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Well, yesterday in addition to being Firefox 3 day happened to also be the release of EA’s Spore Creature Creator. Strangely this whole thing is not a free download – you have to pay $9.95 for the application, but there is a free trial at least. I think when you buy the real deal you get to have access to more parts. I’m thinking pretty hard about that. I downloaded the trial and it is a little mind boggling how crazy this thing is. Here’s some of the guys I created:

These guys are named, starting from the top left and going clockwise: Some Dude, Tony, Oliver and Billy. You can see them hanging out there with their kids. In the trial there really aren’t that many parts (they go out of their way to show you blank areas for all the things that you don’t have access to), but you can still see a lot of diversity in what you can do. To see even more wackiness check out Poyla’s creatures.

Putting things together

This thing just lets you put together parts, control a few variables for each one (the interface is very intuitive – just a little bit of playing around and I understood exactly how to munge each thing). At any point you can put it into simulation mode where the game figures out exactly how it moves and you get to have him walk around a bit. There’s controls to make them flip, punch, be happy, and all sorts of other zaney emotions – very cool. I really like the call button where they make some sorta mating call or something, they get all these sound waves coming out of their mouths, reminds me a little bit of Havoc. You also get to choose some colors and skin patterns and what not for the little guys.

David Worrell just dropped the 411 on me – to change the fatness of the torso you simply put the mouse over the area you want to affect and scroll the mousewheel! Did a quick check and this works like a charm – totally great. Another evening to be lost to creature creation. One issue is that you get a random body type each time you create a new creature, you can modify the spine, but any lengthening is only a thin snake-like size. So you can’t create arbitrary torsos, I wish it gave you more flexibility there – that’s pretty much my main gripe in the ability to do stuff department. But clicking “create new creature” until you get the torso you want isn’t horrendous – although there are a pretty finite number of them.

The software could use a little help

The software itself, on the mac, at least isn’t too polished. It actually took me a bit to figure out how to get into the game off the splash screen (hint, it has it’s own windowing system, to close windows you need to spot the x in the upper right and close them – this is the main interface type). It didn’t detect my monitor resolution so started with a non-native one and looked a little not awesome – hitting the settings in the lower left lets you fix that.

Also, it doesn’t work at all well with two monitors. It goes full screen but just on one my second just goes to black. Which is annoying, but whatever. My only gripe with the editing is that sometimes it’s difficult to select just the right thing – I found myself accidentally moving parts or removing them when I wanted to do something completely unrelated to them.

All that bitching not withstanding, it’s pretty great all in all. And you can share your creations up to Sporepedia! Which gives you a profile page and the trappings of a community, but doesn’t seem to really be all that good. I hope they do more with the site. Definitely give it a whirl, I’d love to know what you think, I’d love it even more to see what you’ve created!

Whoops, just created Oswald and he’s my favourite now. :)