Spore: Creating Creatures

"Spore's Lucy Bradshaw talks about why the game's developers embraced an old programming technique. The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts' highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday. Created by Will Wright, who's known for the video games SimCity and The Sims, Spore begins with a player controlling a single-celled organism and progresses through various evolutionary stages until the player controls an entire space-faring race. The Creature Creator part of the game consists of a modeling interface that lets players build their own organisms from a set of highly customizable and flexible parts. When Wright first began talking about Spore in 2005, he expressed a vision of extreme player control. Rather than having game designers build thousands of 3-D models of creatures in advance and program their behavior, he had the staff develop algorithms to animate the creatures that players built, using a technique called procedural generation." Read on

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Image Reference:
http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/Image/spore-guy.jpg

4 Comments

Comment by Barry Joseph on June 22, 2008 at 8:57pm: Global Kids is running a program this summer using Second Life to teach youth in NYC and Chicago about Tanzania and paleontology. When the Spore Creature Creator came out we wondered if we could use it to make Spore versions of some of the real world creatures we'd be learning about, to see if this tool could be used for education. This is a video of the first test, modeled off of a pre-dinosaur reptile, created in about 15 minutes:

Comment by Troy McConaghy on June 24, 2008 at 11:42am: Calling Spore an "evolution game" is misleading. If anything, it's an "intelligent design game."

Comment by Rafi Santo on June 25, 2008 at 2:26pm: Be sure to join the Spor-ducators group!

http://www.rezed.org/group/sporducators

Comment by Sabine Reljic / Willow Shenlin on June 26, 2008 at 9:33am: yeah!!! Got my first trial critter going too! I posted it on the Spor-ducator's group. (still figuring out how to post a video in these comment boxes). I've also added my comments on Spore on the sporeducator group.

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