A portion of VideoGamer’s ‘first look’ at Spore Galactic Adventures:
The first new element to be added is a planet editor. Up until now, all of Spore’s space missions have been conducted from the safety of your spaceship – “Fly to planet Clarkykat and abduct 10 cows” – but soon you’ll be able to get out and walk around on foot (or on tentacle, if that’s how you evolved). Since this is now the case, it’s clearly important that you can design what will essentially be your game-worlds. You can raise or lower the terrain, change the global temperature and edit the water levels – and you can also place any of the thousand vehicles, creatures and other things that people have made and uploaded to the Sporepedia. So far, so good.
Things get complicated with the creation and editing of missions – despite the fact that it looks as though Maxis is trying to keep things as close as possible to the accessible-for-all approach of the existing content tools. You’ll start out by choosing a cast of “actors” for your adventure – the creatures who will appear within a given quest – then move onto laying out your beasties around the play area. You can set the health of each actor, edit their default behaviour to make them aggressive or friendly, and give them pick-ups to carry. You can also give movement-based orders to your actors, perhaps telling them to patrol a certain route or to track and eat other species of your choice. You can also edit the creature’s awareness radius, the distance at which it will notice the player. In typical Spore style, this is demonstrated via a simple on-screen circle – a neat way of illustrating what might otherwise be a complicated concept.
