Recently Spore Player Furywolf became the second winner of our Spore Competition, winning the VIC treatment for his submitted creature, Mawa.
The VIC Treatment included having his favourite creation bought to life by MAp-MAp, a T-Shirt from Spreadshirt with his creature on it and his creature featured in full motion video on the EA UK Homepage.
Over the next few weeks we will be giving all the winners the VIC treatment, right here on spore.com
We spoke to Furywolf to find out more about Mawa and his thoughts on Spore and to ask the all important question, Pirates or Ninjas?
The competition is now over but you can see all the winners here and don't forget you can still download the Creature Creator here.
We Spoke to Furywolf, also known as Ryan about Spore and his experience with the creature creator.
Hi Ryan, How did you hear about Spore?
I remember first reading about it in the UK PCGamer magazine a couple of years ago and thinking itd be pretty cool to design the creature you play the game with. I also liked the though that my creature could end up in someone elses game. I think everyone likes it when someone shows interest in something they did, so having someone choose your creature for their game world would be pretty sweet. Makes designing a creature even more fun in my opinion.
Congratulations on being one of our winners! How did you come up with your winning creature and how long did it take?
It all started with the eyes. I was actually working on another creature just adding/removing stuff to get a feel for an idea. It was during this that I went to resize something but selected the eyes and enlarged them instead by accident. The boggled look of them like they were popping out of the head made me laugh and I knew then that I wanted to design something with those eyes. Thus, the current creature was scraped and what would become Mawa was born.
I started with a ball with the big eyes stuck on as I wasnt sure of the shape or focus of the creature yet. All I knew was I wanted a goofy comic look so I played about with mouths until I got a dumb look. With a less than intelligent look, I knew this creature wasnt going to be at the top of the food chain so decide hed be a creature thats hides to survive.
With hiding for survival now as the focus, I decide to keep the ball shape I started with and just add short arms and legs to get a small and squat look, as the smaller you are the harder it is to see you. In thinking about how creatures in the real world would hide themselves, I thought he should have highly acute senses for detecting danger and a way of camouflaging himself. The big eyes originally added for comic effect now had the purpose of giving good vision. I big nose was added for smelling and three ears pointing different directions for sound. A creatures weakest point is usually it rear, so since were in a wacky world I though it would be fun to stick a giant eye of the back as both a way for detecting something sneaking up on him and a deterrent. I.e. If Mawa was hiding and all another creature could see was this big eye staring back, most would be put off as a big eye usually means a bigger mouth close by.
For camouflage I assumed hed live in a forest type area so would hide in grass and foliage and I imagined that he would cover himself in bits and piece of these things to help blend in. So, I randomly placed such things on him and that was it.
All that was left to do was paint and name him. Painting came easily enough as I knew Id want him green. The name Mawa came to me from a noise that he would make during creation. If you close your eyes, listen hard enough you can make out a sound which sounds like Mawa, though I could just have been tried and a little off after spending so much time on it. I think I started at about 6pm one day and found myself submitting the email at about 10pm, so Id say it took between 3-4 hours.
So how much time in total would you say you have spent on the Creature Creator?
On the day I download it, I must have spent 5 hours messing about with it. From this I created my first creature Spike. Each day after that I spent about an hour trying various things and reworking Spike a bit. When I felt more comfortable with the build system I started on my second creature and confess I spent the good part of a Saturday twiddling little details to get thing just right. Im still not happy with it though.
When bored, I maybe use it to create random weird things because its fun. So Id say Ive probably in total spent about 4-5 days worth of time using it.
All of our featured entries won a T-Shirt from Spreadshirt. Which creature, apart from your own, would you like to have on a t-shirt?
Its mind boggling to even think about going through all the creatures on there. To choose one good one would be difficult so Im going to choose not on how technical/detailed it looks, Im going to choose based on what I think looks fun/funny.
Id choose Simbura because it looks like a hula dancing lizard and is pretty cool looking when dancing.
Thats how we chose our winners, and Mawa certainly looks funny :)
Moving away from the creature creator for a moment, which Spore Stage are you most looking forward to playing and why?
Besides all of it, probably the space stage of the game. I like the idea of being able to create new worlds and populate them to my liking with creatures from other worlds. Maybe the top predator on one world will become the prey when placed on another. The space stage seems to open the game up to me. I.e. Im not limited to seeing how the creatures on my home world interact with each other and then having to start a new game with different creatures to see other interactions.
I think that's a big thing for everyone, we can't wait to see all the VICs interacting together in the Spore world. Finally, who would win in a fight between a pirate and a ninja?
Gotta be the ninja, as the Pirate would be swinging his sword but the ninja would be jumping around throwing his ninja stars. Cant kill what you cant hit, so unless the Pirate uses a net to capture the ninja, hes going down.
