I had the opportunity to sit down with two developers at Sony’s booth this year and discuss the upcoming LittleBigPlanet 2 release in the Fall. Having been a huge fan of the first, I was enamored by the possibilities for the sequel.
Thankfully, I didn’t have long to wait until those possibilities became a reality.
The two gentlemen sat down with me and showed me a variety of nifty things. First, they explained that when they were developing the original game they didn’t fully imagine that the worldwide community would go above and beyond their expectations. In terms of expectations they didn’t mean monetarily, rather they meant with what the community could do with the tools that the team provided them. The development team was rather surprised when folks started to imagine things like making their own set of games, such as pinball and rather crude looking RTS.
As I was told the dev team didn’t really intend on the original LBP to provide that type of creative outlet.
Well, having seen all the things that people wanted to imagine for a LittleBigPlanet the developers decided to open things up a bit and bring the worldwide community into the developers’ own backyard by providing similar tools they work on to the LBP community. Of course not everyone is a programmer, so the tools provided would have to be easy to understand for a general audience; and so they are.
While watching the magic men in motion, they quickly explained a new feature in LittleBigPlanet 2; building specific controls into homemade objects. For example, the group prior to me decided to build a UFO for their little Sackboy to fly around in. They got the shape of the craft down, but needed more components to make it an ‘actual’ UFO. What does a UFO generally do? It flies. So, to provide flying capabilities to the Sackboy made machine they needed to pull up a circuit-board type of schematic for the device. This board allowed features to be built for this particular object. There was a pre-built feature called an ‘anti-gravity’ device that is flexible enough to make this UFO hover. This device was added and then a wire was run from that particular device to a specific button on the PS controller (a graphic pops up of the controller that allows the user to assign a button or direction). The ‘O’ button was selected for take-off and tested for reliability. Neat, huh?
Well, it gets better.
Being that the boys from the UK didn’t want to leave this bland object with just hovering capabilities, they decided to put in a nice dramatic drum mix to give the UFO some personality. They brought in a ‘timer’ icon that looped into itself. They brought in a series of wires connected to that timer. Each wire led to a specific drum sound that would hit in a specific order. By the end of this build there were wires coming and going from particular components and it looked a bit messy. What should one do to clean this up? Put it all in a single microchip! That microchip can be traded or moved easily and you don’t have to look at that mess of wires any longer.
Just imagine the possibilities with that type of power. You can basically do anything you want. For example, they showed me some different possibilities for the game that included a Space Harrier-esque stage that had Sackboy in a plan flying through a 3D field gunning down other ships. When the devs broke the stage down for me it turned out there were just vertically intersecting lines with horizontal lines scrolling down, which provided the depth-of-field. The enemies just wandered in from the sides and the vehicle Sackboy was in had an ‘anti-gravity’ attachment to it that gave the illusion of flying. It was just fantastic to see and even more interesting when they broke down how it was built.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. LittleBigPlanet 2 is something you should look forward to seeing. It not only has a better set of tools for stage and game design, but now it also comes with mini-games pre-built into the game. You’ll like what it has to offer overall.
I know I was impressed.
