For those anxiously awaiting further word of the reception to my first Spore Galactic Adventures … adventure, I am proud to announce it has been played a grand total of 32 times by other players thus far. NPD best-selling list, here I come.

Rather than rest on my laurels, I moved on and published my second adventure. If my first adventure was a conventional bug hunt, my second effort took the path less travelled. It’s a puzzle that combines two great things that complement each other so well: a classic board game and landmines.

To be more specific, it’s a chess-based puzzle that sees the player trying to navigate a giant chessboard while avoiding capture by chess pieces. Stepping on a square under attack by a chess piece results in an explosive death courtesy of an invisible mine.

Remarkably, it’s been played a total of 222 times since it was published. This would be reason enough for celebratory cartwheels given the response to my first creation yet there’s more to the tale than that. Hits and popularity don’t always correlate.

As of writing, the most popular user-created adventure has a user-rating of 828, and my second adventure is currently rated,  wait for it, 5.6. (By contrast, my first adventure has a user-rating of 6.9.)

Mulling it over, there are certain insights I gained that I’d like to share …

Ancient board games may not be as popular with the videogame crowd as you might think.

It turns out using failure outcome text to insult frustrated players right before they’re given an opportunity to rate your adventure is not a good idea.

Invoking a name from Greek mythology in the introductory text is a good idea.

Everything‘s better with bongos. (The Incredible Bongo Band. Look it up.)

Spore Galactic Adventures, in a shocking oversight, doesn’t include bongo music.

You can put as much creativity, thought and passion into your adventure as you want, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as popular as an adventure titled “Easy Points 2”.

Spore Galactic Adventure‘s Adventure Creator is much like the creature, vehicle and building editors found in the core game in that there’s a lot of power hidden under a relatively simple interface. As a result, creating a simple adventure will be trivially easy. Users hoping to fine-tune adventures and get individual elements just so might be a little frustrated, however.

There’s an in-game checklist to get users started creating a simple adventure but to get the most out of the Adventure Creator, users will have to look elsewhere.

There are two helpful video tutorials by lead designer Stone Librande on YouTube which will help players come to grips with the basics of adventure creation. Aside from that, there are useful posts on the Spore forums with a FAQ, intermediate-level user tips and notes on the advanced AI settings for creatures.

Oddly, the Steam distribution doesn’t seem to include a manual. The only documentation in the download is a simple text file with keyboard shortcuts. Fortunately, the 28-page manual is available as a PDF file on EA’s site here. The English manual weighs in at 1.4MB but annoyingly, it’s bundled with versions in other languages which bumps the download size up to 44MB.

Pop quiz, hotshot.

How do you turn a plain, no-name Sectoid-derivative like this:

into this:

The answer: pay 29.99 in US dollars to Valve and get the Galactic Adventures expansion for Spore on Steam.

Which, by incredible coincidence, was exactly what I did.

After spending four days with Galactic Adventures, I can now proudly claim to be a Published Author with one Adventure published. I don’t want to toot my own horn here but it’s been played 10 times so far by other players. I know what you’re thinking. 10 whole times! Why, that’s more than Daikatana.

(Please save your applause till the end of the show.)

Granted, this grand adventure takes all of three minutes to complete and it’s about as surprising as Predictable McDirectstein, leader of Linearvania. I’m level-headed enough to not let this achievement go to my head.

But Sid Meier had better watch his ass. Just saying.

I made it to the Space stage in Spore after conquering all before me in the Civilization stage. In the process of doing that, I earned the Rolling Thunder achievement for beating the Civ stage within an hour. This is less impressive than it sounds since this wasn’t one continuous hour and this was actually my second attempt. Embarrassingly, I managed to screw up my strategy so badly on my first attempt I ended up having no hope of a comeback.

As I was playing as a belligerent Military civilization, I began my first campaign aggressively acquiring resources and territory on my home continent. This was a sound strategy for the early game. Unfortunately, I made the criminal mistake of neglecting my manufacturing and production, and as history has shown us, it’s the economy, stupid.

My lack of foresight and planning left my military swarmed and completely annihilated by the airforce from hell. The dastardly AI opponent, having wisely built up his economy, could churn out fighter aircraft faster than I could shoot them down, and having achieved air supremacy with trivial ease, the AI proceeded to slowly wrest one city after another from my grasp. There was absolutely no chance of defending myself since the interminable terror bombing campaign prevented me from building up my cities’ defences.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I had saved at an untenable position which meant I was well and truly screwed as Maxis only provided a single savegame per campaign. With no hope of a recovery and no other choice, I had to delete my game and start a new campaign on a new world.

You know a savegame scheme really sucks when players need to destroy an entire world to avoid a bad situation.