Spore
More Than 250,000 Creatures Created and Shared in the Spore Creature Creator
Jun 18th
The Countdown to the Launch of Spore Blasts Off With Fans Uploading More Than Two Creatures Every Second Since Launch
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–We’re not alone in the galaxy! Maxis, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) studio, today announced that Spore™ fans and the creatively curious have designed and shared more than 250,000 new alien life forms since yesterday’s launch of the Spore Creature Creator – currently more than two creatures are being shared every second! Anyone can download their own copy of the Spore Creature Creator or check out thousands of amazing creations from around the world in the Sporepedia at www.spore.com.
“The response to the Spore Creature Creator has been overwhelming,” said Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore at Maxis. “The creativity and passion that the community is putting into their creatures is spectacular. The development team has spent the last 24 hours checking out the amazing creations racing in from all corners of the globe – with peak volume hitting more than 1,000 creatures being shared a minute.”
The Spore Creature Creator is a stand-alone product and creativity toy box where players create their own unique creatures, bring them to life with entertaining animations, and share them online with friends around the world. The full version of the Spore Creature Creator will be available for $9.99 at retail stores or by visiting www.spore.com. A free trial version of the Spore Creature Creator is also available today at www.spore.com. The trial version features 25% of the creature-making parts from Spore and lets players shape, paint and play with their custom-created creatures. Creatures made in the Spore Creature Creator can also be imported into the full Spore game, allowing players to populate their own galaxies when the game ships worldwide later this year.
The Spore Creature Creator lets players create their own creatures, take them on a test drive, snap pictures, and make movies of them. Sharing pictures or videos with friends is as easy as the click of a button. Players can also share their creations with others by uploading to the Sporepedia™ at www.Spore.com. The Sporepedia is an extraordinarily vast online destination where people worldwide can search for and share Spore creations, comment on other player’s designs, check out celebrity creature creations and much more.
The Spore Creature Creator is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. The downloadable demo version is free. The complete version has an MSRP of $9.99 in North America. Spore ships for the PC, Mac, Nintendo DS™ and mobile phones on September 5, 2008 in Europe and September 7, 2008 in North America and Asia. Visit www.Spore.com to download a free version of the Spore Creature Creator, sign up for the Spore newsletter or check out all-new screenshots and videos from the game.
About Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company. Founded in 1982, the Company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA SPORTSTM, EATM, EA SPORTS Freestyle TM and POGOTM. In fiscal 2008, EA posted GAAP net revenue of $3.67 billion and had 27 titles that sold more than one million copies. EA’s homepage and online game site is www.ea.com. More information about EA’s products and full text of press releases can be found on the Internet at http://info.ea.com.
EA, EA SPORTS, EA SPORTS Freestyle, POGO, The Sims, SPORE and Sporepedia are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S and/or other countries. Nintendo DS is a trademark of Nintendo. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Source: BusinessWire
“Expect the Unexpected” with Spore’s Creature Creator
Jun 18th
Spore’s Creature Creator is a very powerful tool. Sporepedia proves this fact – over 150,000 creatures as of this post and still growing by the minute. Dan Moskowitz, the lead programmer for the Creature Creator sums it up nicely:
“The editor is so flexible, it’s almost like putting a kind of paintbrush in people’s hands,” he told me over e-mail. “I expect we’ll see some jaw-dropping works of art, some hilariously funny, some edgy, maybe even controversial creatures.”
You can read more on this over at MTV Multiplayer, as well as discover the Kleenex Test, the method they used for testing the Creator Creator.
Lucy Bradshaw comments on why Spore Creature Creator is $10
Jun 18th
While some have balked about paying the $9.99 price tag for something that’s essentially a demo for the full game coming out in September, Bradshaw says they’re giving players their money’s worth.
“Well, look at the features that it’s got. I honestly think that people sell stuff like this for even more… this has to be able to build a creature that looks cool and to be able to play around with it and share that with other people — you get a MySpore page and all this online functionality … I honestly think it’s a steal… [some at EA were] suggesting that it be priced higher.”
Higher? For a demo? Isn’t the whole point of a demo is to get as many people to get a small taste for them to make a decision whether to purchase the game? Oh well…at least they did put out a free demo, so I guess you can’t complain…but what if they take that away next time and start charging for demos now on? After all, it is EA…
IGN: Spore Creature Creator Review
Jun 17th
Even with all its limitations, I’m really amazed at the flexibility of the creature creation tool in Spore. Starting with the basic spine, you’re free to lengthen or shorten the spine and thicken or thin the flesh around with some very easy and intuitive mouse moves. You can also bend and twist the spine to get a creature that’s either straight as a ruler or a poster child for scoliosis. Once you’ve got the basic shape of the torso and pelvis, you can start dropping arms and legs and mouths and eyes and all the other bits on. Each part attaches to the main body and you can adjust the angle and size of the attachment. For the limbs, you can even set the size and position of each individual joint.
Creating Creatures – a look at how they used an old programming technique
Jun 17th
Erica Naone, the assistant editor of Technology Review interviewed Spore’s executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, about the how they used procedural generation on Spore’s game play.
TR: One goal of the Creature Creator was to make it relatively easy to use, while also giving people a lot of range in what they could create. How did you pull that off?
LB: The Creature Creator’s interface is probably the single item that we spent the most time on. To make it something that feels as simple as shaping clay, allowing players to easily add parts, stretch them, or rescale them, we taught the computer to respond to what the player was doing. If the creature is facing the player, it will manipulate the limbs differently than if the creature is to the side. We created methodology like symmetry, so that if you’re dragging on a leg and you put it to the side of the creature, it’s going to have two of them.
TR: Because so much of the behavior of these creatures is procedurally generated once the game is running, my understanding is that the files for the creatures themselves turn out to be much smaller than for a 3-D model, for example.
LB: What you’re doing with your Creature Creator is creating a recipe for a creature. Because the computer builds the creatures up procedurally, the file that stores [the creatures] gets reduced down to about 8 K. We’re talking about kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes [as you might expect for most 3-D models].
I love the way that Maxis has handled the data for the creatures by storing them into PNG files. It seems a lot simplier to deal with and you can publish them to the net in no time, making fast and easy distrubition.
The great Spore Creature Creator Giveaway
Jun 17th
Big Download is holding a contest on the most craziest and insane creator you can come up with. Download the Creature Creator and shoot them an email. They will then pick the top 10 creatures and only 1 will rule them all.
The prizes? Pretty good, if you ask me. The top 10 winners will receive an upgrade from the Creature Creator Demo to the Retail version. The top 3? Check this out:
First place grand prize winner will receive a Wacom Intuos3 6×11 drawing tablet (MSRP $369) to further put their creative genius to work. Second place winner gets an EVGA NVIDIA e-GeForce 8800GT Superclocked video card (MSRP $259.99) to better appreciate the Spore creature graphics. Third place wins an EVGA NVIDIA e-GeForce 9600GT (MSRP $189.99) to boost their frame rates.
I’d love to win 2nd or even 3rd place! Better hurry, as the contest ends on July 1st, and it is only open to US and Canadian (non-Quebec) residents who are 18 years of age or older.
Thanks to Spores Illustrated for the news.
Spore retail boxart has been published
Jun 17th
Well, take a gander at a very small shot of the retail Spore boxart. You can find it on www.spore.com
GameSpots Q&A with Lucy Bradshaw on Spore’s Creature Creator
Jun 17th
GameSpot UK: Why was the decision made to sell the Spore Creature Creator?
Lucy Bradshaw: The Spore Creature Creator is an introduction to the world of Spore–your own little universe in a box. By starting with this fun little bite we are getting a head start at building the Spore community as players share their creations and interact with each other at Spore.com. The Spore Creature Creator is quite literally the beginning of the launch of Spore and introduces the brand in a really fun and easily accessible way. We can’t wait to see what people will create starting this week.
Lucy, I like you as a person, but I have to say I think you completely mis-interpreted their question and didn’t answer it properly. They asked WHY was the decision made to sell the Spore Creator, as in: Why are you selling it instead of releasing it free (the full version) much like all of the past tools for The Sims and The Sims 2 were?
Then again, I don’t think she could get away saying…”EA wants all the money they can get their hands on”…so that’s probably why we got that answer.
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