http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/things-make-and-do-littlebigplanet?page=0%2C3
Things to Make and Do in LittleBigPlanet
Using mainly felt-tip pens and cardboard, Media Molecule puts the finishing touches to PS3’s biggest, littlest and strangest game.
What could you make out of a 20 pence piece and a rubber band? Both items are lying on a coffee table inside Media Molecule’s offices when we stop by. Presumably left by a developer searching their pockets for a bus ticket or scrounging about for a pen, in this setting, things like this can quickly assume a deeper significance. Here is an unspoken design challenge: take these, and turn them into something fun.
It’s this inquisitive playfulness that lies at the heart of Media Molecule. The company has yet to finish a single game, but following a stellar unveiling at GDC 2007 its first title has seduced almost everyone who’s seen it.
Part platformer, part oddball level-editor, LittleBigPlanet is brimming with friendly, approachable fun. But things are getting serious: the game is locked in for an October release, and ever since that first public demonstration, it’s had a lot of weight on its cardboard shoulders. Many see this near-indescribable toy as nothing less than the key to broadening the appeal of PlayStation 3.
It all started with friends messing around in the park. In 2005, Mark Healey and a few of his Lionhead co-workers made a kung-fu home movie. The movie became a game, and the game – Rag Doll Kung-Fu – became a download hit. It was this experience that gave the founders of Media Molecule the confidence to leave Lionhead and form their own company in January 2006. “It was a crash course,” admits Healey, who’s now Media Molecule’s creative director. Kareem Ettouney, the company’s art director, is rather more upbeat: “It was empowering. It seeded the idea that you could do things differently.”
Two years later, PlayStation 3’s most important title is being built by a team of just 27 in a small office above a bathroom store. (Media Molecule is planning on moving, but that’s probably because the building’s scheduled to be torn down.) It’s snug rather than dingy, however, and filled with the start-up’s playful touches. Along with the 20 pence piece, visitors are greeted by fairy lights spelling out the word ‘hello’, while a quick tour of the office reveals a ‘person in charge of smoothies’ alongside more traditional coders, level designers and a man who’s been shut in a room and can’t come out again “until he’s made the game run fast” (he looks fairly happy in there, though). As expected, there are eclectic props everywhere: homemade dolls, cartoons and other tributes to the hand-stitched or doodled. Everything celebrates impromptu ingenuity and lo-fi craftsmanship; the business cards here are probably made out of quilt.
But enough of the tour – we’ve come to see how the game’s progressing. The basic idea of LBP should be familiar by now: playing as Sackboy, you use Popit, a mix of menu system and mouseless mouse pointer, to create various physical objects and build 2.5D playgrounds, which can then be uploaded in the name of worldwide time-wasting. Today, Media Molecule is showing us a glimpse of some of the more advanced options – options that take what had the potential to be a knockabout assault-course generator and turn it into a tool for making almost any kind of game you can think of.
“To make a good modelling tool is easy,” argues Ettouney (pictured). “To make it friendly and empowering is hardcore.” Yet that’s just what the team has managed to do. Take speech. If you’re making a level and you want to put in a hint box or create a talking NPC, you just open Popit, select a mouth, stick it to wherever it’s needed, and type in the text. “It’s everything you need for a do-it-yourself cutscene,” says Healey. With just that single object, in five seconds you can offer instructions, crack jokes or begin to tell stories.
How about setting the scene? Select which of the available backdrops you want, from dew-spattered garden to sun-scorched desert, then use the sliders within Popit to change the time of day, increase fog, alter brightness and even colour-correct. Adding a soundtrack is even simpler: just stick a ‘music box’ object to the environment. Once it’s in place, you can select the song, adjust volumes for individual instruments and change the audible radius of the music. You can even place multiple boxes within the same level.
The music box is a good example of what makes LBP so simple: every gameplay feature is also a physical object. If you want a respawn point, pull a door from Popit and stick it to the wall: the game will automatically understand what it’s meant to do. If you want sound effects as well as music, pull out a speaker and slap it on some rocks before selecting the noise you want it to make. And, incredibly, if you want to create scripted events to occur at certain moments, Healey and his team have worked out how to make that object-based too.
Scripting is the most daunting aspect of most level editors, and the one point at whichLBP seems doomed to lose a little of its easy class. If this were a conventional game, this could be the boss encounter that everyone gets stuck on and makes some give up. But it’s not, and Popit contains simple tools that let you easily trigger enemy attacks on cue, create locked-door puzzles and even control NPC behaviour.
The tools in question are switches, which players can drop in to the game and then physically wire to objects. At their very simplest level, a switch can be connected to a motor; once it’s flipped, the motor will turn and raise a nearby door. Voila, you’ve made a basic Zelda puzzle in less than 15 seconds.
