![]() ![]() "Basically you start as this microscopic cell. "It was kind of a hard game to make," says Wright. It takes its inspiration from evolutionary biology, and for the most part, scientists are giving it a thumbs up. The game, seven years in the making, was created by Will Wright, the man who designed Sim City and The Sims. One of the most anticipated video games ever is coming out this weekend: Spore. She recommended adding eyes to his rear end so he could spot hostile creatures attempting to sneak up on him.Eventually, a player's civilization can conquer space. Jones was quick to point out, however, that it was hard to make a creature that just "didn't work" – every little design decision would simply affect how the game played. EA/Maxis rep April Jones jumped in to point out some gameplay-affecting differences with this thing of our own malicious making.įor one, she said, our decision to go with mandibles instead of hands would mean Hombre X would be able to eat food at ground-level with his pincer mouth, but not reach higher fruit and the like since he had no hands in which to hold it. The result was something with pincers, stringers, wings, and a slight resemblance to Space Ghost's Zorak. We decided our next creation, "Hombre X", would not be. Having tooled around with the various features, we saved Sporky to the Sporepedia for all of Maxis to share. We even used the "create an animated avatar" option, just 'cause. We took the opportunity to click a camera icon to snap photos while it acted out our commands, as well as a film camera for recording video of it in the act (clicking "stop," we were asked whether we wanted to upload the video directly to YouTube. Once we were satisfied with lil' Sporky, we went into "test drive" mode, where we could walk the creature around various backgrounds and click icons to cue various in-game actions, such as roaring, jumping, emoting, and various dances. If we saw one with a look we liked, we could select it and watch it be automagically applied to our creation. Secondly, we were able to connect to the Sporepedia and browse all of the beasties created by Maxis employees in an interface akin to iPhoto, meta tags and all. There were three pages each of built-in designs, along with some preset schemes with set combinations and colors. ![]() Firstly, we were able to select Sporky's base color/hide then add two more detail layers in the colors of our chosing. This portion of the creator was nifty for a couple of reasons. Once we were pleased with Sporky's looks (and the stats each part had given she/she/it – from socializing to attacking to jumping and more) we clicked over to the paint mode. Our first effort, which we eventually named Sporky (don't ask), came out of a simple dragging and dropping of a toucan-like mouth, webbed ears, antlers, a fin, and some butt flowers (for good measure) onto our initially pear-shaped primary form.Įach piece could be moved with surprising ease, as the creator smartly "knew" not to make it clip through the others, and provided us with easy-to-understand iconography for functions such as resizing, twisting, and generally tweaking them to our heart's content. Other than that, we had a mind-boggling amount of freedom in crafting our little bundle of goofy-looking joy. Your only limits are cost (each part carries a certain DNA point price, and you have a "starting balance") and complexity (an on-screen indicator lets you know when you're tricked your beast out to the max). They're all displayed in their own tabbed windows, and you can place them anywhere you'd like on your base creature shape. Parts are broken down into mouths, eyes, arms, legs, hands, feet, and extras. There was virtually zero guesswork involved in grasping which parts were better at what, whether it was mouths made for eating only meat but gave your creature a combat advantage or an herbivore maw that was better for singing, and thus socializing. ![]() ![]() This was the full version of the creator, so we had access to all of the various creature parts it ships with (the free edition contains only a quarter of them). Without even a shred of guidance, we were instantly resizing a colorful floating blob to form the body of our creature. There's virtually no learning curve to the creator. Read our full impressions after the break. Set to launch on June 17 in two flavors (a $9.99 "full version" and free downloadable demo, also included with The SimCity Box) the creator could be incorrectly described as a "utility" – in fact, as we found while tinkering with it, the Creature Creator could very well have a life of its own. We dropped by Maxis' offices today to get our feet wet in the stand-alone " Creature Creator" component of The Sims architect Will Wright's epic cell-to-galactic-civilization sim, Spore(which hits in September). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |