Space Barracuda Template Challenge winners may be featured in DarkSpore So all of the template challenges held in the past year actually served a purpose – to help feed the NPC’s for Maxis’ newest game, DarkSpore.* MaxisCactus gave us an inside look of the process of importing the latest Spore template challenge, the Space Barracuda, into DarkSpore for our characters to battle against.* They’ll be holding more contests for Spore players to create NPC’s (note – only Maxis can convert the creations from Spore to DarkSpore as NPCs), so I’d suggest entering if you want a chance for a creation to be featured in a game! Oh, and considering that they are tweaking this process, these may or may not make it into the final build of the game, set to be released in February 2011. Space Barracuda: Preview Winning Player Designs in Game Many of you probably already know about the template challenges we’ve been hosting on the Spore forum. We announced that these may be used to help design NPCs in Darkspore. Today we announced winners for the Space Barracuda Template Challenge! Players created Space Barracuda designs based on the following brief description, imagery, and template creation. Check out the original thread here. “Space Barracuda Bio: Once tiny sea creatures, the space barracudas are now larger and via gravitic powers, able to “swim” through the air on land. Dangerous and unpredictable, space barracudas use their gravitic abilities to teleport themselves and their prey. Prospectors and fighters should exercise extreme caution around these bizarre creatures.” The creation entries designed by the Spore community were judged by the Darkspore team and finalists were hand picked for preview in Darkspore. Check out the finalists in the level editor. They won’t all swarm like this in game, but we needed to see all the finalists animate in game to verify viability as potential NPC designs. We chose our top six and verified that their animation, look and feel all integrated well with the game environment. Check out the top 6 in game, pitted against Zrin. They look great!!! The Winners: 1. Space Barracuda By shamar10 2. Starstaidned Space Barracuda By KaluluUchiha 3. Space Barracuda By WforWumbo Honorable Mention: 1. Space Barracuda By ESquidey 2. Space Barracuda Template By Richardson72 3. Space Barracuda Template By Richardson72 I want to stress that this whole thing is WIP (work in progress). We’re still working out the kinks with UGC, but we want to try to get your creations in game. The images above depict a level populated with a bunch of Space Barracudas, but that was for judging preview purposes. We can’t guarantee that these will be in the final game, but we’ll continue to explore this as an option. Thanks to everyone who contributed in this challenge. I hope to see you guys enter the next one soon! -MC
