Introduction
The Spore Creature Creator is the latest offering from Electronic Arts/Maxis, a sort of prequel to their upcoming game, Spore. The game is the newest brainchild of gaming guru Will Wright, who is responsible for such well-known and successful franchises as SimCity and The Sims, two series which revolutionized gaming in their day. Spore looks set to follow in those very large footsteps. But that’s another story; today we’re looking at the Creature Creator.

EA released two versions of the Creature Creator, a free trial with drastically trimmed-down options, and a full version that supposedly contains everything that will be in the version that ships with the game itself. The full version is available in the US for $10; the price varies in other parts of the world. I myself purchased the full version. The basic concept of the Creature Creator should be obvious from its name. Using a variety of nifty tools and objects, you design a creature from scratch, giving it virtually any feature you can imagine. Once you’re satisfied with the basic design, you can select from various patterns and colors to give it the final touches. You can then test out various animations to see how it will function in Spore once the game is released. You also have the option to record videos of these animations and upload them to YouTube from within the Creator, and you can upload your creatures to Spore.com as well. As of this writing, nearly 900,000 creatures have already been uploaded.

Gameplay Overview
When you first start the game, you are presented with a slowly rotating view of a galaxy. You have two choices from here; you can either load an existing creature to edit, or you can create a new one. The Creator comes with 30 Maxis-made creations, and it sounds like the actual game will include many more than that. For this review, I’m going to create a new creature from scratch.

When the Creature Editor loads, you are presented with a randomly colored, randomly generated blob that contains a short spinal column. A little less than the left half of the screen is filled with various creature parts. In total, there are over 200 different parts to choose from, divided into seven categories: Mouths, Senses, Arms and Legs, Graspers, Feet, Weapons, and Details. Most parts can be customized in various ways, some of which include size, orientation, and even shape. The interface is very intuitive; it literally takes only moments to learn how the various controls work.

When you click on a part you’ve added to your creature, it becomes highlighted and different types of controls appear. An arrow-shaped control typically lets you adjust the length and width of an object, a round ball lets you reorient the object in different ways, and a ring lets you rotate the object. Pressing the tab key while an object is selected makes two additional rotation rings appear for most objects, allowing you to turn it through three different axes. Using the mousewheel or arrow keys allows you to enlarge or shrink a part while keeping its proportions the same.

Among the first things many players will do is adjust the length and shape of the spine. When the spine is selected, arrows appear at each end; clicking and dragging one of these will extend or shrink the spine. Clicking and dragging individual vertebrae allows you to reshape it into many different configurations. I’ve chosen to give my sample creature a long skinny neck attached to a short, rounded body.

To add parts to the creature, you simply choose one you like from the menus at left, click on it, and drag it onto the creature wherever you’d like to attach it. Each part has a certain level of complexity, and you’re limited in the total amount of complexity your creature can have, indicated by a small meter at the upper right. As you add parts, the meter slowly fills, changing from green to yellow, to orange, to red. Once it’s full, you cannot add anything new to the creature. Objects like mouths, the senses, and hands are typically the most complex; many of the weapons and details have a very low complexity cost.

The camera can be freely rotated around your creature, so you can get a good look from any angle. This ensures that you get parts positioned exactly where you want them. In the image below, I’ve rotated the camera to look at an angle at my creature’s front, so I can better see the effect of my adjustments to the mouth using the various controls.

Arms and legs present something of a special case. They can have multiple joints, allowing for some really complicated arrangements if you want to spend some time working on them. Each segment (between two joints) costs the same amount of complexity. Arms and legs can be adjusted in multiple ways. The joints can be moved around to alter the length of various segments, and using the mousewheel allows you to adjust the limb’s size at any of the joints, or even between the joints. Limbs are the only place the game will allow you to attach graspers (hands) and feet.

It’s best to add Weapon and Detail parts once your creature is nearly complete; I’ll get into that a bit more later. As you add various parts, new icons begin appearing below the complexity meter at the upper right. They serve little purpose at this point, aside from letting you view some animations when clicked on, but they appear to be a prominent aspect for the main game. They indicate things like bite power, jumping ability, sneaking ability, health, and so forth, and they update on the fly as you add or remove various parts that affect each attribute.

Once you’re satisfied with your creature’s design, it’s time to go to Paint mode and give it some style. You can choose a basic overall pattern, or you can select three different layers of the color scheme to work with. I tend to go with the layer approach, as it allows the greatest control over the final look of your creation. for this review, I’ve set each layer to the most basic pattern to start off with, so my creature is a pretty bland creamy white color. Even he looks bored with it!

I’ve started with the base layer here. As the name implies, this is the most basic layer of the creature’s color, underlying the others. After trying several, I picked a pattern reminiscent of fish or reptile scales, and I chose a nice deep blue coloration. Though it’s hard to see in the mini-pattern on the left, it includes some lighter colored highlights in areas like the belly and legs. It adds a nice touch. Now for the coat layer…

Most of the coat layer patterns affect primarily the back and underbelly. A few have more extensive effects, like adding polka dots all over the creature. I picked one with a nice pattern for the dorsal and ventral sides, and I chose a teal color to give some extra highlighting, beyond that of the base layer. And that leaves…

…the detail layer. The patterns in this layer seem to be primarily ones that affect the coloring on the legs, though there are several that have wider effects. I picked one of those for my creature, giving him dark bluish-green blotches all over his sides. With the fin and the strange feet, the coloration makes it look like his distant ancestors might have crawled out of the sea, before learning to fly.

Once you’ve got the colors figured out, it’s time to test your creature. Test Drive mode allows you to try various animations of your creation, such as roars, jumps, flexing, emotions, and hilariously, dancing. Some of these animations demonstrate unforeseen flaws in the way your creature moves. An arm might pass through a leg, or an eyestalk through a wing. It’s not usually difficult to fix these issues in the Editor, and oftentimes the “fixed” creature does look better than it did before.

I would say Maxis still has some work to do. Some of the animations should work more smoothly, such as the “Sit” animation. It is not uncommon for parts of the creature to vanish into the ground; I would think this could be avoided with a stronger object avoidance script, maybe cause the spine to bend upward a little more. Still, it’s a minor irritation.

There may still be work to be done in the walking animations as well. It is sometimes difficult to get them to move smoothly, as if they were a real creature. My little guy here seems to have trouble lifting his feet up when they’re extended behind him while walking. It gives him a rather weird gait, not a realistic one. The joint setup I’ve used isn’t an uncommon one in the natural world.

Once you’re finished with your creature, you can name it and save it. You can also give it a description, and if you intend to share it with others, you can give it searchable tags for uploading to the Spore site. For this creation, I could use tags like blue, wings, mace, etc.

The in-game Sporepedia shows you all of your creations, as well as having a category for Maxis-made creatures. You can access your page at the Spore website from within the game as well as a Spore catalog. If you find a creation you like made by someone else, you can run the game in windowed mode and simply drag the creature into the Sporepedia. Maxis came up with a pretty unique storage method for their game.

The Good
The Creature Creator is incredibly addictive. Once you get started with it, you can easily spend hours, designing creatures to your heart’s content. The interface is among the most intuitive I’ve seen for a game with as many options as this one has. For those of us with overactive imaginations, we can now create all the strange and wonderful creatures we’ve imagined, going back to our childhood days if we want. The possibilities are nearly endless.

The creatures themselves have a lot of personality. While you’re creating them, they’ll make various noises, dependant primarily on what type of mouth(s) you chose. When you’re not actively editing something (for instance, if you’re perusing the weapons screen looking for just the right addition) the creature will animate. It will look around, wave its arms, yawn, roar, etc. If you add a new item, it will often look at the new addition and then nod approvingly or turn and look toward the screen with what appears to be disgust. If you remove something important, say the hands, it will look at the stumps of its arms in alarm and maybe even make noises of distress! A good portion of the fun is watching the creature react to whatever you do.

In the test drive mode, some of the animations are priceless. Creating a terrifying-looking creature and then seeing it gleefully dance the Stomp in test drive is quite entertaining, and some of the emotion animations are great as well.

The parts list in the Editor is fairly extensive, and most of the parts have numerous controls and options. Tweak one control on a spike, for instance, and it may double in length. Tweak another, and it may shrink down to a thin, needle-like appearance. The various mouths and sensory objects have a lot of options as well. Two people could literally take an identical set of objects and create two completely different creatures, they’re that open-ended.

