EA releases Spore Creature Creator

Electronic Arts, which will launch Will Wright’s Spore in September, has released Creature Creator — a module that let’s players create Spore creatures.

Technology review interviewd Lucy Bradshaw, Spore’s executive producer, about the use of procedural generation in Creature Creator (Creating Creatures).

The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts’ highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday. Created by Will Wright, who’s known for the video games SimCity and The Sims, Spore begins with a player controlling a single-celled organism and progresses through various evolutionary stages until the player controls an entire space-faring race. The Creature Creator part of the game consists of a modeling interface that lets players build their own organisms from a set of highly customizable and flexible … The Creature Creator’s free trial edition is available today. A full version is available for $9.99 on the PC, with a Mac version to follow. The full version of Spore will launch in North America on September 7.

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Frederick County “Future Link”, and memories of the past

I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great!

Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I’d learned a ton about programming by typing in the game programs in SoftSide magazine, a little bit at a time to see what they did and debug them. Later I branched out to writing my own (very simple) games, which I gave away to my friends. One was a snake game, using the IBM PC’s line characters for the snake body. I wrote it as a high-school student in Maryland, then went off to college in Illinois. One day, I came back from classes to find my roommate from Washington state playing it! I don’t know how it made it coast to coast, but I really hoped to be able to give that sense of possibility to the students Thursday.

We used Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, in part because it’s free and very accessible, in part because it has a rich set of examples, and in part because their new community game distribution system gives a way for individually created games to get out there. Plus, I was able to bring one of our XBox 360s to show what we did running on a game system. We started with the catapult mini-game example. With only half an hour, we could only do relatively simple things, but I wanted to show how easy it is to get started. First I dropped in an image of my head to replace the pumpkin that the catapult normally flings, then we walked through changing the bounce logic to do random bounces instead of the simple predictable bounces it normally does. Some of the students went off in their own directions, creating other simple modifications beyond the ones I’d suggested. Not bad in half an hour!

Posted in CS, Events, Game consols, General, History, xbox | 1 Comment »

May Baltimore IGDA meeting Student Showcase

The May 29th meeting of the Baltimore chapter of the International Game Developers Association will be a showcase and demo of student projects around the area. See the announcement for details on where and when.

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Nice article on the “Anatomy of a Video Game” class in the Sun

Link.

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Scholarship for Women and Minority Students

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has created a new scholarship program for women and minority students pursuing full-time undergraduate degrees related to game development (that’s both of the degrees in our GAIM program). They’re giving away 15 $3000 awards for next year. The deadline is May 15th.

More information: www.scholarshipamerica.org/ESAF

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The iPhone is…?

Given the iPhone development kit yesterday, which will allow (among other things) programs using the accelerometers and 3D graphics with OpenGL ES. So, what is this “iPhone”?

• A phone with a nice web browser?
• A nice web browser that makes phone calls?
• A PDA?
• A tiny game platform
• A Wii-mote with a touch screen?

I’m not sure, but I’m pretty excited about what we’ll be able to do with it!

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E. Gary Gygax is dead

The co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons died Tuesday morning.

AP obituary here.

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The Independent Developer Shall…

This PPT by Greg Costikyan is from his keynote at a German games conference last month. It’s got some nice economic analysis, and some nice *hope*: internet speed has caught up with game size, so internet distribution can support more game development business models that it did 5 years ago.

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How to build your own gaming computer

If you were motivated by Professor Olano’s recent post on games that require high-end machines to, here’s a site for you — Learn How to Build Your Own Gaming Computers. It covers all aspects of assembling a computer optimized for gaming. Building your own box or upgrading your current one can save you money as well as give you hands on experience with current hardware technology.

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Sims creator Will Wright: Video games do no harm to children

The British Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture Media and Sport have commissioned an independent report on the effects of violent games and the Internet on children. The effort is lead by Tanya Byron, a British psychologist and TV personality. The study has a web site where people can enter their views.

Today’s Guardian has an interview with Sims creator Will Wright that focuses on the same issues:

Q: We’ve just started a government review in the UK into the affect of games on children. Do you think attitudes are starting to be a shift?

Wright: I think there’s always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don’t. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids. In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology. As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that’s the slow, inevitable process going on here. It goes in fits and starts over time – if there’s a school shooting, it’s a case of ‘did they play games or not’: you don’t really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that’s exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand. (link)

There’s lots more in the interview, including Wright talking about what games he plays.

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