Archive: 3 posts

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Very interesting read... http://threespeech.com/blog/2008/11/none-of-us-feel-like-were-done-littlebigplanet-creator-alex-evans-on-the-future-of-lbp/ Finally hitting UK shelves on today, LittleBigPlanet is one of the most important PlayStation games ever released ? an unmissable collision of user-generated content, social gaming and good old fashioned platform fun. To celebrate, we grabbed an exclusive 15 minute chat with the game?s co-creator Alex Evans, interrogating him about the project?s early days, and where he sees the LBP machine going next. If you can tear yourself away from designing new levels for five minutes, here?s everything you need to know about Sackboy and his ever-evolving world? Was LittleBigPlanet one of those concepts that arrived in a flash of inspiration or was it an evolutionary process? It was evolutionary. When we started, we wanted to do what we call ?creative gaming?. There were five of us at Lionhead and we?d got a history in god games, and those sorts of sandbox-y but not directly creative games. We wondered if we could translate that into a console experience. We didn?t know how the hell you?d do that, we just sort of knew it's what we wanted to do. So absolutely, that was the sort of jumping off point. And then suddenly we had this opportunity to pitch to Sony, so we had a very short space of time to crystallise the ideas. And we all came at it from different angles ? my angle was, I wanted to do something like jamming [in a band], to make it multiplayer and make it feel like you?re with a bunch of friends messing around. And then Mark [Healey] was much more, ?how do I translate //my// pleasure in making games onto the screen?. So we all had these different approaches. And Dave [Smith], the lead physics guy, was like, ?I think that we need a really accessible game that young people and old people can play, and we need to bring in classic gaming mechanics like platforming?. So he was the guy who said, let?s make it a platformer, let?s not worry about editors and high barriers to entry - what if we made it like one of the oldest and simplest forms of gaming and then turned it into creative gaming. So we had this melting pot going on? Have you taken almost a pedagogical approach to developing the idea of creative gaming, or have you just approached this as you would any game? Our backgrounds are not in education at all, but it's not just games either. The art director is an ex-architect. About two-thirds of the team are super-experienced game developers and a third are complete neophytes, either from different backgrounds, or they were talented young gamers who wanted to be game creators. So we have this sort of odd mix, and architecture has been a big theme, music has been another big theme. We didn?t actually go at it from the educational angle at all, we just thought it could be quite a fun and visceral thing to play for a few hours, and for that process to have an outcome which is visible, which can be shown off. So it wasn?t education? how can I put this? I didn?t want to analyise the process of fun, I wanted more to just directly translate by gut instincts what we knew was enjoyable for //us// to do? How much were you influenced by the many physics toys available online ? stuff like Line Rider ? where there is no obvious ?end?, it's just about the joy of creation? The thing that Line Rider gave to me, personally, was ?give them an inch and they?ll run a mile.? Originally, Line Rider was just, draw a little black line and a sled will go down it, but people built these amazing Japanese woodcut-esque creations. And for me that?s what Line Rider is ? with the simplest of tools people will just go crazy and create the most unbelievable things. We?ve already had a marriage proposal built into a LBP level. There?s an amazing Radiohead music video ? even though the game has no facility for importing your own music, someone has built every single note of every single part of the tune and then constructed a visual story ? your character gets on to a sort of hot air balloon and floats through the story of the song as it plays ? all built physically. So that was the Line Rider inspiration. But inspiration came from lots of different prongs. Seeing social communities pop up on the web; a lot of people mention YouTube and MySpace but bizarrely Flickr was a bigger touchpoint for me because you see people enjoying photography at all levels. You?ve got professionals on there and you have people who?re just putting up their family pics. But the vibe in the community is really good. We were like, how can you turn that into a game? That?s one of my personal inspirations. In what ways do you think the game will evolve through its users? That?s a really good question. I used to have a blog, which thankfully has now died, and I used to rant about what made a good tool - because as a game programmer 70% of your success is down to how good your tools are to empower the rest of your team. So I had this obsession with good instruments, and also I have a music background; so you have Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar upside down, the guitar is an incredibly simple thing, and people just abuse it in so many different ways. So if we succeed with little big planet it will be because people use it in ways that we hadn?t expected. And for that reason? as part of game development, you have to funnel and you have to focus, so you say, we won?t do this for now, we won?t do that for now. You can see it in Apple products -they?re very stripped down, they?re very focused. We do the same thing because it's ultimately a piece of pop culture, it's meant to be neat. So what I?m really looking forward to is seeing these abuses happening ? although abuse is bad word because people think of it as derogatory. I have to find a better word for that! But people will extrapolate from what we thought was possible ? and then we can actually choose to support them. That?s the really exciting part for me, as a developer - we aren?t cut out of the loop at all. Sometimes people think UGC means the end of professional game development. But in the same way that blogging is no way the end of professional journalism or edited content, there?s still an opportunity, and we?re almost the purveyors, we?re the tool providers and that?s exciting to me ? we can help out different strands of the community.

2008-11-05 18:48:00 Author: supersickie Posts: 1366

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niceness

2008-11-05 20:10:00 Author: Plasmavore Posts: 1913

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Cool interview. Seems like a smart enough gent.

2008-11-06 23:36:00 Author: Pinkcars Posts: 380

Posts: 1077139    Threads: 69970    Members: 9661    Archive-Date: 2019-01-19

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