Topic: Spore creature creator demo leaked. Kinda.

[idolminds]

Its on "The Bay" if you're interested. Its the creature creator demo thats supposed to be released in a few days. Seems it was on the cover disc of some UK mag. Since they got it a few days early in the mail, of course someone uploaded it.

[gpw11]

ON IT!

[gpw11]

KINDA LAME

[MysterD]

You'd figure they would've protected the demo disc even w/ Securom Internet Protection, knowing EA....

[gpw11]

Well, they protected it by only really allowing like 4 options for each part of your creature...which isn't bad but if you're going to release a demo of a game like this, why not include some of the variety you're trying to sell the game on?

[idolminds]

The free demo supposedly contains 25% of the parts. There will be a retail full creator with all the parts, but thats $10.

[gpw11]

I hope that what's in there doesn't actually represent 25% of the parts.  I mean, you can still do a lot with the modifications and different combinations, but there's not a lot there.

[idolminds]

It seems kind of limited, but I think with all the parts there it wont be so bad. I made a couple neat things just screwing around with just the limited bits. Once you figure out how to adjust the main body (scroll wheel makes the spine parts bigger or smaller), its much better.

So the creator is kinda fun to mess with. The online stuff isnt up yet, so they won't work until the 17th. But then you can upload and download all sorts of critters made by other people.

[Cobra951]

Gamernode has a live feed of creature creation.  It was on last night, and I thought they'd be done by now, but I guess they started up again.  For those who care.

[MysterD]

What Circuit City is doing this week only is if you actually pre-order Spore, you get a $10 gift card when the game ships.
(Spore's pre-order is going for $49.99 on at CC, as you'd probably expect.)

So, you could pre-order Spore from CC, buy the Spore: Creature Editor for $10 this week, and once you get that card you're especially getting it fCreature Edition for FREE when you get your copy of Spore sent to you -- if you want your heads on that Editor (legally) like sometime this week.

Of course, I won't probably touch Spore until something is done w/ that Securom crap and/or it becomes Bargain Bin price -- unless they throw in some allowing for revokes. Allow for revokes, then I might have an interest again in it as soon as it's let loose...

[idolminds]

Its not really free in that case either. You're still spending $10 for the CC and then $50 for the full game. Sure you get "$10 back" in the gift card, but you have to use that towards a future purchase.

Anyway, if anyone is interested this site has screens of ALL the parts in the full creator. You can see if its worth buying the full CC for or just waiting for the full game.

[idolminds]

My first real critter. Just copy the png to your My Documents\My Spore Creations\Creatures folder, and its in your game.

[Cobra951]

That's cool.  So the data are embedded in the png?

[idolminds]

Yup. Its really cool because you can go to a forum, find a "Show us your creatures!" thread, save all the images and suddenly you have 50 new critters to play with.

Once the online part goes live, you can upload and download other peoples critters right in game, you can "subscribe" to your friends and auto-download their creatures (and have them populate your universe in the full game).

Seeing some of the things people are making is amazing. The editor, even the limited one, has a lot of hidden power. You can add joints to limbs, lots more color variety (hold down the mouse button when you select a color to see different shades), hold Tab when a part is selected to see more morphing tools, hold alt to copy items, etc. Theres an in-game manual type thing. Lots of great info in there.

[gpw11]

Yeah, it's a lot better and more robust than I originally thought.  Also, I heard that in the full game you can minimize it to window mode and just drag and drop pictures of other people's creatures straight in, much like the method you mentioned.  I don't know if it's true or not, but it would be cool.

[Quemaqua]

Julia created the first one, I created the second.  This program is jaw-droppingly amazing.  Almost makes me wish I wasn't boycotting EA.

[idolminds]

Oh. My. God.

So wrong, but so funny.

[Quemaqua]

That's disturbing on so many levels.

Here's some more Julia and I did today (my 2 and then Julia's):

[gpw11]

ahahaha.  That's fucked up.

[idolminds]

[Quemaqua]

Heh... mutant cow?

[idolminds]

Its a centaur....cow...thing.

[Cobra951]

Oh. My. God.

So wrong, but so funny.

AHAHAHAHA!  Didn't take long, did it?

[Quemaqua]

What's really scary (sad?) is that it's surprisingly good.  That took some vision.

[Cobra951]

Yes it did, and because of such creative vision, here we go again.   

