Spore Galactic Adventures Q&A - New Improvements and the Adventure Editor

Last year's highly anticipated Spore was released with much ado to fans who may not have found everything they wanted from the multistage evolution of a microscopic entity to a spacefaring tribe. But many players, particularly younger ones, dived into the creature creator editor, which lets you build a customized critter with as many arms, legs, and eyeballs as you care to graft onto it. And the huge universe of Spore is going to get huger with Galactic Adventures, a new expansion that will add role-playing-like "adventures," which are custom missions that resemble a single-player role-playing game. You can build these adventures yourself to explore and conquer them with RPG-character-like "captain" critters. For more details, we spoke with lead producer Kip Katsarelis and with software engineer Shalin Shodhan, who has devised a clever way to capture Flash-based "360" screenshots, which we have to share with you on the second page of this very story.

GameSpot: Give us an update on the progress of the game's development. What is the team working on now?

Kip Katsarelis: The last month has been really exciting. We've locked down and tuned all of our shipping missions and have really been focused on bug fixes, polish, and usability improvements. People have been busy building their own adventures and sharing them with the team. Every day there is a long chain of "Check out my adventure" e-mails. I can't believe what people are making. It's so much fun.

Galactic Adventures will let you make your own multipart missions.

GS: Tell us a bit about the captain system in Spore. This seems like a departure from the original game's focus on building up a race of critters. Now, with captains, players build up individual characters. What are these captains' abilities and attributes? How can they develop?

KK: Captains start out as regular creatures. By taking them into Space Game or starting them through Quick Play Adventures, they will set on the captain path. There are 10 levels for captains to go through, and they gain experience and rank by completing adventures. Their primary titles are based on their archetype, which are determined by playing the core game. Their secondary titles are based on the parts you equip them with. Captains earn new accessories and abilities each time they gain rank, so they can have at most 10 captain parts. There are 32 new accessories and abilities, so the idea is that players will have fun building lots of captains and trying different combinations of parts. We've also introduced a few new stats for captains. These include energy and shields. Many of the parts, like jump packs, require energy to use. Some of the new abilities include holo charm, stealth field, freeze blast, and summon swarm. Get ready to build your captain, gather your crew, and beam down to strange alien worlds.

GS: We understand that the adventures system will let players create, upload, and then play through different adventures with their captain characters. Is the idea that this will basically be a huge repository of episodic role-playing game adventures for people to play?

GS: We do role-playing really well, so I do expect a good number of them. The adventure creator is extremely robust and will allow creators to make a wide variety of adventures. We've been able to create action games, platformers, puzzles, and exciting racing games. We added leaderboards to every published adventure for a reason. We fully expect creators to make challenging games that do have replay value and push players to compete on the leaderboards. Earning a top-three score on an adventure will earn that player a trophy that will appear on their My Spore page. On the flip side, we think creators will make adventures that are simple galleries showing off all of their cool creations. Sort of like an interactive Sporecast. Then of course there are going to be the totally unexpected adventures that none of us could have predicted.

You can create adventures that require you to fight enemies, collect items, or just interact with other characters.

GS: We understand that adventures can have up to eight "acts." But just how huge can an adventure be? How much virtual real estate can be contained in an entire adventure?

GS: Yes, a single adventure can be up to eight acts, and they have an entire planet to play with. We do have a complexity limit for both planet editing and adventure building that will limit the amount of cast members that can be placed in an adventure. We've been pretty lenient with the complexity. It's amazing the amount of stuff one can cram onto a planet. If you haven't played it yet, you must check out Mother Ship Down. It's huge!