Tribal Duds and High Fashion in Space
By now players are familiar with the creature editor, which has been released as a standalone product. But that's just one of the many editors built into the game, and we took this opportunity to check out the others.
For instance, our tribe was prospering and making new friends, but it was time to start dressing like future world leaders. The tribal clothing editor allows players to outfit their creatures with primitive attire. I decided our fish creatures needed a giant gold ring through the nose. And some feathers. With armored shoulder-pads. So far so good: My creatures started to look like extras from the "Road Warrior" movies. Hats? Yep. The best part? Tribal masks. It took a while to find a mask that looked right on my giant fish-face, but after some tweaking my creatures sported a big giant voodoo head and I was glad. Custom clothing is edited the same way that creature parts are edited, so it's easy to understand and manipulate the editor to get the look you want.
By the time you reach tribal phase, your creature is basically done evolving physically -- from here on out you're adjusting your clothes and equipment.
But it was time to fast forward a few epochs. The clothing editor changes with each era of the game, so once your characters are ready to explore space, you've got tons of new options to play with. We set aside our fish-people and decided to "space-ify" a new creature with the space clothing editor. Again diving into Spore's gigantic content database, we picked a cute cartoony orange cat-like creature as our subject.
Our cat was adorable, but wasn't ready for the rigors of space. Step one? Giant scuba-style goggles. As we scaled the goggles bigger and smaller, they adjusted to wrap around our cat's face. Next up we felt kitty needed a computer panel on its chest, Darth Vader-style. Spiral beepy antennas for the head? Yes please. We noted that tribal costume elements were still available, so we could add feathers to kitty's laser-shoulderpads, but decided not to. Instead we went for a gigantic jetpack strapped to its back. Our little kitty looked like something out of Buck Rodgers or Flash Gordon now -- we'd taken something from the Internet and made it distinctly our own. The result was an adorable creature that could've stepped out of a comic strip, and he was animated in real-time.
"We want to make sure the game feels like a toy," Vu explained, speaking of the core Spore philosophy. "The editors should feel like LEGOs, or Play-Doh."
We put this theory to the test with the building editor, and we were pleasantly surprised at the results. Like Lincoln Logs or Tinkertoys, the building editor allows players to create cool places almost at the speed of thought. The mechanics of editing a building are identical to the mechanics of building a creature: Parts are snapped into place, then scaled, rotated, and adjusted in exactly the same way. In under five minutes we'd created a small building with a windowed central tower and a Victorian-style rounded tile roof, with big imposing front doors and elaborate window gables. A couple of mouse-clicks painted the whole structure (default color schemes allow you to easily make buildings rustic, futuristic, silly or haunted-looking). It was impressive how easy it was. Creative gamers could easily spend hours customizing entire cities for their civilization.
