Items tagged with 'Media Molecule'
LittleBigPlanet has today been awarded a Platinum Sales status by industry group ELSPA, meaning the title has now sold over 300,000 units in the UK.
300,000 units in the UK alone, for a new IP launching during the busy Christmas period - is really great news. It comes just a few weeks after it was revealed that sales in North American had reached 610,000.
Christmas is always a competitive time of year to launch a game. Recent sales figures for multi-platform titles Mirrors Edge and Dead Space - both also new IP’s, show they’ve shifted just over 1 million units last year. LittleBigPlanet has surged past 1.3 million unique users playing online and is rumoured to be at the 2 million sales mark worldwide. An impressive feat for a new IP, exclusive to a single platform.
Via EDGE Online
The sneaky observant 20:20 vision folks over at the Playstation Lifestyle blog noticed something special in the background of one of the photos on the Media Molecule Flickr Stream - a big whiteboard with what appears to be the cheese patch release schedule.
The text doesn't tell us *much* more than we already knew, and knowing this industry, this is about as reliable as that guy that stood you up last year, HOWEVER, and it's rare for us to warrant the use of all caps like that, the board does contain some UBER SECRETS. See there we go again.
| Patch number | Patch name | Patch type | ? | ? | ? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TBC | Jarlsberg • 2000 AD |
Data | Legal | - | - |
| 1.09 | Edam • Priority Bug Fixes |
Code | n/a | In test | n/a |
| TBC | Cornish Yarg • Tutorials • Online Create |
Code | 23 January 28 January |
End Jan? | |
| TBC | Leerdammer • (TCP/IP) |
Code | TBC | TBC | TBC |
| TBC | Stinking Bishop • Arcade Pack |
TBC |
If this board is to believed, Online Create is scheduled to appear along with Cornish Yarg, officially scheduled for mid-March, and some new previously unknown patches have appeared.
The new patches are named Jarlsberg, a mild cow's-milk cheese with large irregular holes, which appears to contain something related to British Sci-Fi Comic 2000AD, and Stinking Bishop, a soft washed-rind cheese, that will contain something known as the "Arcade Pack".
One interesting note is that just out of sight we can see 1.08, which is listed as a data pack rather than a code pack, a patch we know contained only costumes. The 2000AD Jarlsberg patch is also listed as a data patch hmmmmmmm.
Your guesses are as as good as ours, but many, many things spring instantly to mind as to what these patches could contain, especially for the Arcade Pack - leave your thoughts in the comments!
Many thanks to everyone who sent this in - Barnsey313, Stalking Silence, CJSgamer, and MrGrey from LittleBigLand.
[UPDATE]
Media Molecule have now removed the photo from their photo stream, adding it to their private collection. However, you can see the original photo of 'super-serious' Media Molecule Art Director Kareem Ettouney here. For camera meta-data nerds, the photo was taken on January 23rd at 18:21 with a Panasonic DMC-LX3 at a shutter speed of 10/500 at f/2.8, 400 iso, although that information is truly gratuitous.
Rex Crowle, the Graphic Design guru behind much of LittleBigPlanet’s art style, has hailed TV artist Tony Hart, who sadly died last week .
Rex Crowle (Photo taken by Rob Logan for South London Today)
We’re not worthy!
Rex wrote a lovely piece about Tony Hart on the Media Molecule blog a few weeks back, but in a new interview with South London Today, Rex talks further about Tony, his influence on LittleBigPlanet and how moving it was to finally meet Tony Hart at the launch party for the game. Rex says:
The spirit of Little Big Planet springs from Tony’s belief that anything can be used to create art.
Read more about Rex’s thoughts in the full article.
Multiple reports from the field have arrived in Planetoid Central this evening to tell us that patch 1.08 has hit the servers, three weeks earlier than expected. This patch, nicknamed Edam by Media Molecule (at least we assume this is Edam, it could be an unknown cheese!), should contain a whole bunch of bug fixes, some of which are fairly major ones that have been causing trouble left, right, and center for the last few weeks.