But with the range of switches available, variety emerges. There are motion-sensitive switches which act a lot like conventional scripted triggers. Pass a certain point in the level, and a new enemy will drop down from the ceiling, or platforms will start to move, and a mechanical assault course will fire up – all of the movement wired in to the switch via simple pistons and cogs. Then there’s the sticker switch, which is a variation on lock-and-key – it’s slapped on to surfaces and is only flipped once a pre-selected sticker is placed on it. Or how about magnetic switches, split between two objects and activated when the pieces are brought together: in a single move, the colour-coded keys and gateways of Gauntlet and a hundred other RPGs are suddenly brought within reach.
These are just some of a handful of different switches, and the complexity that can emerge when all these pieces are in play with the rest of the game is staggering. Healey shows us an example level: a meerkat is blocking a door and won’t open it until you’ve located her missing baby. The mother is actually a collection of boxes, with a proximity switch that works pistons making her come to life as you walk up. When you find the baby and bring it back, the magnetic key attached in parts to both meerkats triggers a set of pulleys which move the mother into a standing position, yanking open a door that’s attached to her feet. It’s a fully scripted sequence with a challenge, a reward and a prod on towards the next part of the level, and the coding is entirely mechanical: switches, levers and wax lips, with not a C++ command to be seen.
And that’s about as complex as it gets. Every time the team has faced a potentially difficult problem, it appears to have found the most elegant and visual way of explaining things. To show players how many more objects they can place in a level, there’s a thermometer on the left-hand side of the screen that slowly fills up as the space gets more crowded. And to chain separate levels together to form a game’s different stages, the team has come up with a simple key system: for each level you build, you’ll get a different key added to your inventory. Simply add the key for your ice level at the end of your fire level, and you’ll warp from one to the other – although why stay shackled to old-fashioned fire and ice when you could have corduroy or sandpaper levels instead?
From these relatively simple components the team has already made RPGs, complex platformers with numerous stages and hub worlds, and puzzle games like Tetris. It’s even made a version of OutRun, which simulates the changing road ahead by moving about a set of painted strips of wood on hinges. If you know what you want to do, and you can think of a way to make it work mechanically, it’s probably possible. And Popit’s the perfect tool for the job: a branching menu that manages to organize a dizzying variety of in-game objects and tools so that you’re rarely more than three seconds away from what you want.
Media Molecule is hoping that the game’s pre-made levels will play the part of tutor when it comes to the more complicated tools. In this way, LBP is a puzzle game: much of the fun is reverse-engineering what the designers have done. “In making the levels, Mark had one rule: we can’t cheat,” explains Ettouney. “We had to use the same tools to create the levels that players would.” In other words, look carefully enough at something the team has built, and you’ll soon know how to do it yourself – and from wooden cars with working engines to a giant Doctor Martens boot that descends on chains, the team has built just about everything. “We kept saying: ‘Can we cheat just this once?’” continues Ettouney. “Mark never caved in. It eventually led to the tools becoming a lot more powerful.”
It’s hard to think of a game with a simpler, yet more ambitious, remit. Because of that, a question has always remained: will this kind of freedom prove paralyzingly intimidating when the player sits down in front of their TV?
“To me this is far less intimidating than MySpace,” says Healey (pictured), and adds that extensive play testing has yet to see anyone freeze with panic. “You don’t need to be a decorator to make your room look nice,” adds Ettouney. “This is the same kind of thing. We’ve given it a handmade look to celebrate imperfection. We hope people will feel comfortable.”
LBP is broken into three discrete modes: Play, Create and Share. Initially, you’ll have to unlock Create by playing through the first few pre-made levels of Play (there are 50 in total). Sackboy and Popit are the lynchpins that tie everything together, both modes using them as the means of interaction, with Create allowing him to switch between flying about the level to place items and dropping back down to the ground to test them. (Share handles precisely what you’d expect.)
Hands-on, Create is not a million miles away from a simple art package. We start by selecting a material and brush shape from Popit, and are soon drawing a thick swathe of shiny metal plating on to the environment. Using the right stick, we alter the size of the brush as we go, and then break this into chunks with judicious stabs of the eraser. When we switch to test mode, our strange metal landscape falls to the floor, rocked back and forth by the physics engine, before coming to rest (you can use ‘dark matter’ to glue blocks in the air, but the designers rarely do).
We’re left with a pile of chunky rubble, but within seconds we’re tugging it about to form a promising assault course, and Healey is already showing us how to build working motors from a few metal blocks and a cog, while technical director Alex Evans stops by to offer instruction on the serious business of adding belch effects to stone lumps to make granite whoopee cushions. Even without this top-quality help, we’re quickly finding things we want to do, just by pulling objects from Popit and trying them out.
The results are hardly Yoshi’s Island, but within five minutes we’ve turned a blank canvas into a playground we could happily mess about in for hours, tweaking platforms and playing with the physics properties of different materials. And we’ve done it all without thinking – the design emerging from the ease with which we moved between building and testing.
