In anticipation of the release of Sim-creator Will Wright’s evolutionary masterwork Spore, Maxis have made the Spore Creature Creator available today. One of Spore’s major concepts is that the player designs almost everything in the game. The Creature Creator is the utility that allows the player to shape their chosen life-form into anything their imaginations can come up with.

The Creature Creator is available in two versions – the full version will set you back a fiver, whilst demo is free but only contains 25% of the creature parts that can be found in the full version.

The application allows the player to take what looks like a lump of clay with a spine and mould it into a creature. Once they are done moulding the main form, they can then add body parts such as legs, arms, feet, hands, eyes, mouths, decorative elements, and a wide array of sensory organs like antennae. Many of these parts affect the creature’s abilities (speed, strength, diet, etc.), while some parts are purely decorative.

Once the creature is designed to the player’s satisfaction, they can paint the creature using a large number of textures, overlays, colours, and patterns, which are procedurally applied depending on the topology of the creature. After the player feels their creature is complete, it can be tested in a small, enclosed area, demonstrating how it would move around, fight, interact, etc.

The utility also allows those people ‘playing God’ to upload their monstrous creations to the Sporepedia and import other peoples creations through this feature as well. Creatures created with this utility will help populate the Spore universe when the game is released.

The Creature Creator also includes screen capture and video tools as well, including functionality allowing you to upload movies of your creature directly to YouTube. It also gives the user the ability to easily create an animated avatar of their creation.

You can download the Spore Creature Creator from Spore.com now. Most of the creations we’ve witnessed so far seem to have a very… phallic theme. Please see if you can think up something more original.

Spore is due for release on PC and Mac on 5th September.