Spore Maxis Creatures

[Tisham Candella]

Ihave over a dozen creatures I've created, which I intended to use to populate a world. But when I go to start a new world and I select the "My Creations" theme, it only shows one of the creatures I made.

I got the My Creations theme to work, and upon creation it showed all of the thumbnails full of things I made, but when the world loaded I explored it for hours and only found 2 of my creatures, the rest were from maxis. What gives?

ive been looking for an answer for something very similar to this, i had a space stage world that had defeated the grox and colonized half of an arm of the galaxy, but then when i gotback on to my world it switched my creature and spaceship with maxis creations and my creations from the sporepedia wont show up

Hi, So I think it's pretty obvious that i am BIG into spore. Hell, My name is grox, My fursona is a grox, the character in my avatar who is my fursona is a grox... So why don't I assign everyone some spore creatures?

Well spoken. Brings back great memories! Delays and crazy expectations aside, I thought the linear-style game progression was still great fun, though it did not fulfill the powers-of-ten vision and it interfered with the creative aesthetic (+1 attack, +2 dance etc.)

Chris Hecker was brought in at the last minute to re-design the middle game, which ended up being a bad civ clone, but the previous parts and the space parts were and still are amazing. Because the city building part stood between the more free form procedural start and end games, the flow from one to the other was lost, and play ended up bein too fragmented.

After seeing Will Wright talk about spore before it was released, the potential of being able to move along the axis of scale to achive gameplay objectives felt incredibly compelling to me, but this was roadblocked by wedging a standard RTS game between the more freeform parts.

I really wanted more:

-evolution by the simulator, including mutations

-less dancing and musical crap/ more fighting, death, and procreation

-creature morphology matters more than the sum of the parts in success or failure

-crafting, and physics in the building and vehicle system determines success, not the sum of parts irrespective of where they are placed

-the planets all looked very similar (we needed way more than 12? giant rock types

20 tree types, and a bunch of heavily restricted planet height maps to make a convincing universe of diverse planets)

Chris has been bizarrely and inappropriately blamed for Spore before, but this may be the first time he got blamed just for the Civ level! At any rate, any failings of that stage should fall upon me more than anyone else.

The game looked so awesome and when the creature creator came out it proved it was awesome. I had my parents, grand parents, friends etc. play it and they loved it. This is what i feel spore should of been more focused on. The creators and what functions each part has with the creature / spaceship / building.

Like me, I think you guys have probably learned a great deal, about scope, about focus, about motives and themes, and on the other side, about DRM, about hype, about teamwork.

I think the same team today would probably do much better than in the past.

Hey, great writeup Soren. I was on the project before your time (Around 2004-2005) and I feel like you and I would have been on the same wavelength. I had the dubious distinction of being the first person on the team to voluntarily leave for anything else at EA. A lot of people thought I was crazy to leave the dream team, but I saw the rocks that Spore ended up crashing on even back then.

This is a great write up of some of the faults of the game, thanks Soren. I was also disappointed that while the creativity in designing the creatures and buildings and units was endless, the meaningful mechanical differences were more rock-paper-scissors like.

