Mark Valledor, Marketing Manager at SCEA has updated the SCEA PlayStation Blog with this weeks latest Q&A session.
Some of the most interesting answers come from “efong”, one of the US producers for LittleBigPlanet. He pops up in the comments to answer the following questions:
Are their plans to make new levels as DLC? link
Yup, new levels have been in the works for a while (but require a lot of testing/fixing/balancing).
Are there plans for a LBP Home Space? (re-quoted from El Scorhcho )
Are you guys going to release new materials, objects, or other creation tools as downloadable content as well?
It’d be really awesome to be able to download new things to use while creating levels… Like more music! link
Yup, these are all things we’re working on…
Any word on any new levels by you guys?
When are we going to get a patch that will let us create levels with others or take full use of all the things you have for the game?
Any word on more tools or any other goodies you can hint at? link
Yup, new levels soon, so hang tight.
Sorry, can’t discuss new tools :(
I remember Alex mentioning a patch not too long ago (around a month ago). If I recall correctly, he mentioned it’s slated for December. Any update you can share with us? At least confirm that there’s something big in the works in that regard? link
Yup, we’re working on a fairly significant patch. Hope to have an update for everyone soon. Keep checking back.
So yes. There you have it. Some tasty hints at what’s to come there. New developer level DLC, new level creation DLC, and no wonder that at some point they’ll be a ‘fairly significant’ patch to get it all in there.
Dutch site ps3clan.nl have also reported that a source close to Sony has confirmed that the LBP Home Space will launch soon soon after Home itself, saying:
In this room will enable you to promote levels and users can direct you in Home loading level to play. Furthermore, the room also with a feeling LittleBigPlanet Sackboy programs as a central figure.
That sounds great.
Of course, the blog post also had the regular Q&A section with all the usual ‘coming soon‘s and ‘working on it‘s, which we’ll break it down in to easy bite size chunks of heavily summarized foam:
Moderation
Changes are coming very soon.
Rankings
They hope you noticed the “Star rankings”.
Failed to load level
This happens due to lag, or a level being moderated. You knew that, right!?
Lag
They’re still working to improve things further.
Full Profiles
Solve this by deleting some of the unwanted objects. They’re looking into increasing profile space.
Sackbook.com
An impressive community fansite popped up last week and we were all impressed, but we’ve been in discussions with the site owner and requested the site be suspended. Chris, the site owner, was happy to work with us on this. Our intent is to be able to offer everyone the choice of whether their shared data is visible or not in order to protect everyone’s privacy, and while Sackbook was doing nothing wrong in the way it presented information and had no access to any personal data, we believe this additional option is important.
Interesting. And a positive spin on that. Keep it up Sony. Dont go quiet on us and lock it down forever.
Merchandise
There are major plans for Sackboy merchandise, announcements in the New Year.
“Failed to load level
This happens due to lag, or a level being moderated. You knew that, right!?“
I’m not sure about this, two of my friend have level i can’t load, they have not been moderated, first time i tryed it had 0 plays so no one could have made a greif report. lag would not be permanent would it? i tryed but faild ca 30 times over the last two weeks. same error every time, but i can load their other levels.
About Sackbook:
What? Privacy issues? Oh come on… the info on the site is no more telling than what you’d find in-game. Again… PRIVACY? Is that REALLY it? So I bet the only way I’m going to be able to find anything on there is if the player is a member… That would make the site a lot less useful, because last I checked, hardly anyone knows the site exists yet.
Sackbook was impressive the way the pulled in the XML data (I know what XML is and how to work with it, but how did they ever *find* it? Amazing!) but I wish they went in another direction instead of a Facebook “knockoff”...
Would hope it comes online again, but it could certainly use more features as it is now, it merely replicates what you can do in-game… (not that it wasn’t handy to check in on my level plays/comments from anywhere!) A better level search would be great - proper level reviews of good levels (and not the ones super-glued on the first globes) that is sortable by review score, genre, etc… There’s so much that could be done with it… why didn’t MM make a proper social network themselves, I wonder (LBW is just crap mostly except the forums are often helpful)
Boo Radley:
I don’t know if you disliked Sackbook being a Facebook knockoff because you dislike Facebook or because it didn’t actually use Facebook.
