Fans of Creatures, Fishing Cactus is not leaving you alone in the… sun :3, here is what you’ve been waiting for since way too long: some fresh news about Creatures 4!

Like every year, our team went to the Gamescom in Köln (Germany) and presented a new demo of our beloved game.

Gamescom is the biggest videogame event in Europe, where over 100.000 gamers and the vast majority of industry insiders flock every summer. What better setting to present new games or improvements on existing long overdue projects?

If you had a chance to see our demo at Gamescom 2012, you’ve surely noticed that the game is finally running smoothly and is really getting closer from the vision we had for it.

Since Gamescom 2011 we’ve introduced a starting tutorial and it was great to see players get into the game quickly and cleanly this year (compared to the general disorientation of the public twelve months ago ). We also added some new features like the Norns speech abilities, the Science Kit and the Ecosystem!



Tutorial

Basically the tutorial helps new players learning how to play and getting acquainted with the game mechanics. A series of mini-quests will help you resolve some common problems like how to breed your Norn, how to keep him happy (or miserable, for the sadists) and how to interact with the flora and the fauna of each area of the universe.



Norns Speech Abilities

As most of you already know, infant Norns can only talk incomprehensible Bibble. They develop their ability to speak socially understood Handish only when the player conditions them to that.

Science Kit

The Science Kit is one of the most complex instruments in the game and it will blend several features from the kits found in the previous versions of Creatures. The current Science Kit is a heavily work-in-progress version and the one available on release will, however, most likely differ in several ways.

In a nutshell, the Science Kit will tell you the “stats” and conditions of your Norn and you will dispose of a window full of items you can use to evolve your little creatures.



Ecosystem

Butterflies, pawless four-eared rabbits, beautiful flowers and lonely Oliphants are finally interacting with each other on Sphericus, the planet on which the game takes place. Every area of the universe sports its own gushing flora and vivid fauna. Although in this demo we were forced to disable the unfinished and unstable customization mode by locking placements of the various decoration objects, in the release version you will be able to freely move them around at will.

The demo version also delivered a glimpse into some work-in-progress interfaces, such as the hatchery, the splicing machine and the Norn collections.



The Hatchery

The Hatchery machine provides the player with Norn eggs and is one of the most important spots in Creatures 4. Therefore we have really focused a lot of time and energy on this aspect of the game and we are quite happy with the final result.

Unfortunately the Hatchery Eggs menu was disabled to make the experience more linear in the demo, but in the final version you’ll be hatching eggs any way you like them.

The Splicing Machine

Next to the Hatchery Machine, that two egg-shaped cocoon is the Splicing Machine. You can buy “genes” and play mad scientist by mixing these genes to spawn precisely the type of Norn you want, completing your Norns Collections. We were thinking of renaming it BCWYWF (Be Careful What You Wish For) but “Splicing Machine” sounded more familiar

We will publish many more Gamescom pictures on our Facebook by the end of the week and more inside information about C4 will be dropped in this very space soon.