Friday, May 15, 2009

The Future of Spore Machinima

One of the first talks I attended at fmx/09 was called "Tools as Toys - Promoting Creativity with Spore" presented by Dan Moskowitz from Maxis. Dan was the lead engineer on the in-game content creation and browsing tools for SPORE - the Creators and the Sporepedia.
I've never played Spore so far, just downloaded their free Creature Editor and played around a bit to evaluate it's use for Machinima but never got something showable finished. Looking around at YouTube there indeed seem not that many Machinima published with Spore yet, even I remember they once did run a Machinima contest (make a dance video). But Spore never took off as a Machinima platform like the SIMS2 did.
Asking Dan about Machinima his answer might give an insight into why Machinima is still not fully recognized by them in it's current evolution. He stated that Spore supports Machinima providing a way to record the gameplay and then upload it to Youtube.
With just that Spore would not have been made it into this blog. But what he presented in his talk could indeed change the future of Spore Machinima or even just help really starting it.
His talk was mainly about the upcoming Spore Add-on Spore-Galactic Adventures.
It's about playing. and much better, creating you own Adventure type games with Spore. You can terraform a planet then for the first time place buildings, creatures, vehicles exactly as you choose, then add goals, structure, or story to your adventures then play and even share this adventure with others. Amazing part is that you can use every asset on Sporepedia (right now around 100.000!!) to build your game. What does that mean for making Machinima. Now for the first time with Spore, you can build you own sets, place characters and props. There is still now way to create an add your own animations, but I'm sure the existing ones are good enough to create some great Machinima movies. I guess we will be surprised soon. For sure I'll have a look at that Add-on when it is released June 23rd.

Do you have a webcam? Then you have to look at the winner application of the Spore API contest:
Spore Skeletons- an amazing augmented reality Flash application by Aaron Meyers



2 comments:

  1. We're starting to see some Spore machinima from the new expansion pack already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8uymqtFHA

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  2. Tnx Dan, I'm sure we'll see more Spore machinima soon. Although filmmaking is not as tightly integrated into Spore as it is in Sims3.
    I got my own copy of the expansion now and I love to explore it.

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