If the latter is the case, you could try my Facebook app at http://apps.facebook.com/lbpstages . It has over 700 users (with more than 40 or so active on any given day), and over 200 stages and reviews, along with features for finding stages based on the reviews. I’m trying to get even more reviews, but I need people to help with it. 
@Randy - no, I just don’t like the knockoff of the name and some of the FB style… It’s just not creative and could potentially get them into trouble down the road…
I actually already am on that app on FB under my real PSN name… It’s pretty decent though I dislike use of the term “stages” vs. “level” and I dunno if users should be able to rate their own levels 
. Very decent overall though the browse/search feature could use some work and maybe some aesthetic tweaking.
There is a popular review thread on LittleBigWorkshop and another blog lbpreviews.blogspot.com that have some level reviewers there which may pitch in… Decent enough reviews but I don’t think a forum/blog is the optimal way to present reviews as levels need to be more “discoverable” 
Thanks for the comments. I certainly agree that even though forums/blogs are useful for reviews, they don’t make stages very “discoverable”. That’s one of the main reasons I made the app. I also thought reviewers would like it, since it provides a nice single page where all of a reviewer’s reviews could be stored. I think part of the problem is that not every stage is on the app, so they’re hesitating to transition to it. That or they’re jerks.
I’ll look into the other stuff. Anything in particular you’d like to see in the browse/search feature? As for users rating their own levels, it was more for simplicity than anything else (since a lot of the site features don’t work if there are no ratings for a stage)... though perhaps I could factor out that user’s rating once another user rates the stage. Originally, I expected more people to rate stages, so I figured the vote by the stage creator would be factored out as noise anyway.
Thanks again for the interest.
@Randy - well don’t want to hi-jack the thread or anything (unless it’s your site )... The list all levels don’t seem to have any reasoning to their order - perhaps could be presented with multiple sortable columns (for date posted, rating, genre, etc…) Likewise the Search instead of depending on a specific PSNID/Level name input could additionally include browsing options to list levels rated X or above, of this genre, etc… ‘Course I’ve been a web dev for 12+ yrs so I always see room for improvement P.S. level is Sackboy’s Mayan Misadventures - feel free to look me up on FB!
The search feature works - I mean, you can search for the name of a level - its just the way it works. I’ve no idea how it fetches the results and you can’t delcare a direct match such as using quotes around a search term.
Doing a search for ‘Little Big Planet’ for example returns anything that’s big, little or planet and also returns things that are ‘plane’ or say, ‘lite’ (lit*). Very strange.
I think Sackbook could have been a bit more ambitious that using the facebook layout but then its named around faceBOOK itself. It was its features that were the most impressive thing, plus the fact that a regular web-dev could built it in a short space of time, with Sony having no equivalent of their own.
Hi guys, I just want to chip in a little about the limited featureset of Sackbook as everyone saw it last week. I had (and still have) loads of ideas for useful features, borrowing ideas (just like LBP said it would) from lots of networking and other Web 2.0 sites out there, but making them more suitable and useful for LBP users. I launched with only the minimum set of features needed for it to be useful to people as I didn’t want to pour my heart and soul into developing it further knowing that it was likely that it’d be taken down a week later (as happened.)
If it returns in its previous form, and if it’s still called Sackbook (I’m still fond of the name), the first task will be getting rid of the not-so-subtle reference to Facebook in the header. You’ll notice that’s the only Facebook-looking part of the site - this is on purpose so it’ll be quick and easy to replace.
Thanks for popping along Chris, we’re all big fans of what you managed to put together, here’s hoping you and Sony can work something out, like maybe giving you and others far easier access to the LBP data , and maybe even inspiring them to do something themselves.
