Hope you love taking pictures, because MaxisCactus is kicking off the Spore Screenshot Challenge!  They want you to take an image of an ‘incredible’ scene from one of your adventures.  Details on the contest below, or hit up the Sporum.

In other news, the Sporepedia gained a ‘facepage’ that lists Most Popular New, Top Rated Sporecasts, Contests and Challenges as well as the Featured Creations.  Check it out!

Shutterbugs get ready. Load up your Galactic Adventures game and take a screenshot of an incredible scene you’ve created in the Spore Screenshot Challenge!

Post your screenshot, along with a link to the adventure here to enter.

What will the challenge winner get?

A chance to be featured on Spore.com!

We’ll post our favorite submissions here, then YOU get to vote for which one is your top pick! The winner may be featured if it meets our criteria for featured creations.

  • The adventure must be originally created by you. No other authors are allowed in the lineage.
  • It must not contain any creation with an offensive creation in its lineage (any parent or child creations).
  • It must not contain any creation with any links or references to other sites in the submission’s tags, name, or description

Submissions that do not meet the above criteria will not be considered for the poll.

Rules:

  • Your image should show off a cool scene you’ve created with Galactic Adventures
  • To submit, publish and tag your adventure with mcscreenshotchallenge, and post a link to it here along with your screenshot
  • You can submit as many screenshots of as many of your own adventures as you like
  • Adventures can contain creations by other players
  • All submissions must be in by 11:00am PDT Sept 17th 2009

Resources:

Tips:

  • If you normally run your game at low or mid range graphics settings, consider maxing them temporarily while you take your screenshot.

FAQ:
Q: Can it be an old adventure? Something I’ve already made?
A: Yes. Don’t forget to add the tag mcscreenshotchallenge to it, though.

Q: Does the screenshot have to be from a published adventure?
A: Yes, part of the rules state that you must publish and post a link to the adventure.

Q: Can the adventure just be built for the screenshot, or should it also be fun to play?
A: While the focus of this challenge is to create an amazing screenshot, we will pay some attention to how fun the adventures are when narrowing down the finalists, so put some fun gameplay in there, too.

Also, don’t forget that you can always revise your entry up until the contest deadline. For example, you can build your scene and even publish your adventure now, but then go back and revise the gameplay so that it’s more fun later. You have a whole month for this challenge. Just don’t forget to update your link post if you publish a revised version later down the line.

Q: What happens if the adventure I use is already featured?
A: Adventures that are already featured won’t be featured again… so use a fresh adventure!

Q: Can we use stylefilters/adventurelook/a combination of the two?
You’re encouraged to use the adventureLook cheat in your adventure. See this guide for adventureLook info.

The styleFilter cheat is not recommended for use in adventures. Use it at your own risk, but this cheat was not created for adventures and may cause publishing issues. If you must use it, I recommend that you back up and publish a version of your adventure before using this cheat.

Q: Can we use Photoshop or other image editing programs to doctor up our screenshots?
No. The screenshot must be an unedited capture straight from the game.

Q: Can we have two screenshots from the same adventure?
Yes. Only one will be chosen as the winner, but post as many as you like.