Items tagged with 'Sony'
Media Molecule has a new job position available, yes, they’re looking for a ‘Level Designer’. No, that’s not a typo or a mistake, you could be coming up with level designs for the award-winning Guildford based studio, Media Molecule. Have you got what it takes? The job spec even states that “examples of design/gameplay work specifically built within LBP would a real bonus!”. No doubt that some of the most creative level designers from the LBP Community will be thinking long and hard about this job opportunity…
Main Duties
- Design Beautiful, innovative, challenging and fun levels.
- Collaborate with Programmers, specifying and integrating new tools and gameplay features and reporting bugs.
- Work closely with Artists and Sound Design specifying and integrating new assets.
- Liaise closely with Production to keep on track and in sync with the rest of the project.
- Communication with Quality Assurance to keep the game top notch and bug free.
- Create, collate and organise collectible libraries.
- Inspire the community with great examples of tools/feature applications.
Check out the full job spec over on the Media Molecule jobs page. You can keep up to date with the company’s latest positions too, on their main jobs page.
VG Chartz is reporting the latest Little Big Planet sales figures.
The good news is that Little Big Planet has sold over 1 million copies worldwide and sales over the past few weeks are on the up during the Christmas rush.
| Region | Japan | America | Others | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Sales | 0.09m | 0.50m | 0.50m | 1.09m |
| Week 1 | 49,839 | 124,434 | 176,050 | 350,323 |
| Week 2 | 16,163 | 184,185 | 95,408 | 295,756 |
| Week 3 | 8,598 | 60,597 | 70,812 | 140,007 |
| Week 4 | 5,863 | 38,516 | 69,251 | 113,630 |
| Week 5 | 4,358 | 40,075 | 84,393 | 128,826 |
| Week 6 | 3,381 | 55,715 | n/a | 59,096 |
Figures taken from VG Chartz December 12th 2008
Launching with a new IP during the Christmas period can be a risky business as there are always plenty of established AAA titles fighting for your dollar in the shops, so it's great to see that Little Big Planet has claimed its stake of the Christmas buying-blitz.
Obviously we absolutely love the game here on the Planetoid and we can't wait to see the new content and features coming to LBP over the coming months which will no doubt keep those new sack people joining our massive online community of FUN.
Still thinking of getting the game or know a friend who needs some gentle persuasion? Just £19.99 on Shopto.net.
The Independent Film Channel has teamed up with SCEA to give one lucky Happy Gadder out there a chance to win $5000, by creating a short film and submitting it to their Play Create Share contest.
Interestingly enough Little Big Planet is already secretly an awesome device for Machinima creation and short story telling, the Media Molecule trailers with city smashing monsters, or knights in armour saving damsels, being prime examples of existing works, and we were wondering when the first films would start to appear…
LittleBigPlanet is a new video game that celebrates the art and act of creation first and foremost. Play the game, create and customize your character and environment, and share what you’ve made with others.
In the same manner, The Play/Create/Share Short Film Challenge asks filmmakers everywhere to have more fun and let their imaginations run wild. Play in, create and share your unique world with us.
Show us what you got by creating a short film that pushes your creativity to the limit.
It’s time for Planetoid to start work on the Oscar winning short film based on real historical feudal Japan, and starring a guy who’s ability to change weapons in real time, will one day save the world as he strikes the attacking Giant Enemy Crab for Massive Damage.
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.
Less than a week after its first appearance on the web, Sackbook.com has been taken down at the request of Sony’s lawyers.
In a statement on the site, Sackbook‘s creator, Chris Warren, is surprisingly upbeat about the situation, saying:
8th December 2008:
As expected I’ve been asked by Sony’s Sacklawyers to take down Sackbook whilst they take a look at how the data is accessed to ensure everything is safe and lovely (it is, but they are right to make sure of such important things).Please keep your burlap fingers crossed that Sackbook can return in the not-too-distant future in some form or other. If you cross your toes too, there may even be added useful thingamabobs and fun doodahs to play with.
Sackbook launched last week and was built using the same (unencrypted) XML data which the game uses to fetch player and level information over the Internet. Initial users of the site were incredibly pleased with its key features, which included the ability to check level rankings, player rankings and access photos taken from in the game.
We were so impressed with Sackbook when it launched, we even wrote an article heralding it as the LittleBigPlanet social network that Sony should have built. We suspect that Sony is somewhat miffed that an individual could so easily create a site that overshadows their own community portals such as LittleBigWorkshop; by providing access to the data which players so eagerly want to access.
Use of the games XML data is supposedly unauthorised however, so the action being undertaken by Sony is perhaps understandable. Then again, quite why such a community focused game like Little Big Planet does not have an open API for the creation of community apps on devices such as iPhone or sites such as Facebook remains unknown. But lets hope that Sackbook has helped find a key to opening the shutters of Sony’s community windows.
Fingers crossed, gadders.
Azure Palace, one of Little Big Planets best loved community levels has been moderated. Again.
For the second time now, Azure Palace has been removed without any clue as to why. Speaking on GameFAQs, its creator says:
I finally got a reply from Sam over on the littlebigworkshop forums and I asked him if I could know exactly the reasons were for it being taken down, both the first and second time.
The response from Sam_Protagonist, Global Community Manager for Little Big Planet is as follows:
Hi David
I’d like to be able to give that information out, but at present due to the way that moderation works it is not possible to do so. We know where all the issues are with the system and it is being resolved, hopefully with more news very soon.
