Pew! Pew! Preview!: Spore Creature Creator

Shortly after arrival to the Maxis studios in Emeryville, the esteemed gaming press was ushered into the makeshift presentation room (A.K.A. the kitchen and dining area). Before we could get our hands on the PCs in the next room, we were walked through the basics of the Spore Creature Creator.

The video gives a great overview of how you start the creature creating process. But it's my job to write, so read my words. To begin, you're given a very basic torso to manipulate. You can extend or shorten the spine, make your torso bigger or smaller, whatever you want. If you don't like the torso you're given, you can simply click the torso button to load up a differently shaped torso.

Once you're satisfied, it's time to give your creature a face and body parts. You have a menu divided up into different sections filled with parts. There's a separate menu for eyes, mouths, noses, arms, legs, hands, feet, spikes, weapons, feathers and much more. You can place all these wherever you would like on your creature and increase the size of each body part to whatever you desire by simple clicks of the button. As you play through the main game, you'll have to explore and socialize to find more parts that you can use on your creature.

All body parts have different stats associated with them. If you plan on playing passively in Spore, it would be best to pick the feet that gives your creature better dancing skills. If you want to play aggressively in the game, it'd be best for you to pick the feet that gives your creature the skills to charge and run fast.

The best way to describe this entire process is by this picture, I believe:

You see that? That's a fucking pear. YOU CAN MAKE A PEAR CREATURE!

Basically, what I'm trying to get at here is that your imagination is your only limitation. If you can dream it up, you can in all likelihood make it. 

The next process in your creature designs is color design. You have three different layers to customize in the color design section. There's the main color of the body, the secondary color and the patterns portion. If you make something that looks like a gorilla but you want it to have the designs of a bee, all you have to do is pick yellow for his main color, maybe white for his belly area and give your creature some stripes. You have the entire color wheel at your disposal with tons of different patterns to pick from. 

After you're satisfied with what you've created, it's time to take your creature out for a test drive. In Test Drive mode, your creature is dropped off into a small little enclosure where you can mess around with your creature. You can make him move around to see how your creature will walk and do some basic actions. There’s a menu with the various action commands that contains things like making your character jump, dance, sing, sit and so on. There are also emotion buttons you can use to get your creature to show emotions like fear, happiness, anger and more.

Another option in test drive mode is to give your creature some babies. You can have a max of three babies at a time and the babies will imitate everything that you do on the screen. It's really adorable watching your creature get really sad once he sees he has to be responsible for babies now.

You can change the background up from the default field location to an extraterrestrial look to a volcanic dark world. There’s also a plain black background, which is perfect for filming videos that you want to edit into a movie.

Speaking of videos, Spore has teamed up with YouTube to let players upload videos of their creature to their YouTube account directly through the game. You’ll also be able to take pictures of your creature that you can e-mail to friends in the test drive mode. Spore has also joined with a comic book creation company, so players will be able to make little comics with their creatures, too.

Once you're satisfied with what you've made, it's time to name your creature. You can name it whatever you want or let the game randomly choose a name. Then, you give it a description and tag your creature. Tags will play an important part in the game. When we were watching the demonstration, an all-pink creature was made and it was tagged "pink". If someone wanted to populate a planet with nothing but just pink creatures, they would search for the pink tag and have the game import everything tagged with pink.  

The Spore Web site is going to play a big part in the Spore world. All the creatures you have made will be in your own little section of the Spore site, where people can comment on and rate your creation. People will also be able to simply drag the thumbnail of your creature from your site onto their own harddrive and then load up your creature design into their Creature Creator. Each picture is like a very tiny compressed recipe that tells the game exactly what the creature is supposed to look like. You'll also have widgets and an RSS feed for your Spore site. 

Everything you do in the game will be recorded on Sporepedia. It will store the characters you have created, the comments you've moderated and show you who has visited your profile -- basically everything is recorded here. Sporepedia is seamless between the game and Web site. 

It was really amazing watching what everyone was making in the Maxis studio. Each person had something completely different from the person next to them and it made me realize that the possibilities are just endless. Some people were trying to make real-world animals, while others were making creatures that would realistically kill the mother in the birth process. 

The picture introducing this preview as well as the retarded red-looking creature above were both made by me. The first creature I made is called Mr. Meow Meow. I'm planning on making more creatures that I'll share with all of you this weekend. Keep an eye on my Community Blog, as I'll be taking requests on what to make sometime tomorrow. 

This is only one tiny little part of a huge game; I can see myself just losing my life to making an endless amount of creatures. The Spore Creature Creator will be released June 17th worldwide in over 22 languages on both the Mac and PC for $9.95; a free trial version will also be available. For more information, head on over to the trial page on the game's website.