EA Maxis has released Spore Creature Trial before launching the complete Spore game. I have finally tried it out and I can tell you that's really fun !

In the first phase you edit your first creature, you begin with a random spinal column and add piece by piece leg, arm, hands, mouth, etc. There is so many choices to build you creature that the rendering is unpredictable so that usual pre-designed skinning techniques are not possible. If you look closely in the edit mode, you can see that they use a metaball technique to get nice smooth connection between body parts.

Then you can customize the texture of your creature. In the trial you have a limited choice of texture with some nice shader effects, just enough to personalize your creature.

Finally you can test your creature in a small arena, see how it behaves when walking and playing some fun animation clips, you can even add some baby creature of yours. The skeleton of your creature is also unpredictable, so they created an in-house tool called spasm to create animation clips that can fit morphologically different creatures.

On the marketing side, this product is really advanced and really tailored for smooth word of mouth. You can very easily take pictures and shot videos that you can upload directly to youtube. Of course you can instantly email pictures to your friends and share publicly your creatures on sporepedia. Last but not least a small avatar picture of your creature is automatically created, so that it's really no hassle to embed it as profile picture on social networks if you want to. And if you prefer an animated gif, that's also possible !

Enjoy my creature and its family: