[games] Spore releases Creature Creator
Yesterday was the official launch of the first piece in the Spore game series. "Spore Creature Creator" went live for download on EA's site at: http://www.spore.com/getSpore. Being launched next there will also be a "Spore Creature" game released to Nintendo DS, the full computer game "Spore" featuring not only the ability to create lifeforms, even from the cellular level, but also the game world to play in and finally, a lighter mobile world app to come later.
The Spore Creature Creator allows you to make fantastical beast like creatures. The tool set is cutely stylized and easy to use, reminiscent of creating personal Mii avatars on the Nintendo Wii console. The creation system itself though user friendly is amazingly thorough. You can not only put together the most unbelievable pairings of body parts and adornments, but also refine and tweak each small element quickly on the fly. Next you pick between color palettes and patterns to 'paint' your creature. Once done you can view the finished creature and run it through available gestures and actions which of course includes dancing!
Once released, the larger multi-platform computer game of Spore will allow you to not only use these neat creatures but also have them wander around in a vast world populated by other people's creatures since each player's creations are available throughout the Spore universe to other game players. This makes it so that even though it is a single player game, the Spore universe you play in is effected by all players.
To boldly go where no creature has gone before...
Spore is essentially an Artificial Life simulator where all creatures made live in the Spore universe and evolve over time, with adapted characteristics and traits being passed along through each user generated creature species. Those creature species then go out and interact with other user generated species in the game. Think of gameplay within Spore as a combination of elements of some of the early lifeform games like Game of Life, Darwin Pond and Creatures, meets The Sims series of games, meets the larger strategic world and society forging games like Civilization. All of that, with some space travel/colonization elements thrown in for good measure!
Spore 2.0
Aside from lush, adorable graphics, what sets the Spore series apart from these other games is the emphasis on user content creation in not only the creatures themselves, but the built in ability for users to create further by making YouTube videos, photos and animated gif graphics. Players can choose to share these and the actual creatures themselves with friends right from within the software. This incorporates a lot of the current strong web 2.0 interest in user generated content and social media online. Taken further, think of the ability to use this to visualize derivative narrative story based comics and film machinima.
The Facebook of game worlds?
EA is also hosting a larger social media site where users can interact with each other outside of the game, search and share assets, species bios and other info. Called SporePedia, akin to the wikipedia concept but complete with tagging, rating and comments. To logged in users, it also offers profile pages and embeddable widgets with such things as RSS news feeds of the updated status of you and your friend's creatures.
Games based learning
The release of the full Spore game has the potential to generate lots of excitement about the idea of game based learning. It is amazing to think of the myriads of possible educational and creative uses Spore and it's resulting online community could spur. I know I am looking forward to this, nevermind the fun once all of these creatures have a game space to roam around in.
Comments
it's neat but can you build your own parts (in the final version) and make your own animations (like SL?).
If you have to rely on the game to make the parts like you rely on lego to make the blocks it's not really 'new'!
I love the dragon though!!!!
Posted by: Darren Daz Cox | June 18, 2008 1:50 PM