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Saturday, August 16, 2008

CreatorTip Extra: unusual organs as a cool concept for your creature

Well, folks, why don't we do something different on this CreatorTip post, for a change? This time, instead of showing a creation tutorial, I'll give a useful tip for creating creature concepts.

Coming up with a concept before making a creature is a good idea mainly for two reasons: in first place, it may lead to new ways of using and combining the parts available on the SPORE Creature Creator; secondly, it gives you something interesting to write in the creature's description.

One cool concept is this: what if your creature had an enlarged, distorted or specialized organ?



Step 1: Think of an organ with a well defined function. You can get as weird as you want, but try to make the function of the thing clear, or at least, guessable. Jellybuttons, for example, are great orifices for respiratory organs.



Step 2:
Think of a reason why the organ is so different. In this guy, for instance, I've used springles to create an external coil of veins and arteries; that could be a way of cooling the creature's body, instead of sweating.



Step 3: Think of an evolutionary reason. The organ should give your creature an advantage of some sort, for it to have evolved and grown into proeminence. The example creature here has an external digestive system; while that leaves it vulnerable, it doubles as a defense mechanism by producing an awful stench.



Step 4: Don't get magical. Don't try to make an organ that allows your creature to shoot lightning bolts or anything like that. Remember that, in-game, it won't have any special abilities except those that come with the parts, so give the organ a subtle function, one irrelevant to gameplay or that fits your critter's stats. Senses are a good choice of function; the creature above, for instance, has smell-sensing tendrils.



And voilá! You can have a great creature with an impressive description. Take my Sennezantine, for instance. I'm pretty sure it got featured thanks to that combination of plausibility, cool description and original use of parts.

4 comments:

DarthZahl said...

Thank you for these tips and inspiration! All these "organs" look fantastic!

jarnomiedema said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
jarnomiedema said...

Sorry about the deleted post there.. I said something dumb and couldn't find the edit button. I said that I especially liked the tips about the organs, but upon looking at the entry again, I noticed it was ALL about organs. I was particularly impressed by the creature with the breathing apparatus on its back, so I guess that's why I said it..

Anyhoo; I love that feeling of excitement at having all sorts of inspiration and I want to thank you for providing it! I'm definitely going to try out a few of these tips!

captain cupcake said...

well what you could do is for an organ that use gastric acid as deffence you could hide a spit part insid of the organ.