The Panspermia theory formulated by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arrhenius hypothesizes that life is spread throughout the universe by drifting seeds, or spores. The game of Spore begins with a single cell, deposited in the ocean of an unknown planet by a convenient meteor; the player's goal is to evolve this organism into an intelligent species capable of building a starfaring civilization. Gameplay is divided into five distinct phases, beginning with a two-dimensional subgame in which the player must survive in the primordial soup, eating and avoiding being eaten. Food can be either other creatures or vegetable matter, depending on whether the player has chosen to adopt a herbivorous or carnivorous nature. The process of evolution is mimicked by the acquisition of body parts which can be combined with the creature's existing form, using a remarkably sophisticated and powerful software tool. At the end of this phase, the player's creation emerges from the oceans and moves on to dry land. Here it participates in a similar three-dimensional subgame in which it can either prey on others or attempt to ally with them, with the eventual goal of evolving a brain. Once this stage is complete, the physical form of the species is fixed, and it moves through phases representing tribal and technological civilizations, both of which resemble simple three-dimensional Real Time Strategy games. Again, it is possible to either cooperate with other cultures (the herbivore's approach) or conquer them (the carnivore's preference). These phases end with the (peaceful or otherwise) unification of the entire planet under the aegis of the player's civilization. The fifth, and final, stage of the game (for which Walter Jon Williams wrote the dialogue) is by far the most flexible and open ended, recalling Spore's working title of "SimEverything". In this phase the player can roam the galaxy in their own spacecraft, Terraforming and colonizing other planets, engaging in conflict or diplomacy with alien civilizations, and involving themselves in the development of primitive species (see Uplift). The design draws on both space exploration games (see Space Sim) and God Games, in a universe which has been modelled with considerable attention to detail.

The overall effect of the gameplay is remarkably charming. The player created species are consistently appealing, with a "phenotype" of elegant and amusing animations generated automatically from the "genotype" supplied by the player's decisions in the creation tool. While the central themes of the game are evolution and social development, they are approached in a manner reminiscent of a children's cartoon; the biology is poetically rather than scientifically accurate. New physical characteristics are either found or taken from other creatures and then passed on to offspring, a model which only vaguely resembles the Darwinian theory of evolution. Spore is also notable for its status as the first "massively single player online game". Unlike Massively Multiplayer Online Games, only one player at a time participates directly in the game. However, each player's experience is informed by the others' actions. The various species created by Spore's users, and the behavioural patterns demonstrated by them during play, are distributed across the internet and appear in the worlds inhabited and visited by each participant. Considerable effort has been devoted to supplying players with powerful tools that make constructing their own creatures, buildings and vehicles as easy as possible, employing the collective creativity of huge numbers of individuals to populate the game's simulated universe.

Maxis, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) studio, and Z Corporation today announced that fans of the critically acclaimed video game Spore can now transplant their unique creatures into the real world as "Spore Sculptures" through Z Corporation's 3D printing technology. The partnership furthers EA's commitment to extending intellectual property outside of traditional gaming, giving fans a platform to go beyond the game and further express their creativity.

"At its heart, Spore is a tool for creativity. Since launch, fans have made more than 40 million Spore creatures, vehicles and buildings," said Patrick Buechner, Vice President of Marketing at Maxis. "We wanted to give players a way to extend their in-game creativity to the real world. The flexibility of the in-game creation tools allows an almost limitless variety of Spore Sculptures."

"A ZPrinted Spore Sculpture will immortalize a Spore creature at any given time, or several selected times to document its evolution," said John M. Kawola, Z Corporation CEO. "There's a staggeringly large universe of 40 million potential creations that can cross into the physical world."

To create a Spore Sculpture, players design their creature using the Spore Creature Creator with hundreds of flexible drag-and-drop body parts and a virtually infinite number of possible configurations. Players can then digitally paint their creatures with unique patterns. Once the creatures are complete, players upload their digital creations to www.sporesculptor.com and place their order. The ZPrinted models (up to 4 inches tall) will be shipped directly to consumers. For detailed information on the Spore Sculpture creation process, visit ---The-Arts/About-Spore-Sculptures/spage.aspx.

Released to worldwide critical acclaim in September, Spore is a game that lets people tap their inner creativity and build their own personal universe, evolving life from a single-cell organism to a galactic god over hundreds of millions of years. Gamers design a species and guide it to sentience, then help it build a society, develop its culture, and ultimately explore an infinite cosmos of worlds created by other players.

Crossing from the virtual to physical worlds is a popular trend in merchandising for the gaming industry. Spore Sculptures will be a dramatic addition to Spore T-shirts, playing cards and comic books. Z Corporation technology is ideally suited for this role given its status as the industry's only high-definition multicolor 3D printer.

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