[Quemaqua]

Haha, that was a pretty good article.  Funny stuff.

[idolminds]

Spore creator is cool, but of course Ive run into some walls. Hopefully these can be implemented or something.

1) No asymmetry. I wanted to make a 3 headed creature, but I wanted each head to be different. This currently isn't possible. You also cant have something like one arm on one side of the body. Or different hands on each arm.

2) Not sure how to describe this, but...using hands to walk. Think of a squirrel. It has "hands" it uses to grip things, but also runs on them. Or a gorilla, same thing. In Spore, if you put hands on the thing they will not be used for movement. I saw a squirrel creature today on moddb, and it will walk upright in some kind of freakish manner. Would be cool if you could designate hands to also be used for movement.

3) What, no hair?

[Quemaqua]

Ridley and Kraid!  (I didn't do them)

[gpw11]

2) Not sure how to describe this, but...using hands to walk. Think of a squirrel. It has "hands" it uses to grip things, but also runs on them. Or a gorilla, same thing. In Spore, if you put hands on the thing they will not be used for movement. I saw a squirrel creature today on moddb, and it will walk upright in some kind of freakish manner. Would be cool if you could designate hands to also be used for movement.

That was my main problem with what I was trying to do.

[MysterD]

John Riccitiello of EA is thinking of possibly having DLC content to purchase for Spore, sometime down the line.

Spore Microtransactions Still On The Table, Says EA CEO

Posted on 29 July 2008 by Sean Hollister

Back in March, game developer and Gamasutra contributor Ian Bogost went to Toronto, and came back with two things: a glowing preview of the Spore Creature Creator (only tempered by an intuition that the game might not cater to the same broad audience as The Sims) — and within that preview, news that Spore would feature microtransactions.

Apparently, this last part was erroneous, as the very next day EA issued a correction: “The Spore Store simply gives players the ability to purchase out-of-game merchandise such as t-shirts and posters or any additional game products we might make down the road such as expansion packs […] we do not have plans to sell individual parts via micro-transactions.”

But today, in an conference call following the release of EA’s Q1 financial results, CEO John Riccitiello made it clear that the company is actually considering that very opportunity:

   

Job one with Spore is to make the launch successful. I would love to imagine that two years from now or a year from now the debate is whether we need a Spore label inside of EA, because the back-end system works so well that we’re able to monetize body parts, plant parts, car parts, planets – as a way to generate incremental revenue off an install base of several million active users. But it’s a little bit like pool, in that I’m a little afraid that if we spend way too much time setting up the second shot we’ll miss the first shot, and I don’t know if that metaphor works for any of you, but right now, it’s all hands on deck to make September 7th the event that matters.

    Yes, we’ve got a clear, obvious and very compelling post-launch monetization opportunity. This is a game where basically, the parts are what make the sum of the product work. So selling parts as we do with the Sims Store online right now in The Sims 2 is incredibly obvious, we have all the technology for it, but that’s really not what the overwhelming portion of our focus is on right now. It’s on making that a successful launch and making sure we have the right to ask that question down the road.

Personally, I like the way he ends that sentence — “making sure we have the right to ask that question” — and I welcome microtransaction schemes as long as they don’t confer an in-game advantage; but neither of these change the fact that EA seems to be abandoning its earlier position with regards to Spore, and so I think they have some explaining to do.

[Quemaqua]

You know, I think I'm actually getting less excited about this game as time goes on.  A lot of that is because as strong as the creature creator is, the more I've thought about it the less convinced I am that the rest of the game will be even half as innovative or compelling.  And just sort of the rumor mill combined with this somewhat more official statement about the possibility of DLC, and looking at how The Sims was handled with so many expansion packs... it just makes me think this isn't going to be the game for me.

[MysterD]

Will Wright talks about Spore and expanding it likely as often as The Sims gets expanded.

Great, so along w/ crappy Securom-Internet Protection, Spore will likely get 5-7 expansions per game.

I think I might wait a while for Spore even more so now; possibly 'til when there's a Spore: Complete Box Set.

