In addition to Wednesday’s level searching updates Media Molecule have made changes to the way in which the Community page in-game works.
Basically, newly uploaded good-quality levels are far more likely to appear on the first few pages of results. Older levels with thousands of plays won’t get to hang around on the front pages for quite so long, and levels that are constantly ‘bumped’ by creators re-publishing them, won’t get any special treatment either. These are great improvements which offer creators a genuine chance to get their levels seen.
Here is the official lowdown on the specifics:
Previously, the first few pages of the community levels displayed those levels which had the most activity in the last 7 days. However, we soon noticed a trend; once a level was popular enough to make it to the front page, it was likely to never leave!
Clearly, that’s great if you’re one of the few hundred or so creators with levels on the front pages, but not so good for the creators of the other 500,000 or so LittleBigPlanet levels! It also means that eventually the pages start to look a little static, with very little variation from day to day (or even week to week!).
We wanted to try a new system; one that would ensure that the default community selection, was fresh, of a high quality and constantly changing. In brief, the new system ensures that the default selection of levels are those with the highest rating, published within the last 7 days. Once 7 days have passed since a level was first published, it will make room for a new level to gain some exposure (republishing the level over the same slot won’t make it count as a new level).
The important part to remember is that it’s never been so easy for a level to hit the front page searches. Previously, a level would require 100’s of thousands of plays and hearts to even come close the front page. Now, if a creator publishes a good quality NEW level today and tries out some of our publishing hints in our article publishing 101, it’s far more likely their level will hit the top.
Good stuff. Read more over on the full write up by Mm.
A collaborative project from a team of creators on Neo ‘how-many-years-will-it-take-to-get-my-account-approved’ GAF has now been completed and released to the community.
The project aimed at delivering the definitive experience of the 1987 arcade game, Contra (also known as Gryzor and Probotector), to LittleBigPlanet. The goal has been to recreate the 8 stages of the original NES version of the game, which the team has managed to achieve.
It’s a lot to take on and we believe this is the biggest community level building project in LittleBigPlanet to date. The eight levels and building team are as follows:
- Jungle: MisterAnderson - PSN: Leonidas2123
- Base 1: Orz- PSN: SaitoHalifax
- Waterfall: PSN - RyanardoDavinci
- Base 2: Orz- PSN: SaitoHalifax
- Snowfield: PSN: NinjaMicWZ
- Energy Zone: El_Beefo - PSN: El_Beefo
- Hangar: Jaeyden - PSN: Jaeyden
- Alien’s Lair: Donkey Show - PSN: gevurah22
Along with the release of the levels is a preview trailer. Check it out:
Impressive stuff! We’re off to play these levels right now. And with those new level search features released on Wednesday, it should be pretty easy to track these levels down 
You can find out more about the project on the teams release thread on NeoGAF and in a great write up article over on One Last Continue.
We’ve had a news tip come in from a Canadian reader who says that on February 23rd’s episode of the Canadian show EP Daily on G4 Tech TV (G4TechTv.ca), YouTube video uploading is hinted at coming to LittleBigPlanet.
Media Molecule’s Kareem Ettouney begins talking about how users of LittleBigPlanet want to share their level creating ideas:
A lot of people in the LittleBigPlanet World are really keen on showing off how they made their creations.
It’s an obvious need. You go on YouTube and see all those videos. Let’s give the users a tool that can stream the content and put it on YouTube.
Yes, let’s.
Unfortunately there is no way we can verify this information as we cannot watch the video (without being in Canada), so if anyone wants to YouTube it for us, feel free!
You can watch the video here!
Other games that utilise the PS3’s access to the YouTube API include PixelJunk Eden, PixelJunk Monsters and the recent (and frankly awesome) Noby Noby Boy. YouTube API integration for PlayStation 3 titles was first announced last May. The ability to upload game play videos to YouTube has proved popular with players, allowing them to share techniques in completing the most difficult of levels. It would be a very fitting and welcome addition to LittleBigPlanet.
Thanks to Mark C from Canada for sending this in.
After the news that there would be no dlc for LittleBigPlanet this week, community members will be pleased to know about some of the upcoming costumes arriving soon, as revealed in this weeks Sack it to me on the U.S PlayStation Blog.
Two costumes have been revealed for Killzone 2. They were expected this week, after a hint on the U.S PlayStation Blog suggested February 27th. But alas, it was not to be. Heavenly Sword and a Buzz costumes have also been revealed:
We all knew this was coming! Killzone 2’s Helghast Trooper.
Another Killzone 2 outfit comes with little surprise - ‘Sev’, the main protagonist from the single player campaign in Killzone 2. We could’ve sworn it was Mr T at a glance though…
It’s the cheese-master himself, Buzz! from the ever popular quiz games.