The emphasis throughout is on enjoyment rather than speed. “We’ve put the priority on making the game fun to use,” says Evans (pictured). “People think you’ll be able to make a Miyamoto-style level in five minutes. Not quite. You can make a Miyamoto level, but it will probably take all weekend. Our effort has been to make sure that weekend’s fun.”
It’s reassuring to see how friendly Create is, but the real surprise turns out to be Play’s pre-made stages. It’s easy to assume that the levels that ship with the game will be little more than tutorials – what we discovered, however, playing through an Indian-themed stage with Healey, was that even if this wasn’t a genre-shifting creative tool, it would still be a devastatingly effective 2D platformer out of the box.
While the aesthetic is unmistakably its own, the mixture of precision jumping, simple physics and the intricate clutters of moving platforms is strongly evocative of 16bit gaming. There’s ingenuity and humour on display everywhere, with risky secret routes to be uncovered, jumble-sale landslides to trigger and an entire sequence that plays out on the back of a mechanical elephant which advances across a bed of flames. Everywhere, the handicraft style combines with the chunky mechanics to create platforming that feels fresh yet traditional. With fairly low expectations for this aspect of the game, it’s a revelation to come away with the sense that we’ve just played through some of the purest 2D design we’ve seen since Super Mario World. Working above a bathroom store clearly does wonders for your creative motivation.
It was at 2007’s GDC that Healey realized just how important his fledgling company’s game was to Sony’s plans: “Up until then there’d just been less than ten people making a game that was a weird concept. When we turned up and saw this room with 5,000 seats it was: ‘Oh my God!’” When we ask how the team feels about the perception that the wider fate of PS3 is somehow tied to LBP, he just smiles. “I don’t think that’s really true,” says Ettouney. “We’re a very good example of what PlayStation is capable of doing, but we picked one battle and others pick their own, taking narrative or combat and pursuing them.”
And is the weight of all that expectation shaping Media Molecule at a time when it’s still trying to form its own identity? “I don’t think it could even if we wanted it to. Because of the people in this company, it just hasn’t sunk in,” laughs Ettouney. “Many of us here haven’t even comprehended the fact that there’s someone in Japan working on the product. There’s something naïve about us: we live in that bubble of being fixated on what we’re doing. I paint, and if you think about the perception of a piece while you’re doing it, it’s not going to be a good piece.”
The arrival of scones and strawberries for tea sends everyone into an excited flutter. The team certainly seems like it’s remained down to earth amid the hype, and there are no Hummers in the car park yet. (Actually, we didn’t see a car park – they must use the NCP down the road.) And if the game isn’t changing how the company sees itself, it’s not changing how it works, either: Media Molecule is determined to stay small and do things its own way.
“One of the most challenging things in big teams is using the skill of people,” explains Ettouney. “They get pigeonholed into doing something very specialised. You get people with titles like ‘hair artist’. We wanted cross-discipline stuff, an integrated meritocracy, where the best idea wins and you end up with the role that suits you. We’ve had artists who now head level design. Most of our stresses come from genuine creative hurdles rather than politics and monkey business. But we still have to deliver: we’re living in the real world and can’t just be an R&D company of coolness.”
And are they afraid of being defined by LBP? “I think it’s sort of the plan for it to define the company,” says Healey. “We’ve got ‘Creative Gaming’ as the company motto, and I’ve always been into games that involved user creativity. The first thing I worked on was C64 educational software to help kids to paint.” Ettouney agrees: “It’s not a suffocating genre, and hopefully within that there’s lots of room.”
As for the future, Sackboy will probably take up many months ahead, even after the master disk is shipped. “Hopefully a community will form. We’re committed to supporting that. We’ve got dedicated time planned for it. When the game’s released, that’s just the beginning.” Healey laughs: “The game hasn’t even been released yet – it might be crap. Never been one to believe in hype, myself.”
But Media Molecule doesn’t seem to think it’s crap. In among the obvious pride, there’s also a weird twist of the lottery winner’s confusion visible at times, as if the team are slightly surprised by what they’ve created. As well they might be: although it’s drawn in a modest childhood manner, this is a game that could actually outshine Spore when it comes to ambitions. Will Wright’s opus may be about science, but this is a full-blown physics playground where you can design motors and even construct, as one team member has done, a rudimentary mechanical computer.
But that makes things sound dry and worthy, and from what we’ve already played LBP has the potential to be fun at its most entertainingly idiotic. Full of endless goals and effortless creativity, this could be that special game that finally demonstrates that control and freedom don’t always have to be at odds.
It’s a dangerous, unpredictable and ambitious experiment, then, but Media Molecule seems to have an answer for almost everything. The only time Healey and his team seem genuinely stumped is when we ask them how they’re labeling this type of game genre internally.
“We’ve struggled with describing the game,” admits Healey finally. “Different people do it their own way. For me, it’s a creative tool. Other people say it’s a game that you play and learn to make stuff.” He frowns and leans forward, and then, in four words, unintentionally sums everything up: “What do you think?”