Actual content is so far unconfirmed - Let’s hope everything is fixed now though, huh?
The outlined plans for this patch are listed below, let us know what is and isn’t included!
Edam contains a set of bug fixes and is currently in testing. Specifically the fixes are:
- Failed to save profile’ message not being displayed when a users profile is full.
- Object Capture Bug: switch connectors being deleted when an object is captured.
- Failed to load profile issue: where the user is thrown out to the XMB due to a texture that is not registered in their profile being present in their pod.
- Text not displaying in the text chat window.
- Slow rewind due to moderation check.
- Save file corruption which caused the game to crash when placing any object in an emitter in any level.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
Update 1: It looks like this patch could just be related to the forthcoming availability of the God of War costume pack, and not as we all hoped the much needed changes to the game. It’s waaaay past our bed time here on the Planetoid, hopefully the morning will bring with it some clarification!
Update 2: We can confirm that this patch is 13Mb and we notice that it has re-arranged selected content in the LittleBigStore. This screenshot shows how the Kratos’ costume now appears for players who’ve already downloaded it (the God of War pack icon showing the three costumes no longer appears to players who’ve not already downloaded it). This makes sense as the Kratos costume and God of War pack are out on Thursday.
We’ve heard reports of some players still having problems with LBP, so we’re still not 100% sure that the patch is Edam - we’ll report back when we hear confirmation.
Update 3: This patch has been confirmed as a content-only patch, installing the latest costume textures (required for players to see other people online who are using the latest DLC costumes). It’s *not* Edam.
You may have noticed by now that Media Molecule name their patches after cheeses, the last one being called Roqueforte and the one before that Emmental. Today Mm have posted a look at their cheeseboard, a pungent selection of forthcoming patch snacks, the first of which, Edam, we should see some time in February and features some quite major bug fixes. Cornish Yarg, a cheese described as having a creamy and soft outside and a crumbly centre, will include new creative abilities - could this include the much desired image import tool? We certainly hope so!
Edam contains a set of bug fixes and is currently in testing. We are hoping for this to be out into the world by mid February (fingers crossed). Specifically the fixes are:
* Failed to save profile’ message not being displayed when a users profile is full.
* Object Capture Bug: switch connectors being deleted when an object is captured.
* Failed to load profile issue :where the user is thrown out to the XMB due to a texture that is not registered in their profile being present in their pod.
* Text not displaying in the text chat window.
* Slow rewind due to moderation check.
* Save file corruption which caused the game to crash when placing any object in an emitter in any level.Cornish Yarg contains many fabulous things, most excitingly new creative abilities – woo!! This will be a big delivery and so we want to make sure that it gets to you without any bugs and so we are planning very extensive testing which may involve some of you guys (more details out soon). This has only just started the testing process which usually takes 6-8 weeks minimum. Further announcements will be made in February.
Leerdammer: This delivery will really help people who are experiencing issues with lagging/packet loss. This improvement is still in development, which means it will be out after Cornish yarg but we aren’t sure when, rest assure Amy is hard at work. Announcements will be made throughout feb.
With no mention of a patch coming closer than February, we wonder what today’s scheduled server maintenance will bring… stay tuned!
Peter Molyneux, head of Lionhead Studios, and ex-boss man of several people from the Mm start up team, has nominated LittleBigPlanet as the most creative innovation, in C&binet’s review of the creative economy in 2008. The report states:
“LittleBigPlanet has outstanding creative vision. It’s from a British start-up studio and is one of the defining titles on Japan’s Sony PS3.”
C&binet - Creativity and Business international network - is a not-for-profit network which links the international creative and commercial communities to inspire new ideas and opportunities, demonstrate the economic power of creativity and help shape the world’s creative economy.
Peter Molyneux is listed as one of C&binet’s ambassadors, along with ex Xbox honcho Jay Allard.
Thanks Gi.biz.
This month’s Game Developer magazine contains a look back at LittleBigPlanet by the key members of Media Molecule, reflecting on the development process, what they thought went well, and what they thought went… not so well.
