If the creature is facing the player, it will manipulate the limbs differently than if the creature is to the side. 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.
LB: The Creature Creator’s interface is probably the single item that we spent the most time on. 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. And that happens throughout the game, in fact. If you’re putting on a more socializing part, it turns a little more perky and happy. So, as you create your creature in the editor, if you’re putting on a more aggressive part, the music starts to turn a little more ominous. LB: One of our original visions … was to do procedural music.
TR: Does how you build the creature affect anything in the game beyond how the creature behaves? The game’s algorithms interpret the form that those parts take to create behaviors for the creature, and to determine how the creature moves, interacts with other creatures, or fights its enemies. After attaching the parts wherever they choose, players can stretch, resize, and paint them. Players select parts by dragging them onto a creature’s body. Spore’s Creature Creator, a part of the Spore game that launches today as a stand-alone product, has an interface balanced to give players a great deal of latitude with relatively easy controls. All of these things together create the kind of strategies that you get to play out once you get the game. There are also movement parts that give creatures the ability to sneak and jump and glide. If I want to attack and win by brute force, then I’m probably going to invest more in the combat parts. So, if I’m going to decide I want to socialize with a number of other species, I’m probably going to opt to put on more socializing parts and create my possibilities there. There’s AI in the game, and creatures will behave based on the parts that you’ve added to them. For instance, a charm part might be a little flower, or some sort of antenna might give you the charm ability. With the Creature Creator, you can put these things on. Socializing parts, for example, give you the ability to charm other creatures, to dance, to sing, or to pose.
LB: The creatures’ abilities come from the parts that players choose to put on them. TR: Can you offer an example of how procedural generation gives meaning to the design choices that a player makes when building a creature? Secondary creatures are controlled by artificially intelligent software, not by other players. The game is entirely populated with creatures created by players, but it’s not a multiplayer game. While using the Creature Creator, each choice that a player makes to design the look of her organism affects how it moves or interacts with others. 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. When Wright first began talking about Spore in 2005, he expressed a vision of extreme player control. The game’s algorithms generate behavior for the creatures based on the features of physical characteristics selected by players. Below is a screenshot showing examples of creatures that could be built using the game’s Creature Creator. Spore creation: Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of the highly anticipated evolution game Spore, says that the game’s approach to programming affects game play and player control, making characters more customizable. 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. 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, the first piece of Electronic Arts’ highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday.
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