Spore and "Horizontal Expansion"  [August 28, 2008, 10:09 am ET] - Viewing Comments

We Chat With Will Wright About The Evolution Of Spore on GameInformer talks with the designer behind Maxis' imminent life simulation. They discuss design challenges, gameplay, evolution versus intelligent design, and learn that Wright is not unaware of the amount of attention Spore is receiving, nor is he unconcerned about living up to what he describes as "too much hype." The most interesting topic is probably expansion, as he says: "With The Sims, we were basically selling expansion packs to the same customers over and over." He sees the possibility for as much expansion for Spore as The Sims (eek!), but in a different way: "I think Spore lends itself more to horizontal expansion, where we take components of the game like levels or editors into totally different formats and hit people that maybe never even played the hardcore PC game, but would enjoy a lighter experience using one of the editors. Or, using the content in new ways outside of Spore the game." On a related note, Why isn't everyone copying Will Wright? on Develop discusses the user-generated content in games like Spore and LittleBigPlanet and examines whether "UGC" is really a hot trend in gaming.

[Quemaqua]

I was listening to a podcast the other day that was discussing some of this stuff.  I think at this point I am very much not excited about Spore, mostly because A. I'm not entirely sold on the concept yet, and B. because even the slightest inkling that Wright is interested in doing anything expansiony means that EA is going to do everything in their power to turn this into another money press.  And I'm not fucking have any of that.

Too early to say anything for certain, but I have my guard up for sure.

[sirean_syan]

Yeah. Remember how Hellgate sounded all awesome when we first heard about it and then as the game got closer to release we started to hear all this stuff that made us wonder if the game was really going to pan out? I'm sorta getting the same feeling every time more information about Spore comes out.

[gpw11]

I don't know, I'm still all over it.  The expansion thing is kind of worrisome and it is certainly over-hyped, but from everything I've read it's not a situation like Fable where we were hearing about a totally different and far more in-depth game than what was eventually released.

[idolminds]

The problem I see with expansions is the community splitting. If you don't have a particular expansion, you can't use any creature made with any of those parts. On one hand, this works in EAs favor. People seeing all these cool creatures will want to go out and get the expansion to use them/make their own. On the other hand I can see people getting frustrated being forced to buy all these things just to keep up.

[Quemaqua]

But what incentive is there to care when you have a database of MILLIONS of creatures before the game is even out?  Within a few days there were hundreds of thousands.  When the game ships with a real editor, there will be more than anyone can even count.  At that point there's almost no point in even going out to a site to look at the creature creations, let alone worry about buying an expansion.  Unless, of course, the expansion adds something compelling.  In EA's case, I don't consider that a likelihood, especially since I'm not even sold on the premise of the game actually working as advertised.

[gpw11]

Yeah, but there are ways around that.  They could do it like Company of Heroes and have it so that you can have those creatures in your enviroments and planets, but just can't control them I guess, or they could set up some sort of system where as you automatically download the creatures with those parts to your world, the procedural generation automatically comes up with the animations and everything, and then once you encounter them you have access to all the new parts and your credit card just automatically gets charged.....OH FUCK NO

[Pugnate]

I heard some of the designers of Spore the other day on a podcast, where they talked about the expansions being less like those for The Sims. They said that the expansions would most involve better creation tools etc.

Yeah. Remember how Hellgate sounded all awesome when we first heard about it and then as the game got closer to release we started to hear all this stuff that made us wonder if the game was really going to pan out? I'm sorta getting the same feeling every time more information about Spore comes out.

Right, but somehow, this doesn't seem nearly as a big a nose dive as Hellgate was becoming.

I don't know, I'm still all over it.  The expansion thing is kind of worrisome and it is certainly over-hyped, but from everything I've read it's not a situation like Fable where we were hearing about a totally different and far more in-depth game than what was eventually released.

Agreed.

To me, Spore doesn't seem like a "hardcore" game aside from its creation tools. It seems that its various stages (RTS/4X etc) will be highly accessible and somewhat simplistic, but very enjoyable because of the high degree of polish the simplicity allows for. In a sense, the developers may have taken Blizzard's design philosophy, and ran with it. Spore may end up being simpler than Blizzard's games, yet more refined at the same time. Plus, it will have that strong community going for it.

I guess that's the make-or-break question here. Have Maxis put the same effort that Blizzard does in fine tuning its titles? When you take games like StarCraft, WarCraft, or even Diablo, they don't set the gaming community alight because of their depth or innovation, but rather because of the perfection of their design. Blizzard spends tons of efforts refining and fine tuning even minute aspects of their games. Hell, they don't even stop even after releasing their titles.

From what I've seen of Spore, none of its stages have the complexity of contemporary strategy games, so lets hope they the polish and charm to make up for it.