Spore Opens API, Throws Contest

Tired of making penis golems in Spore? Why not try to create something a little more useful with the recently released Spore API, which lets users make their own Spore web applications.

"Here at Maxis, we're working on some features to help the community create their own Spore applications," Maxis wrote on the API site. "Using simple web services, you can access our huge database of creations and creators." The API works for Flash, php, Mathematica, Python and Processing, so if you've got some tricks up your sleeve with any of those platforms, get to developing.

There are already a number of examples up in the gallery Maxis is hosting, including a Spore virtual aquarium, an app that lets you keep tabs on your Spore buddies' activities, embeddable Flash apps that track Spore stats and something called Sporenament that lets you pit a set of Spore creations in an epic organized battle to see who's the top penis creature.

To drum up development activity, Maxis is hosting a contest for the best app that can be developed from the Spore API. The winner will get a new Nvidia graphics card, while runners-up will receive, uh, a copy of Spore or the Galactic Adventures expansion to go with the one they most likely already have. The deadline for entry is April 6th.

Spore, despite not really becoming the phenomenon we all thought it would, still can be quite the canvas for creative gamers, and this should hopefully make the experience even more rich. Get to making things, folks, and keep it clean.