The four page article is a fascinating look into the processes, ideas and company culture at Media Molecule, and gives us some detailed insights into their working methods. Below are a few of the points brought up by Siobhan Reddy, the executive producer of LBP. There are a whole bunch more of in the magazine itself, which should be on shelves now, and a digital version can be purchased here for $3.95.
• Pop-it’s accessibility
Pop-it is the name of the in-game editor. There was a time when pop-it was not a single editor but was a set of tools, a paintbrush for painting, a hair dryer gun to blast away material to sculpt, a decoration placement tool, a paint scrubber, and so on.
We had the project greenlighted with pop-it like this, but afterward, it was one of the first areas to evolve. Initially, we didn’t know how versatile the game was going to be or how we would feel about the editor, but as time went on and the conceptbecame more concrete, we became more confident that people would want a more focused editing experience that prioritized functionality over “cuteness.” We quite literally went back to the drawing board. Our new design became a pre-visualization video, which we later tried out in the game.
Making this decision marked a shift in pop-it in that we now expected people to be able to create bigger and more complex things. Between December and May (2007) the pop-it design was worked through until we rested upon the “stamping” concept we finally shipped with. Back then, this was all happening at thesame time that the team was working out what they wanted to make! The switches (basically cause-and-effect nodes that the player can use to construct mechanisms) were the last big feature to be added into creation toolset, and this unlocked the game design enormously. Creating pop-it was a massive job, and one that had constantly moving goal posts. Amazingly, it was primarily coded by one man, Jonny Hopper.
• Molecular structure
A key part of our company culture is to acknowledge that the production plan doesn’t belong to the production team—it belongs to the creator of the work. Each member must make his or her plan visible to everyone else so that we all know what’s going on and can understand how it affects other areas of the game. Once the team grew to be more than 10 people, we started using a structure that we call “molecules,” which was inspired by Valve’s cabal structure and our own experiences. We agreed that our workforce should be organized into small—and ideally cross-pollinated—molecules: pop-it, character, levels, online technology, and player experience, while our audio designer was included in every molecule as well.
Members changed over time, depending on who was working on what. Some people were in two or three molecules at a time, and each molecule works slightly differently, with the only requirement being that their plans need to be visible and shared. Early on we established something we called Friday features. On Fridays, people show the work they created during the week. This allows the whole team to see what’s going on and helps us end each workweek on a high note.
•Settling on servers
We spent a long time talking with Sony about how to proceed with the server technology to support the online components. We had proposed a LittleBigPlanet -specific solution, but it was rejected because, we were told, improving an existing tried-and-tested server would be safer than relying on an entirely new server that would be a perfect match, but would require a lot of testing and not map well to Sony’s process. As a result, a whole section of the game had to be managed and developed collaboratively between Sony and Media Molecule. The launch has been rocky, but that said, the team working on the online components has worked incredibly hard to support the huge amount of online content that has been generated to date.
•Building a studio and making a game at the same time
Our focus was often split between building the game and establishing the studio. We recently conducted some team surveys and learned that there were a lot of things that worked well enough when we were a very small team, but broke down as we became bigger and busier. These issues ranged from the trivial to the serious: employees not knowing who to get direction from, starting meetings on time, making visible the reasons people failed to come to work, office space not being used efficiently, inconsistency in work-life balance—the list could go on!
There is an expectation from the team, and a good one, that every area of the company be the best it can be. We underestimated the amount of support we needed to ship LittleBigPlanet and run the company to its best simultaneously.
Those of you with good memories may recall that Alex Evans was due to appear at the Wired store in New York at the beginning of December to deliver a little talk about LittleBigPlanet, maybe you were even lucky enough to have attended… For the rest of us, who were several thousand miles away at the time, Wired has kindly posted a 15 minute video of the event to their Game|Life blog.
In the video Alex discusses the origins of LBP, showing some footage of the proof of concept demo video they used to pitch the game to Sony, and showing again the origins of the little Yellowhead costume. He then goes on to discuss where the concept of the game came from, why user generated content is important, and Mm’s plans for LitteBigPlanet 2. Thanks Offworld.
