Spore Creature Creator!
I’ve been playing with the Spore Creature Creator (trial version, sadly, but for being three days before release I can’t exactly complain). It’s wonderful! The first time I went through all the animations I was squealing and clapping.
GET IT HERE NOW! You know you want to!
The controls are mostly intuitive, although I’ve still not worked out how to make the bodies fatter or thinner (btw, in case you haven’t worked it out yet, click and drag a vertebrae). The UI is very sleek and, in stark contrast to a lot of games, doesn’t get in the damn way – in writing this sentence I got as far as “The UI is” and then realised that I actually hadn’t a clue what it looked like.
Hey – I’ve worked it out! Mouseover a vertebrae/joint and scroll or use the up/down keys to make it fatter/thinner.
The build a creature system is very neat, although the trial version only has a few options available – a sign of how good this game is going to be can be found in that despite only having access to a quarter of the content, there is an incredible amount of variety possible. So far I’ve made a strange green quadruped with an earhorn attached to its face, a “Monoboing”, a worm-type thing (incidentally, the engine handles movement in creatures without legs very well, even with pretty realistic animations – although the speed doesn’t match up with said animation, giving the impression of a gliding space slug), and something vaguely reminiscent of a cartoon character the name of which I have forgotten. I really hope EA make it as moddable as The Sims 2 – the possibilities are mindblowing; although I get the feeling it’ll be more common to focus pretty much on one race so maybe tonnes of cosmetic options won’t be overly useful.
There are only a few restrictions as regards building. One is what appears to be a “DNA cash pool”, however with most items costing no more than 50 little double helixes, a few reaching 100, and the pool starting at 2000, it seems unlikely that it’ll ever run out (unless you build Cthulu, anyway).
Another is the creature complexity. An icon in the top right denotes how complex your creature currently is, and when the “bar” is full you can no longer add parts – this also goes by how much stuff you stick on your creature, particularly how many attribute-improving items you give it.
On that subject, there are several attributes available to your creature – these affect its chances of survival.
Attributes are split into three categories – abilities, attack, and socialise.
On the first row are the abilities “Mating call” (unsurprisingly essential), “Grabbers” – the hands I gave my Offlobart, and “Sight” which is fairly self-explanatory. These are all simple true/false.
The rest have ratings. The attacks listed here are Bite, Charge and Strike, with the Offlobart’s skill in each in the number on the icon. Similarly the socialise icons depict Singing, Dancing, Charm and Posing. I’m not quite sure what posing is referring to either.
The last three are speed, defined by your creature’s feet; health; and diet – defined by the mouth you choose, sadly the trial creature creator only has carnivorous mouths available.
The test drive is great fun! As in pretty much all games, there are some clipping issues with certain animations.. but with the amount of customisation, that’s unavoidable. The animations are so damn cute, it’s horrendous. And they dance! This is the bit which induces giggling and squealing :D
As regards moddability, things look somewhat promising. Most of the files are in DBPF .package format, as they are in The Sims 2, but SimPE (the player created TS2 DBPF editor) can make nothing of them, showing just empty packages or lists of unknown files – not really surprising given the purpose of SimPE. The saves are hidden exceedingly well – to be found in application data, in a file which my pathetic OS didn’t even know existed (sigh).
Butbutbut! The EULA follows…
…license to … use one copy of the Spore Creature Creator and its components for the sole non-commercial purpose of creating creatures that may be used by the game Spore or any authorized sequels, expansions, and spin-offs … (2) publish and share Spore Creatures created with the Spore Creature Creator for personal, non-commercial purposes … EA owns all of the right, title and interest in … all derivative works comprised of those assets, including the Spore creatures that you create, animate, and capture in screen shots or video clips using the Spore Creature Creator. … you may not … use the Spore Creature Creator or Spore Creatures to further any commercial purpose, including the promotion of a product or business.
This will mean nothing to you if you’ve not been part of the TS2 modding community, but otherwise squee!
Of course certain parts of the EULA will be ignored outright – such as “You may not further modify Spore Creatures with any other materials, tools, or software programs.” – but hopefully the force and repetition with which EA are saying NO MONEYS! NO MONEYS! will make for a much less petty and greedy community than that of TS2. So yay! Let’s go poke at stuff till our keyboards bleed.
