Alex Evans, Mark Healey of Media Molecule

Keynote: Media Molecule, Little Team, Big Ideas

The second talk of the day was also the first keynote of the conference. Alex and Mark chose a rather original form to their talk. Instead of running a bunch of slides behind them, they decided to showcase their upcoming “Little Big Planet” game in a quite unique way. So they designed their presentation to fit in the game.

And that was beautiful. And fun.

Figure 3: Alex Evans and Mark Healey running a special level of Little Big Planet

The goal of this keynote was to present the game and the design process behind it.

Little Big Planet (or LBP for short) is heavily based upon the idea of user-generated content. There is a good reason for that: when the two veterans decided to create the company Media Molecule, they didn’t want to build a big development team. Even in small teams you’ll get friction between people – these frictions would be even worse in a bigger team. But in the PS3 era, the strength of a small team is inherently limited so they designed the game to overcome these limits.

The base idea is: if we cannot do it, let’s empower the players so they’ll be able to create their own levels. Every aspect of the game can be customized by the user, from the avatar costumes to the textures of the background elements.

But giving to users the freedom to create their own world has its own drawbacks. The first one is that if you give many tools to the player, he will experience many difficulties before he’ll be able to do something interesting. If you want to avoid that you have to make the tools very simple to use. From what I saw during their keynote, they succeeded: repainting the background is as easy as selecting the repainting tool, moving a cursor on screen and pressing a button to apply the texture. Changing the costume is even simpler: you can select the costume parts individually or you can ask for a random costume. Placing a prop in the game level is also quite easy: select it in the corresponding panel and place it where you want. That’s all. Of course, since the game is multiplayer, you can build and decorate levels in groups.

The same philosophy is responsible for a prominent part of the gameplay. While the game is using 3D technology, the player is constrained in a small band on the screen. This is really a gameplay choice: when they began to think about how the game should feel, they tried pure 2D, pure 3D and then (after a few fights) settled on this 2.5D environment. The result improved the quality of the levels.

Honestly: LBP seems to be a really interesting game. The physics are smooth and fun, the graphics are stunning and the game is to be extended with user-generated content and other downloadable content. During the QA session, someone asked to Alex and Mark what was their opinion about questionable content. Of course, this is probably going to be a huge issue. While Mark is eagerly waiting for any user-made content – be it classical or questionable – Alex is more pragmatic. Of course, some moderation will take place to avoid this kind of issue (Mark told me later than Sony is building a team to take care of that specific problem).

Last bit of information we got during the keynote: according to Mark Healey, LBP planet is going to be released in October’08.

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