The previously exclusive Heavenly Sword Nariko costume is presumably now seeing a ‘commercial release’, much like the Kratos costume did a few weeks back.
Kai (Nariko’s cranky little sister) from Heavenly Sword also gets a costume.
Prices and dates are yet to be announced, so it’s all a bit of a tease. Still no news on the Sepiroth and Bumblebee costumes (design-a-sackboy winnning entry) that are in existence, but we’re sure they’ll surface at some point.
We’re sure that many players will be pleased to see the Nariko costume released - if only to stop the “ZOMG! NARIKO CODEZ PLX” threads popping up on certain forums…
Thanks to Mr Grey at Little Big Land for sending this in, via Curious Onion.
LittleBigPlanet for PSP has been officially confirmed (previously it was only confirmed internally at SCE’s annual briefing). The game was debuted as part of a 2009 lineup unveiling at SCEA’s annual Destination Playstation retail and publisher event in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, which also announced the arrival of Rockband and Assasins Creed for the Sony Handheld. Gamasutra reports...
As for its own titles, a PSP LittleBigPlanet developed with Media Molecule promises new levels specifically created for the platform with the same gameplay, although SCEA didn’t specify whether the PSP edition of the game will interface in any way with the console version
Time to dust off your PSP in anticipation folks!
Gamasutra has posted coverage of Alex Evans’ talk at the D.I.C.E conference, which he gave after Mm won eight of twelve available AIAS awards the night before.
“I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re just a bunch of hippies in a room,” Evans added.
“How do you make sure you’re not just making shit?” he asked, saying that as a studio director he considered that question many times. He recalled Media Molecule going through many, many iterations of its core user creation tools, many of which were only practical for creating “melty lumps of shit.”
The user tools ended up needing to be powerful enough to create production-quality content. “We are just power users,” Evans explained—the PC-based tools the team uses are simply more efficient versions of the same tools that ship with the game on PlayStation 3.
The decision to pursue that focus with the tools was one that required great effort and caused many headaches, he admitted, but it “paid off in huge spades.”
Interesting, that was always a bit of an unanswered question to us, whether the developers used a more enhanced set of tools or not, and it appears they do. Oh to get our hands on ‘em!
Read the full report on Alex’s talk over on Gamasutra.
After the announcement that LittleBigPlanet and Media Molecule were up for a grand total of 10 nominations at The Interactive Achivement Awards taking place in Las Vegas this week, the winners have now been announced and LittleBigPlanet has taken 8 awards home.
Speaking on his Twitter feed, a clearly excited Alex Evans said:
We won! A lot! Go team mm! Thanks academy judges
There’s much to be exicted about too, just take a look at all the awards:
- Overall Game of the Year
- Console Game of the Year
- Family Game of the Year
- Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
- Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction
- Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering
- Outstanding Character Performance
- Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
Congratulations Media Molecule!
The Interactive Achievement Awards are part of the D.I.C.E summit, which ends today. As part of the summit, Alex is giving a talk about LittleBigPlanet, its user generated content and the game’s design philosophy.
Full details of awards and nominations are available on the official AIAS site.
Remember that emergency late notice news piece last week regarding the BAFTA Families event? Well Media Molecule have posted a report of the event to their blog.
Anton opened the proceedings with a brief bit about what programming is, and a child-friendly history of the company (e.g. “Here is a picture of Kareem, he is Egyptian” and “This is Alex and Dave, they like pink”). He included a code sample from the game to illustrate his first point (”This page of code makes the character jump”), so if you are keen to learn what goes on under the hood consider attending about 50,000 similar presentations, and maybe you’ll be able to view the entire codebase!
I then continued with a bit about the Create aspect of the game, and admitted that I hadn’t been allowed to show the photo of me peeing my name in the snow. I talked about the world the game is set in, and the kinds of things you can make - and how cool it is to be able to share what you created in your living room with 1000s of people around the world.
Danny finished off with a brief talk about level design, and introduced the task they were to perform - design their own game! The children had 45 minutes for this, and namely they needed to come up with a title for the game, a lead character and perhaps a nemesis, and a description of what you would do. At the end they would have 1 minute to pitch their concept to the rest of us. So off they went and got busy with paper, paint, felt, glue and glitter to make something amazing!
Sounds like it was a really entertaining morning for the kids who attended, and a level featuring the kids’ faces, handily snapped by a PS3 Eye camera, will possibly be published some time sooner or later - cute!
Why not check out the full report from molecule Jonny, and also the flickr photos from the event, over on the mm page.
