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Spore's Creature Creator

• By Flynn DeMarco
• June 11, 2008 16:26 PM PST
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GamePro contributor Flynn DeMarco tries out Spore's new Creature Creator, and explains the pros and cons of playing God.

Last night, I played with the Spore Creature Creator, something I've been waiting to do for over a year. Luckily, I wasn't disappointed. We took a trip to Maxis Studios to play the latest version of Spore, and the excitement of trying out the Creature Creator was heightened by the bustling atmosphere of Maxis employees crunching to finish the game in time for this fall.

Creature Features

For a game that's only partially complete, Spore's Creature Creator packs in a surprising number of features. The Spore website ties in closely with the Creature Creator itself, which will arrive on both the PC and Mac on June 17th. EA and Maxis have also partnered up with sites such as YouTube to create a fully realized Spore Creature community. Once you create your creature, you can share it in many ways, such as auto-posting your creature videos to YouTube or emailing creature snapshots to friends from in the game. The Spore team is also interested in coordinating with a comic-creator program, which would allow you to import your images and create a comic from them on the fly. You can also choose to share your creature to the Sporepedia, a compendium of player-created creatures that reside on the Spore website. In an amazing side feature, you can copy any of the shared creatures you find on to your desktop in the form of a small file. Dragging and dropping that file into your own Creature Creator will give you a fully editable version of that creature that you can tweak and adjust. The ease of use in this feature was quite impressive.

The Sporepedia shows just a fraction of the bizarre creature varieties. Your Spore creations will be available for all to see.

The real meat of the evening was spent creating creatures, a process which was cut short due to the number of journalists clamoring to try it out. The system is rich but intuitive, and will no doubt suck in creative types for hours. You begin with a random torso shape, and you click on it to reveal a spine. You can elongate the spine to any length , then move and adjust vertebrae by using the mouse wheel. You can also change the torso segment sizes during this process, blowing them up like a balloon or shrinking them down to thin tubes. Once you have your body ready, it's time to start adding the details: arms, legs, mouths, eyes, hands, feet, wings and some things I couldn't even begin to describe are all at your disposal. You can add as many as you like, though there is a limit to the number of body parts, which is represented by a small meter at the top right of the screen. When you add a body part, you can resize each individual piece in multiple directions. And in the case of arms and legs, you can move joints or elongate them to create just the look you want.

It's Alive!

Click to see more Spore screens

Now it's time for the final Creature Creator step: giving your life form some color. You can choose from a large selection of pre-made color palettes, or individually color the base, the coat, and the details. You can also surface textures such as scales, spots, stripes, and everything in between. With your creature complete, you can enter a test mode and examine how how your creature walks, bites, kicks, dances and any other number of pre-determined movements. You can also drop him/her/it into a few different backgrounds and even give birth to some baby versions of your creature so you can see what they will look like when they reproduce in the full version of the game.

The Spore Creature Creator is a deep and satisfying experience, and one that will likely cost you hours of sleep as you nurture your Dr. Frankenstein-like tendencies. Once the final version of Spore launches this fall, you will be able to download a demo version that will contain all the same creature-building features but will only have about 25% of the full content. If you want to experience the full version of Spore's Creature Creator, you'll have to cough up $10. If you've ever wanted to play God, Spore's Creature Creator might be the best ten bucks you've ever spent.

What a strange, pretty bird you are! Spore's Creature Creator lets you build fantastic beasts in minutes.

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