Playtime!

The Spore Creature Creator gives Spore fans, and those who are creatively curious, the first hands-on opportunity to design their own species and share it with their friends. All creatures designed with the Spore Creature Creator can be imported into the full retail version of Spore for PC and Mac when it launches on September 5, 2008.

“We are thrilled to finally be putting the creative tools of Spore into the hands of players around the world,” said Will Wright, chief designer, Maxis. “The amazing creations players design this summer will help populate the game universe we all enter when Spore ships this September, so in a sense, the Spore Creature Creator is the birth of Spore.”

Spore, the highly anticipated game from the creators of The Sims™, gives players their own personal universe in a box. Create and evolve life, establish tribes, build civilizations, sculpt entire worlds and explore a universe created by other gamers. Spore gives players a wealth of creative tools to customize nearly every aspect of their universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even UFOs. Players can then seamlessly share their creations with the world or explore infinite new galaxies created by other gamers.

Today I had a play around with the Spore Creature Creator Demo. Wow! It's only a little taste of the experience you will get with the full Spore Game, but this little bit was just plain fun. The creature creator is part of the second phase of the game. You can create your creature with full control of spine, body shape and body elements such as legs and arms heads etc. Then you can 'paint' your creature giving a you a totally unique animal of your very own, and all in glorious 3D.

But the fun doesn't stop there, click the test button and now you can make your creature walk, dance, roar, laugh, jump, flip...the list goes on. The amazing thing is that your creature is animated in real time. Change your creature and change the way it moves... here's my first creature attempt.



You can capture screen shots and even movies of your creature in action. You can even capture an 'avatar' which creates an animated gif you can use on the web.

Once you save your creature, it is added to the 'Sporapedia', an online beastiary of user creations, and yes you will see these creatures in the game.

And this isn't the full game!

Will Wright spoke at a recent TED conference about Spore, and it was interesting to hear that he follows a Montessori approach when designing his games. He talks about his games being toys that are open to exploration and discovery, and that the experience of playing the game in your own way is a goal in itself. And he openly used the word 'Educational' when talking about his game...usually that is enough to kill a commercial game dead, and yet this is one of the most highly anticipated games in years. You can check out his full speech here.

I look forward to more Spore fun in the future...

How to tweak your blog

Ok, so it seems that some of you would like to know how I have tweaked my blog. So here goes...some instructions.

1. Create a new banner for your blog. Use whatever program you like, I used Comic Life because I love it's ease of use. When you have created your banner you need to export it as a jpg, gif or png file. A blogger banner is usually 760 pixels wide. The easiest way to do this I have found (on a mac) is to use the built in screen capture tool. Shift Command 4 will let you select an area of the screen to capture...and if you haven't noticed before it also tells you the size of the capture area...in pixels! So just drag over your creation until you have selected an area that is 760xWhatever...and you're done.
2. Upload your banner into blogger. Go to Dashboard, layout, and then click on edit in the header section. A pop up window will appear. Choose 'get image from computer', browse for it, make sure that you tick the box that says 'Instead of Title and description'. Wait for your picture to load, and click save.
3. Yay, you have a new banner!
4. To alter the background image of your blog, you need to delve deep into the world of html. Here is some digital scuba gear to help you...
5. First you need to have an image that you want to have as a background, and it needs to be online. That means an existing picture that is on the web, or one that you have uploaded to a photo sharing site such as Flickr or Photobucket.
6. Next you need to go to the layout section of your Blogger Dashboard again and then choose 'Edit HTML' in the top menu.
7. Scroll down until you find the Body { tag. you should see something like this...
8. /* global
   ----------------------------------------------- */
   body {
   margin: 0;
   text-align: center;
   min-width: 760px;
   background: #4386ce
   color: $textColor;
   font-size: small;
   }
9. Add these edits so that it looks like this...
10. /* global
    ----------------------------------------------- */
    body {
    margin: 0;
    text-align: center;
    min-width: 760px;
    background: #4386ce url(put the web address of your picture in here) no-repeat top center fixed;
    color: $textColor;
    font-size: small;
    }
11. Your background picture needs to be large enough so that it will cover your background. My background is 1660 pixels wide, so that it will suit most screen resolutions...too small a picture and you will have coloured bands at the sides of your blog. Anything 1280x1024 or larger should suit. Take care the file size is not too large otherwise your blog page will be slow to load.
12. If you wish, you can alter the transparency of your blog as well. In the body { section after where you have pasted the background image info, paste in this code...
13. filter:alpha(opacity=75);
-moz-opacity:0.75;
opacity:0.75;
}
    
    Change the transparency level by changing the numbers highlighted in red. Vary the numbers between 0 to 100 for the line 1, or 0 to 1.0 for the lines 2 and 3. All the numbers must be at the same level, for example 75 for line 1 is equal to 0.75 for lines 2 and 3. The lower the number, the more transparent your blog is. If you don't want it to be transparent, set the values to 100, or 1.0.
14. Preview your template to make sure it looks ok...if it does save it.
15. Finished!
    

Playing with blogger

After creating a blog for Lily the other day, I wanted to make it as 'Lily friendly' as possible. I created a new banner for her using Comic Life, and then played around with the 'Edit HTML' functions in the blogger layout section...and her new look was born.

My lovely wife Jo came home and saw Lily's blog... "Great!" she said "Can you do mine?"...and so Room 6's purple cloud of learning was reborn.

After all this hard work, I thought that there was one more blog that could do with a makeover...mine! And so here is my new look...Edge of the Seat, adventures in the sea of knowledge. Enjoy.

Playing around in the blogger layout section reminded me that this tool is so very flexible and can be molded to fit your personality...or that of your classrooms! Don't settle for others standards - make your own!

The Wonderful World of Lily

Last week my daughter brought home a fantastic story she had written in class, and she was itching to show it to us. She read it out with great pride and expression before tea that night.
"Wow, that's a great story Lily." I told her, "Maybe you could get that put on your class blog."
"Our class doesn't have one yet." she told me.
"Hmmm, well would you like your own blog?"
She turned to look at me her eyes shining...and The Wonderful World of Lily was born.

So please welcome the blogosphere's latest writer, you can read her stories and writing at http://lilycb.blogspot.com, I'm sure that she would love to get some comments from all of you out there!