So, after years of development, Will Wright’s latest design nears launch, with the release of the Spore Creature Creator today. I haven’t really been looking forward to it, and tend to avoid and disregard most hype (outside of the promised Everquest-nolstagia-inducing MMO, Vanguard), but their trailer perked my curiosity, and hey, free download, no reason to not try, right?

So.. downloaded! And assembled my first creature. The controls were very intuitive, and I was making my own freak-entity within seconds. Gave it some creepy eyes, some pincers for good measure, and started layering on spikes.

I fucking love spikes.

So I created my creature who is currently nameless and ran him around his little virtual world, and there were several built in animations and moods (happy, angry, flip, punch, “ta-dah!”) that I could trigger and my creature would then perform them. When I say “built-in”, I mean nothing like a cookie-cutter animation; each animation is unique to your creature, and while the “punch” animation is similar in style for every critter, each creature’s arms, legs and body structure can be completely different, so we’re not just talkin’ about copy and paste animations here.

This is smart new stuff, and being an animator, it has a lot of questions still up in the air, like how much longer will we be animating, knowing exactly what the end-result will be, or will user-created characters like Spore’s and AI and physics-infused animation from NaturalMotion’s software be the future?

Enough horror about becoming obsolete!

After playing with my character a bit, I noticed a built in “record video” option. After recording my critter breakin’ some moves, there was an “upload video to YouTube” button, and without ever leaving the creature creator, I uploaded my freshly-created video to YouTube.

Just for you. <3

June 18th, 2008
Categories: Gaming . Tags: animation, spore, user created content . Author: Jordan

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