Spore Robots in Galactic Adventures

This was a design for some snap on weapons I made for one of our Spore creatures. The creatures got all kinds of interesting parts and capabilities in that Spore Expansion Pack.

Here are a few quick videos of that creature in a walk cycle

Spore Robots

more concepts showing body blocks snapping onto a bendable spinal structure;
The key was a certain fun tactility as you dragged the body block off the palette and onto the spine.
How it snapped in place and slid around clicking and snapping in small increments along each spine segment.

You could then attach other blocks to this main block and they would move with it and the parent spine segment.

You could also reduce the number of spine segments or add them by pulling end handles (like in Spore)

A decent robot could be built with 2 or 3 spine segments, but more complex behaviors could be made with
longer spines.

Spore Robots Concepts

concept for a spinal structure

sketch showing how body blocks could attach onto the spinal structure

concept for a robotic leg assembly for use with the Spore Creature Creator

side or top mounted weapon concept

Spore Robot Prototypes

Scouring my older backups for artwork and came across these concepts I did for a Spore Robots Game

we pitched.

The core idea was combat between highly customizable robots in 3 different classes or types based on Speed, Weapons, and Defense, in a destructible environment.
We wound up outsourcing these designs to get modeled and textured. Some of the designs and models made their way into DarkSpore eventually :)

Spore - Editor Concept

War Plane

Playing around with the lighting a bit in this test.

Spore - Editor Concept

Battleship
Another vehicle exported out. These were fun to make. (I also modeled and concepted the parts that made up
the vehicles which made it even more rewarding to see the final creation) I could have made a whole army for an RTS with this exporter and Spore in a day!

Spore - Vehicle Editor Concept

Spore- Editor Concepts

Here's a preliminary and rough modeling, lighting, and texturing concept done in Maya of what the vehicle editor environment would look like for Spore.
I was inspired by backgrounds from the game MetalSlug. I was imagining it as a giant interior of
a spaceship, and picturing some kind of energy doing the "editing"(represented by the volume light)
I'm using an exported vehicle from Spore with a baked on AO map from game (kinds low res) and standard specular and reflective settings done in Maya using a baked out specularity map, also from game.

robots and tanks

Here are some hover tank designs I did years ago (14 years ago to be exact). They were for a 3do platformer called Battlesport. On a system that was still being designed "M2" to succeed the yet to be successful 3do Panasonic console :)
Eventually "the wraith" became a tank used in another game we did at Cyclone Studios called Uprising. More pics from that later...fun early days of game development.