The latest song by Japanese Rock-pop band Beat Crusaders is made using elements from LittleBigPlanet - both in-game and some weirdy beardy renders.
The band, who commonly mask their faces with drawings resembling themselves as printed by a dot-matrix printer, appear in this one as Sackboys wearing the same masks. Their song, Phantom Planet, was used in one of the Japanese promos for the game, and is quite funky dontchathink?
LittleBigPlanet players eager on getting new stickers will be pleased to know that Wipeout HD® themed stickers are coming soon.
After receiving his game save back from Media Molecule, PSN user brnxblze yesterday told us about the upcoming costume items he could steakily (steakily!?) sneakily see in his new data, fresh from Media Molecule towers.
brnxblze has since notified us of another new item in his pop-it inventory - Wipeout HD® stickers. Nine of them infact!
Oooooooh
The Wipeout HD® costume pack is out on Thursday this week across Japan, Europe and North America. Until now, it was thought that the pack included just the four costumes, but it’s now clear that the stickers will also be available, either in with the costumes, or in a seperate pack. Could this be a Wipeout level pack? Or just an extra special costume pack?
The ‘Sack it to me’ update on the Official PlayStation Blog tomorrow should give us the full details on just exactly what costumes, stickers and other goodies will be hitting the PSN Store on Thursday. We’re hoping for the new free Bumblebee costume, the Wipeout HD® costume and/or Sticker pack and maybe, just maybe - that Sepiroth costume
[UPDATE]
The ‘Sack it to me’ update is now up, and it is revealed that these nine stickers are included as a bonus with the costumes. Yay!
PSN user brnxblze recently sent his save file in to Media Molecule to help fix the game saving bug. Well, it got sent back to him, and when it did, it had some hidden extras!
Pretty much all the costume items ever were in his pop-it! Although many were locked, as brnxblze had not purchased them and didn’t own them, the items were visible in his pop-it anyway. So, the LBP Crown, Toro, Ape Escape, Space Suit - all there.
Thrown in to the mix however are costumes which are not yet released, like the Wipeout costumes which are due for release this week, the Sepiroth costume from Final Fantasy VII and a new ‘Design a Sackboy’ competition winner, the Bumblebee.
All the ‘competition winner’ items to date have been free, so we wouldn’t be surprised if the Bumblebee costume is out this week alongside the paid-for Wipeout costumes. When is the Sepiroth costume out? We can only presume ‘very soon’. There is no sign of the Killzone 2 costumes, which was hinted at having a February 27th release date, so perhaps Sepiroth will be out before then? If that were the case, then it’d leave just this week… Anyway, enough speculation, here are the pics!
Sepiroth Coat from Final Fantasy® VII
Sepiroth Wig from Final Fantasy® VII
Sepiroth Trousers from Final Fantasy® VII
Sepiroth Gloves from Final Fantasy® VII
Bumblebee wings ‘Design a Sackboy’ Competition entry
Bumblebee skin ‘Design a Sackboy’ Competition entry
Bumblebee antennae ‘Design a Sackboy’ Competition entry
Auricom Racer from Wipeout® HD
Feisar Helmet from Wipeout® HD
brnxblze doesn’t own these items, so he can’t use them.
We look forward to hearing about the PSN Store update later this week.
Thanks to brnxblze for sending this in and sharing his find!
Following the announcement last week that there will be official Sackboy toys hitting shelves this year, photos from the Toy Industry Association’s Toy Fair 2009, which opened its doors yesterday are starting to come in.
The new photos give us some juicy details on the kinds of toys we’ll be able to get our grubby mits on.
First of all, we’re not sure if last weeks official announcement of 4” figures is still valid but it is now clear that the there will be a 2” figure range coming out in October 2009 from Mezco Toys. So, the same size as popular vinyl toys such as the standard series of Qee, Munny and Kubrick.
The photos show original painted sculpts for the Sackboy prototypes, all of which look super cute. We can’t wait to see their finished versions! There is also a keyring range shown with 4 different, presumably rubber designs.
Sackboy leads the way
Stick ‘em up!
Yay! Keyrings!
Hmmm, does she glow in the dark?!
Yearrgh! Me hearties!
Devil boy too!
So, we’re not quite sure if there are 4” figures (out in Spring) and 2” figures (out in October), or if there are just 2” figures but either way - we’ll be running off to the shops to buy the entire set once they come out.
If the 2” figures sell like Qee’s and Kubricks - you won’t know which one you’re getting until you buy it and open the box! This could get expensive…
Thanks to Nick for the link! Check out the original photos on GEEKANERD.
Page 4 of 21 pages « First < 2 3 4 5 6 > Last »
