The boundaries of my strange imagination
Does anyone remember the game called Spore that was announced what seems like a decade ago? You probably don’t because it hasn’t been mentioned for a while but you can soon get up to speed if the feeling so strikes you.
I’ll explain if you’re too lazy to click. An expert game designer (one of the best the industry has seen, in fact), Will Wright, announced a couple of years ago a culmination of all his previous efforts into some kind of “you play God and control evolution of a unicellular organism right through to the space age” game. It’s even a massively online single player game, which is a bit different. Will Wright was obviously the man behind Sim City and The Sims, but you knew that already. Hence why Spore is a bit of a morph of both with new concepts as well.
Let’s move on and get to the point. Finally, the game is set for release to a few platforms at the beginning of September this year. But just to trigger some drool amongst avid followers of the development process, EA decide to release a small taster to the community in the form of creature development. If you watched the video, you’ll see what I mean by creature development.
This new software is known as the Spore Creature Creator and is available for PC and Mac users alike, and is a stripped down version of the full game’s creature creation module, for free. The idea is that lots of people with different levels of creativity (and sometimes sanity) start sculpting weird, wonderful and slightly concerning creatures that are sometimes more fit to be shown to a courtroom during a sanity hearing. Then, they hit a little share button and send them to the “Sporepedia” which is a database of lots of creatures that will apparently be used to document in the full game lots of combinations that can be made by the game. At the time of writing, there are 860,902 creatures. And that’s only ones that people have bothered to upload… it’s like a new breed of social networking. It’s like some kind of distributed imagination!
How many games do you see where the blurb on the back says “your imagination is the only limit”? Well I’ve seen lots, and I can tell you that it certainly applies here. Naturally, I decided to put the theory to the test and made some very strange discoveries.
My Spore Profile
Click, if you dare, and check out my creations. I’ll be adding new ones all the time.
Tags: creature creator, creatures, spore, will wright