The game seems to be relatively stable. I haven’t read of any widespread crash bugs affecting a lot of people, and it even seems to run on systems that are below EA’s listed minimum system requirements. My own processor just barely meets the processor requirement, since my AMD chip is “equivalent” to a 2.0GHz Pentium system. Even so, I’m able to run the game with high graphics settings (except for shadows, which I set to low) and I experience very little lag. The longest delays come when I’m painting the creature, as rendering the patterns seems to take maybe 30 seconds or so. Also, saving a creature seems to take quite a while, and I’m not sure why.

The Bad
As with most EA releases these days, there are a number of bugs in the Creature Creator. I have experienced several of them myself. One of them generates static-like buzzing noises continuously in certain parts of the Creator, notably the main test drive background location. It can be mostly avoided by turning the volume on the SFX slider down to zero. This problem seems to affect certain sound devices primarily, but it is widespread. Another bug causes the dissappearance of some of the creatures you’ve created. The saved files still exist in the correct folder, but something causes the game to skip loading them. There are various workarounds for this, though not all methods seem to work for every person. There’s a similar bug involving snapshots taken from within the program.

In terms of options, though the 200+ parts seems extensive, I did find some notable oversights. For one thing, it’s difficult to make a pointed tail without resorting to some sort of trick like adding a limb segment to the end. There’s also little in the way of fur-like details. I can understand that, to an extent, since in the world of CGI, fur and hair are among the most resource-intensive things to render and animate. I’ve noticed numerous comments on the relative lack of feline parts. Some of the little things can be irritating too. There are a wide range of eyes to choose from, but you cannot select the color. Surely that wouldn’t have been so difficult to add? Similarly, the sounds. You have no control over the sounds the creature makes aside from the mouth types you select. This means, for instance, that creating a relatively accurate recreation of a Tyrannosaur ends up producing one that sounds like a sea creature of some kind.

A major oversight, in my opinion, is a lack of a numerical readout of part complexity. The complexity meter is a bit obscure, and which parts will add the most to it is not always obvious. If each part listed a numerical value for its complexity and the meter itself showed the remaining capacity, it would simplify some things. Along these lines, there appears to be a bug with certain weapons and detail parts. Ones that are actually low cost will rapidly fill the complexity meter. I have seen this result in glitches where I removed a hand part, and then changed my mind and wanted to put it back. The game wouldn’t let me, telling me I had too many parts, even though I had changed nothing since removing it in the first place. This issue is explained in more detail elsewhere, so I’ll leave it there for now.

I am somewhat dissappointed by the paint mode. It seems rather dumbed-down compared to another Maxis game, The Sims 2. In the Pets expansion for Sims 2, you could add layer after layer to your pet’s coat to customize its appearance and color. The limitation of three layers in the Creature Creator seems rather paltry by comparison, and has often left me aggravated by not being able to use, for instance, TWO of the Detail layers simultaneously. I’d even be willing to put up with longer render times if I just had some extra control over the final appearance.

Finally, there’s not all that much to do in the Creator. You build a creature, poke the various animation buttons to see it do its thing… and that’s about it. This lack of a real goal will surely turn some people off; and they may wait for Spore itself.

Final Thoughts
All in all, I am very pleased with the Creature Creator. I do find it worth the $10 purchase price for the full version. The downsides mentioned above aren’t enough to really detract from the experience, although the dissappearing creature bug is rather annoying when it happens. There is hopefully still time for the issues that have cropped up to be fixed in the full game before it ships. The hundreds of thousands of creations on the Sporepedia are pre-populating the Spore environment so that when the actual game ships, there is lots of variety for it to download and deposit on your world, or in your galaxy.

Speaking of downloads, I’m very impressed with the method Maxis devised for saving creatures. Saved creature files are small PNG image files with all the details embedded within the file. This means to put a friend’s creature into your game, all you have to get is a small image file and all te details like the description, color choice, etc will be extracted. These PNG files are miniscule by comparison to many games’ saves. I’ve created nine creatures so far, and none of them has a file larger than 30kb.

If you’re creatively inclined, as I am, you will likely spend many hours with this product. I for one am glad it was released prior to my weekend off from work. I would have gotten very little sleep otherwise! I’ve had a blast designing different creatures, and a friend of mine who visited two days ago had never heard of Spore and now wants it himself. If the full game of Spore has the same level of depth as this one little piece of it does, I predict millions of gamers will be spending a lot of sleepless nights with it come September.