6/17/08

First attempts with Creature Creator

I arrived home last night to the joy of a FedEx envelope on my doorstep. This thin, white bundle of joy contained one (1) installer for Spore Creature Creator for Macintosh. Installation proceeded (prosod?) apace.

The installer is Mac-typical, and presented no problems. The install was actually surprisingly fast. The program launched rapidly, and took over the screen. To my surprise, Command-Tabbing works! For instance, I wanted to try and recreate a Unioc from Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary strip, but I needed a reference. So a searched for "Ebbirnoth," (the primary Unioc character in the strip), pulled up a couple of images to go by, then launched Creature Creator. Since the game allows me to tab out to other apps, I could page back and forth between CC and Camino to check the quality of my work (which is debatable, but I'm new at it).

The Creature Creator's controls are pretty simple. Deceptively so, in fact. For Mac folks, make sure you're using a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel/ball, or you'll miss out on a lot of the fine control. More on this later. For now, here are the Unioc and the snufflehunter.