This image perfectly sums up the last 24 hours of mayhem in the LBP community. EPIC.
Mm have really opened the Little Big flood gates in the last 48 hours; with two updates, 1.06 and 1.07, both packed with features, a festive construction kit, and a game changing Metal Gear Solid pack with levels, costumes, a paintgun, and new trophies announced for next week.
So just when we thought the ceaseless tidal wave of information had brought enough joyous havoc into our lives, and we were ready to have a bit of a relaxing drink or two… suddenly we noticed those merry folks at Mm returned to the internet again to throw some awesome Metal Gear Solid: Paintinator posters and box art mockups into our overfilled laps.
Click through for loads more of these…
Most of the guys and girls at Mm will surely be heading off for a well deserved Christmas break from today, meaning there can’t be any more… surely? There’s just no way our tiny minds could hold any further glee, and we might see some serious injuries up here on the Planetoid should this torrent continue.
Thank you Mm, a truly awesome couple of days for LBP, have an excellent inevitable Christmas booze-up tonight, we’ll raise a glass to you all!
If you’re one of the many people hoping for a Little Big Present from Santa this year, then maybe you’re already planning all the crazy levels you’re going to make. If however you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed and confused at the very thought, then you should head over to Game Daily, who found the time to speak to Mm founders Mark Healy and Alex Evans to gather 11 pro tips on how best to go about making a level in LittleBigPlanet.
GD: Does not having a PlayStation Eye camera severely limit what you can achieve?
MH: No, not at all. Bear in mind that you can use the existing stickers in cunning ways (just like painting with pictures!), then take a picture of your creations with the in game camera to create your own stickers. The system is massively versatile with or without a camera.
Head over to Game Daily and become enlightened!
Games Industry.biz is reporting that LBP has climbed from 29 to 16 in the UK’s all formats games chart, an increase of 58%.
Just a few days ago LBP soared up, up and beyond 1.1 million sales worldwide, and after winning so many awards this year, including EDGE magazines BEST GAME EVAH 2008 - though can anyone blame those Christmas shoppers storming retailers to stuff LBP in to their Christmas stockings?
Well, we certainly can’t blame them.
Little Big Planet has bagged a massive 3 awards in old time hardcore gaming magazine EDGE‘s 2008 awards. Media Molecule also gain an award bringing the grand total to an award-storming 4.
The awards appear in January’s edition of the magazine in the UK, and the game picks up Best Game, Best Innovation, Best Visual Design with Mm picking up Best Developer. The news comes just after Media Molecule rode off with the Studio of the Year award from the Spike 2008 Video Game awards with LBP also picking up the Best PS3 Game award.
The full list of EDGE awards is as follows:
Best game:
- LittleBigPlanet - winner
- GTA IV
- Fable II
Best Innovation:
- LittleBigPlanet - winner
- NXE
- Left 4 Dead
Best Visual Design
- LittleBigPlanet - winner
- Street Fighter IV
- Far Cry 2
Best Audio Design:
- Dead Space - winner
- GTA IV
- No More Heroes
Best hardware:
- Xbox 360 - winner
- PS3
- Wii
Best Publisher:
- Microsoft Game Studios - winner
- Electronic Arts
- Sony Computer Entertainment
Best Online Experience:
- Left 4 Dead - winner
- LittleBigPlanet
- Gears of War 2
Best Developer:
- Media Molecule - winner
- Criterion Games
- Rockstar North
EDGE magazine is well known for its hard-line, unforgiving reviews so it comes as no surprise that a truly excellent game like Little Big Planet passes their high standards with flying colours.
The only award the LBP was nominated for, but didn’t win - was the Best Online Experience and considering the hiccups from the games launch, it’s perhaps understandable that LBP missed out to zombie kill-a-thon Left 4 Dead.
Another huge congratulations goes out to Media Molecule and their clearly excellent product, Little Big Planet.
