Ocean Quigley’s projects: Spore’s Creature Editor version .1

The art director for Spore, Ocean Quigley gives us a look at one of their old prototypes of the Creature Editor from Spore, way back from 2004.

Here’s a screencapture from the first iteration of Spore’s creature editor, from back in 2004 or so.

We had originally experimented with a much more free-form approach to the creature editor. The player could assemble an arbitrary creation out of bones and nodes, and it would hop around using physics and a pre-Chris Hecker animation system. And this was before we started skinning it with a metaball mesh, so it’s just the naked skeleton.

As you can see, we were playing around with a cel-shaded look that ultimately fell by the wayside.