Sam
So. despite recent updates on the SCEA blog about the moderation system ‘evolving’, the system is still flawed by, presumably, griefers in the community and the current moderation process. This is hugely disappointing for the community.
Lets hope Azure Palace returns online for players soon, as it did the first time.
Via GameCyte
The SCEA PlayStation blog has been updated, giving us some tasty Little Big Planet usage stats. Love stats!
- 177,657 user generated
- 1,093,491 comments
- Story levels have been played online 36,661,881 times
- User generated levels have been played online 22,463,892 times
- 59,125,403 online levels plays in total
Their post also tried to answer some community questions. Here are some stats about their answers:
- Number of topics covered: 5
- Number of times ‘check back soon’, ‘stay tuned’, ‘more to come shortly’ used: 4
- Number of new, unanswered questions in the comments: Around 50, and rising.
But seriously, its good to see the stats and get an insight in to just exactly how many people are hammering those Little Big Planet servers. If you’ve been reading the interweb, you would already have seen the news about Play, Create, Share scores returning soon, be aware that more DLC is on the way and that the servers are stable.
Although no doubt if you’re in America, you’ll be interested in just exactly why the U.S PS Store didn’t get that Day-one rare costume T-Shirt (‘held back for evaluation’).
Perhaps the least interesting piece of information is that The level moderation process is something we’re continually improving. Well guys, it couldn’t really get any worse, right?
/sarcasm
Head on over to the post to read the full report.
With Little Big Planet, Media Molecule have created a game that truly embodies Phil Harrisons vision of so called ‘Game 3.0’. Tags, comments, photo tagging and bookmarking tools are all key elements of Web 2.0 which Media Molecule have seamlessly integrated in to Little Big Planet to make one of the biggest community-focused games to date.
So it was somewhat of a surprise to see that when Little Big Planet launched, there was no web based counterpart to fulfil the communities needs when out-of-game.
Today sees the arrival of a new community-built website that truly shows us what Sony should have created when producing a community site to support Media Molecule’s fantastic work developing the game.
The site is called Sackbook, an obvious play on Facebook, and welcome page tells us that “Sackbook helps you to connect and share with the sackpeople in your life”, and we think it’s really going to live up to that ideal…
You see, Sackbook pulls data live from the Little Big Planet servers and lets you view it right on your computer. Want to find out how many people have played your level whilst you’re sitting at your desk at work? Want to check how many hearts your level has had? Want to see the latest photos users have taken on your level? (yes, it is possible to get those screengrabs with user-tagging out apparently!) It’s all there. Whilst we think it’s fantastic that a community game like Little Big Planet can rely on its community to provide the ultimate tools through playing, creating and sharing, it’s also incredibly sad that this essential tool wasn’t already catered for.
So effective is its execution, Sackbook manages to make Sony’s own LittleBigWorkshop site seem somewhat lacklustre in comparison. Sony, we hope you’re listening because this really is the site you should have built.
Head over now to www.sackbook.com and sign-up to what is perhaps the ultimate LittleBigPlanet social network.
Since launch, residents of Little Big Planet will no doubt of noticed a few oddities in the game. Like, for example - why their Play, Create and Share scores remain at zero. Where are the scores for all that hard work and play!?
Score FAIL
Sam_Protagonist, Senior Community Development Manager posting on the Official PlayStation EU forums, shed some light on the feature earlier this week…
It’s not exactly broken, but it is deactivated at present.
Until we’re happy with server performance we’ve switched off a few online features, Play Create Share scoring being one, in order to help the service to remain stable. The good news is that we’re not far from reaching stability, so expect this to return soon. As soon as there’s an exact date for its return I’ll let you know.
That sounds reassuring. Or not.
It’ll be good to see it up and running in the game, although whether or not it will backwardly add all your previous scores for time spent playing, creating and sharing looks pretty unlikely.
A PlayStation community team lead has revealed on the Official PlayStation forums how it is possible to play levels you’ve created which have been moderated.
Community Team Leader, MusterBuster states:
I have a solution for you!
Can I ask you to restart your console, and do not log in to the PlayStation Network.
Whilst offline, enter LittleBigPlanet and edit the level on My Moon - then save it on to a different slot.
Log back in, and re-publish
So there you go. Sony moderating levels and then Sony telling you how to get around it. Thank goodness there are dedicated community support staff around like MusterBuster to help out the more unfortunate of us. Top marks for Community Support MusterBuster!
If you’re still having problems with this, once your level is copied using the method above, you can save your level as an object and save to your library before placing it in a new level. If you have a very large level, you may need to save sections as objects, but both methods should work for re-publishing your content.
Naturally, we wouldn’t have to do this if levels were not being moderated in their rather heavy handed yet mysteriously uninformative way.
SCEA has announced a new LBP online space called the LittleBigWorkshop.
Imagine a place where all LBP players and creators can gather to share their experiences and ideas; a place where you can plan your creations with special tools and connect with other LBP fans to collaborate and share ideas; a place to show off and demonstrate your greatest achievements, with the ability to teach others in CREATE and SHARE; a location where you can access everything LBP, including tutorial videos, user-generated content, and etc…
Along with standard stuff such as video media and wallpaper downloads, the workshop will also encourage creativity by providing users with some interesting tools. Amongst the tools is a blueprint level design assistant, which will allow you to sketch out your level ideas before making them. The workshop also will allow users to share videos and imagery of their creations to inspire one another and show off. Read more about the LittleBigWorkshop on the SCEA LBP news site.
