Spore
Tah-dah! It’s a Spore creature
Somehow, alongside a bunch of celebrities and A-list bloggers, I was invited to have a play with the Spore Creature Creator.
Spore is a new game developed by Will Wright - the guy who came up with The Sims and Sim City. Watch this video to get a sense of what it will do - pretty amazing.
I’ve been reading about it for a long time in Jake’s PC Gamer magazine, and it really looks pretty awesome. Essentially, you create creatures and they develop colonies and live their lives.
But the trick (and this is the really clever bit) is that all of the game’s creatures are created by the users.
Here’s my first go at making a creature. It’s called a Bropholus (don’t ask me why) and this is me testing out the different things it could do. The amazing thing is that I built the creature from scratch. Chose all of its characteristics, shape, limbs and colouration - everything.
Building a creature was so easy even I could do it. And I am not a gamer. The only other PC Games I get involved with are the ones where you drive cars, and it doesn’t matter if you hit stuff. I quite like those. Other than that, I get bored almost immediately. Introduce any complexity and I’m out of there.
You can get your creature do all sorts of things and express a range of emotional reactions. Now I get to upload a creature to a site where people will vote on the best ones, and that creature will link back to the site of my choosing. Apparently, only a handful of “creative opinion leaders” in the world got to do this.
So there’s Brian Eno, Elijah Wood, Richard Branson, David Lynch, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Adam West, Carlos Santana, MC Hammer, Ze Frank, Flight of the Conchords, Seth Green - and me. Cool.
Here’s another creature Jake and I made. Its voice is kind of wrong, but there’s not much I can do about that…
Spore itself isn’t out till September, but they’re doing a spot of PR. We’ve just got the creature creator bit, which is one small part of the overall game - but frankly, I’m really stoked with it. Jake and I have been making lots of different creatures and testing them out doing all sorts of different things.
It’s quite a bit more sophisticated than when Will Wright showcased it at TED last year. Our creatures are on the tame side - but I think we’ll get more ambitious with them as we go along. Jake’s already coming up with some amazing animals.
We’ll post new ones up on YouTube as we make them. One-click uploading is actually built in to the game. Nice. Glad that the YouTube account is finally useful.
Here’s one more for good measure:
Can’t wait for the whole game. It might even be something I’d distract myself with on a semi-regular basis. And… they’re releasing it for Mac as well as PC. Simultaneously. Brilliant.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Matt
I laugh out loud every time the Bropholus starts crunking. Awesome stuff.
The reason, though, for this comment is to find out what happened to newmusicstrategies.com.
As soon as I discovered it, it vanished, only to be replaced by spam.
What happened?
Jun 18th, 2008
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