Archive for June, 2008

For those who didn’t read the introductory post, or who weren’t here for Challenge #1 (kudos to everyone who participated!), part of what I’m hoping to do here on Spore Daily is give people a nudge in the creativity department by setting weekly challenges for people to try.

These challenges are meant to be the fun kind of challenge, not the gruelling “Climb Mt Everest” kind. And it’s not a competition, either. But even if it was, there would still be no prizes. Sorry, all my money is invested in cookies.

Think of the challenge as more of a “prompt”, as some fiction writing circles are known to do some times. Someone comes up with a theme, or an idea, or a setting and writers can then fill in the blanks, as it were.

In this instance, it will be some kind of guideline to follow when creating your creature.

This week it’s going to be a little more specific, but hopefully wide open enough for folks to get creative with the idea.

Challenge #2:

Create a creature that appears to be a common, household pet, except…

The “except” is where the challenge comes in. You might decide to create a creature that is just like a regular kitten, except that it’s bright blue.

Or perhaps you want to make a creature that looks like a doberman, except it has a sting on its tail. Or a hamster, except with wings!

Get the idea?

Don’t worry if you can’t quite get the base creature right, the idea is just that it look somewhat like a regular Earth pet except for the bit where it’s clearly not.

The only real stipulation this week is that there’s no pretending things like dragons are household pets. It’s got to be something you could reasonably expect to have as a pet in your house without the neighbours reporting you to the police. Even the most forgiving of neighbours is going to complain when your dragon keeps poking its head into their house.

As with last week’s challenge, there is no time limit on when you must have your challenge entry in. Take as much or as little time as you need.

And most importantly, have fun!

Tags: Challenges, creature creator, spore

Name: Five Footed Oddicus

Description: The extremely rare five footed oddicus is a mutation of the more common four footed oddicus.

Created for the “Odds or Evens” challenge from last week!

Statistics:
Abilities - Mating Call, Jump (3), Sight
Attack - Bite (1), Charge (5)
Socialize - Sing (5), Dance (3), Charm (3)
Speed - 5
Health - 40
Diet - Herbivore

Notes:
As stated above, this is my creation for the “Odds or Evens” challenge that I set last week. It’s not too late to create your own if you like the sound of the challenge!

Initially I was going to try having 3 legs, each with a different kind of foot on the end, but the creature was walking kinda goofily with 3 legs, so I tinkered with the leg layout some more and eventually got 5 of them all coming off one stalk, which gives the five footed oddicus a very interesting gait.

Originally I had an ear slung under his mouth, however when he roars the ear clips through the bottom of the mouth very obviously, so I had to scrap that idea. With one of the roar animations the body also… flips out a bit. So I may have to report an animation bug as well.

Even though the mouth comes with two horns and thus could technically not be considered outside the bounds of being an “Odds” creature, I added an extra horn to the front of the mouth to give it a total of three. Three nostrils along the top and one giant, central eye rounds out the oddness!

There’s still room in the complexity meter to add arms to this creature, but a single arm looked distinctly ungainly, so I left it out. If I were to actually play this creature I would add two arms to it, coming off the middle of the body in all likelihood.

Creature in action:

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Sporepedia: Five Footed Oddicus

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(Rated 3.25 out of 5, based on 4 votes.)
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Tags: creature creator, Creatures, Daily Creations, spore

Name: Grabby McPants

Description: He loves to grab things, especially the pants of unsuspecting space tourists!

Predominantly black with a long blue stripe, Grabby McPants has an extra long, prehensile, tail. Complete with a grasping claw, with which to grab people’s pants!

Statistics:
Abilities - Mating Call, Graspers, Sneak (5), Sight
Attack - Bite (5), Charge (2), Strike (1)
Socialize - Sing (2), Dance (2), Charm (1), Pose (2)
Speed - 4
Health - 40
Diet - Carnivore

Notes:
I can’t actually recall if I made this creature with the Trial, but I suspect I probably did.
In any event, I wanted to create a creature with an extremely long tail with a grasper on the end, sort of like the Wilosaur Will Wright was always running demonstrations with a long time ago, but not identical, because that would just be copying!

Of course the highlight of this creature really is the raver punch dance. With such a long arm the game goes a little crazy and… well, see for yourself in the video!

Creature in action:

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Sporepedia: Grabby McPants

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(Rated 3.33 out of 5, based on 6 votes.)
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Tags: creature creator, Creatures, Daily Creations, spore

Well, I expected the Sporepedia to reach over 1 million creations in fairly short order, but this is quite astounding.

As of right now if you go to the Sporepedia you will see the number is well above 1,000,000. Even when you consider that some of those creatures are probably “inappropriate” and scheduled for deletion, that is huge!

So what’s next? Can it continue to grow at such a pace?

Tags: creature creator, spore, sporepedia

Name: Tripod

Description: Tripods have three legs, dontchaknow?

Dark green with a light green stripe along his back and belly and one, huge, eye!

Statistics:
Abilities - Mating Call, Sight
Attack - Bite (2)
Socialize - Sing (1)
Speed - 2
Health - 40
Diet - Carnivore

Notes:
Probably the least capable of defending itself of all my creatures so far, the Tripod is based very loosely on the Masters from the Tripods TV series.
Tripods is a very old show from the UK based on a series of books by John Christopher. The Tripods on the show were alien beings who had invaded Earth a long time ago and enslaved humanity. The enslavement had happened so long ago that humans had no idea they had ever advanced beyond late medieval times, leading to all kinds of interesting discoveries as the show progressed.

End history lesson.

Tripod does have a mouth, it’s slung under his belly and is quite unobtrusive. You may not even be able to see it at all on the thumbnail version, but it is there!

And he was also created with the Creature Creator Trial, so you’ll be able to load him up if you only have the Trial.

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Sporepedia: Tripod

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(Rated 3 out of 5, based on 5 votes.)
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Tags: creature creator, Creatures, Daily Creations, spore