore's worlds, or maybe even taking the time to craft a beast that's a bit more complex.
Spore, starting with the Creature Creator, blurs the line between social networking and videogames. Strange bedfellows, sure, but an exciting prospect, particularly for a game whose content will spawn primarily from a rabid user-base. (There will be official offerings from Maxis Software, of course.)
Every player (upon registering their game) is given their own page on the
Spore community site, with RSS feeds tracking events in the game, their creatures' ratings based on community votes (Trunk: hot or not?) and other in-game news.
Publishing to
Sporepedia -- a compendium of all things
Spore -- is as simple as clicking "Share" once you're done working on a particular creature. Snap a screenshot and send it as an e-mail postcard, and shoot video, too, with uploads to YouTube just a few clicks away.
Decided that you must have a Trunk of your own? Drag his image off the web page and into your game, and
voilà, there he is on your screen. The whole world is sharing the same database, so you'll never know what you'll find, or where it'll be coming from.
There is, of course, the question of explicit content: Someone, somewhere -- more than likely, many folks -- will find no greater joy than ruling over a race of erect phalluses. If anthropomorphic genitalia isn't really your thing, feel free to block whatever you don't want. You can also create tags for your creatures (Trunk is "scaly"), with as many modifiers as you'd like, so if you decide you only want a planet with creatures tagged "fluffy," you can do that, too. You can also decide to only share creatures with your friends and people whose content you trust, so parents don't have to worry about little Johnny or Jane seeing something they shouldn't have. And if a particularly offensive creature does slip through the cracks, you can boot them from your planet, and even ban the creature's creator from ever sending you their wares again.
Spore is a casual game with a ridiculous amount of depth, allowing you to contribute as much or as little as you'd like. The game's
relatively low system requirements mean you won't need a brand-new rig to get to work, and interoperability between the Mac and PC versions (which will be released on the same day, by the way) means people can swap creatures, regardless of which operating system they use. The Creature Creator is only the beginning -- with the full game coming in September, we'll be cranking out vehicles of all kinds, and our own buildings, all of which can be shared with the world.
The Creature Creator will be available for $10 on June 17, with a free trial also available.
Head over to the Spore
website to meet Trunk and Sparky, and to get a look at all the stuff people have been cranking out thus far.