While my wife was unwell I played some Spore and picked up the two expansion packs Creepy and Cute and Galactic Adventures (both went on sale for half price). Once you get a stable install running, by that I mean one that only crashes a few times a week the game isn’t to bad to play. The strongest point of the game is the ability to use the predefined library of shapes and textures to create unique creatures, buildings and vehicles. The Galactic Adventures (GA) expansion pack adds the ability to put together rather simple first person adventures and I was assembling an adventure in GA for Annette to play while sick but she recovered before I finished. I did sink a significant amount of time into developing the adventure so thought it deserved it’s own blog post.
I started off scratching out a storyline and then splitting it across the 8 available acts in the game. Initially I thought I had 9 acts so the adventure gets a little rushed/compressed in the end 3 acts but at that stage I didn’t want to re-do big chunks of dialogue. The basic story line is that the inhabitants of the planet are all plant based and that they terraformed and setup this planet for themselves to live on several 100 years ago. Then another race comes a long and they wish to dig up some purple spice crystals (Spores main game focus is on spice gas so I threw in crystals for a difference)) as they are ultra rare and valuable. In the process the miners are displacing the plant peoples and destroying there world. I can see when I thought up the storyline sub consciously I’ve been affected by Avatar…but anyway.
That’s a brief overview, first up I designed the plant city and it’s buildings. I wanted these to look like tree’s as if they had been grown to the required shape. I checked through the Sporepedia and couldn’t find anything suitable so designed up some of my own using existing designs in the Sporepedia as inspiration. I ended up with 5 different market stalls, Well, Street lamp, Two Different Houses, City hall, Windmill, Bakery, Building with a fence, Observatory, City Wall and Gate and an Open Air religious circle. Below are a few images of some of the city elements:
Bakery
Windmill
Observatory
House Type One
Putting it all Together
Next up came the plant inhabitants of the planet, this was slightly more difficult as spore is configured for more your normal kind of animal rather than your living tree. But I looked around at what had been done in Sporepedia and then Built up my own people using bits from existing critters as inspiration. I ended up with quiet a few different variates of plant people: Cactus, Daisy, Mushroom, Palm and Some odd flower variates. Some of these I used for specific main characters and others were just to provide populace variety. Few more pictures:
Ancient Palm – Who employed you and your main contact
Captain Cutter and One of the Daisy Cutters (right) – Charged with defense of the Tree City
Srgt Fustugal – Looks after the Fungal Scouts
Wiley Weed– Lets just say he causes you quiet a few problems :). He’s my favorite character and design of the lot.
One of The flowers, Cactus Trader and a Daffodil
Now I moved onto the antagonists. I didn’t want your usual bad guy looking critters, more a difference on fundamental cultural level. So I designed up a totally weird looking race to play the miners. I also did a suited version to represent a heavily injured miner. I was very happy with how they turned out:
Standard miner
Injured Miner in Support Suit
Jartooth – Old retired miner he’s a considered weird by his own race because he loves plants.
To go with the miners I also did some hi-tech robots. I ended up with two variates a defense bot who simply patrols and defends a particular location or thing and an Attack bot who is used for offensive attacks. I was very happy with how these came out as they appear to float when they move. They are visually the same although Functionally the Defence bot is nastier than the Attack bot, This was something I needed for gameplay:
I did have to change some ideas around due to the Spore:GA engine limitations. The worst bug is the inability to place different inspect text on the same creature for different acts. Due to the complexity limit (basically a file size limit) on adventures and the work around being put a new copy of that creature in your adventure and hide the other copy you waste valuable space to work around the issue. Saying that the functionality you do get can produce some very interesting results and my adventure reminds me of a very simplistic 1990’s console RPG with better graphics but only takes 10-20 mins to complete. Below are some in game screenshots:
Market Square
Roof Top View
Mining Town
Battle
Link to Video
Whipped up a quick video for those who don’t play Spore
Sorry about the poor quality, for some reason spore wont take video above 320x240 even adjusting it higher under settings…
I really enjoyed putting the above adventure together although I probably took way to much time and added to much detail at least I ended up with a finished project. I’ve started back to work on my regular project stuff and I’ll be posting more on those soon.
Sirrob01 