Credits Go To Original Writer.
The LittleBigPlanet experience starts with players learning about their character's powers to interact physically with the environment. There are obstacles to explore, bits and pieces to collect and puzzles to solve – requiring a combination of brains and collaborative teamwork. As players begin to explore, their creative skills will grow and they will be ready to start creating and modifying their surroundings – the first step to sharing them with the whole community. Creativity is part of the gameplay experience and playing is part of the creative experience. Players can make their world as open or as secretive to explore as they like. When it's ready, they can invite anyone within the LittleBigPlanet community to come and explore their patch -- or can go and explore everybody else's.
General Information:
- Console: PlayStation 3
- Media: Blu-Ray Disc (Rumor: PS Store Download)
- Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
- Developed by: Media Molecule
- Genre: Action
- Release Date: Q1 2008
- Players: 1-4 (Online 1-8 )
Box Art(not official):
Overview
The LittleBigPlanet experience starts with players learning about their character's powers to interact physically with the environment. There are obstacles to explore, bits and pieces to collect and puzzles to solve – requiring a combination of brains and collaborative teamwork. As players begin to explore, their creative skills will grow and they will be ready to start creating and modifying their surroundings – the first step to sharing them with the whole community. Creativity is part of the gameplay experience and playing is part of the creative experience. Players can make their world as open or as secretive to explore as they like. When it's ready, they can invite anyone within the LittleBigPlanet community to come and explore their patch -- or can go and explore everybody else's.
This genre-busting PS3 offering is turning with its quirky ragdoll, unique patchwork visual **** and revolutionary approach to level design. While you and three friends can simply tussle and hop through premade 2D stages, the game's true appeal lies in the ability to design and share your own levels. The goal with the game is to have users creating tons of new content that will continue to keep the game active long after release. Sony has confirmed that there will be a group of set levels ready to play out of the box -- and even a single-player offline mode for those who don't want to experiment with the community ideas and simply want to play it like they would a traditional platformer.
Characters:
Affectionately dubbed as "Sackboy" (or "Sackgirl") by Media Molecule developers; they're tiny little creatures that are able to run around the world's horizontally scrolling levels of the game, overcoming obstacles as they go. Using the controller, you're able to move your Sackboy around the levels, jump by pressing the X button, or grab onto items (or other Sackfolks) by pressing R1. Simple controls combine with cute design to make Sackboys adorable right from the get-go.
By default, Sackboy is made out of a drab, brown burlap material, but you'll have tons of ways to customize your personal Sackboy on the fly. By pressing the square button you bring up a menu where you can choose from different heads, body materials, and accessories. With just a few clicks of the X button, we were able to outfit our Sackboy with a fancy top hat, a superhero cape, a dandy Wyatt Earp moustache, and a pirate's hook hand.
Creation:
Creation couldn't be simpler: You and up to three pals all hop into an expansive 2D stage (although most levels feature three distinct planes) and start designing the layout in real time. The E3 demo allowed you to swap between five different stage backdrops on the fly -- the quaint English Garden (that's the one the GDC level used), a sun-parched desert, a spooky graveyard, a relaxing Zen garden, and a stark, THX 1138-****blank slate for you uppity avant-garde types.
Once players have selected their background and item types, the creation process begins. Each object is entirely physics-based too; so if a ball falls from the sky and lands on a hardwood floor then it will react just as it should (as will all objects). Once users have chosen what they need, they can further customize them by adding stickers, changing their position, or erasing parts of these objects entirely. Players can even put items together to create new working contraptions -- cars, carts, you name it. You can place as many objects as you like in the world.
In addition to the huge number of stickers that will be available when the game is released, players will be able to upload their own designs to their sticker albums for use on any object they create in the game. The game is even smart enough to have stickers wrap around 3D objects in an intelligent manner. These simple objects can easily turn into quite complex ones with the help of some simple helper parts and tools that greatly expand the depth of creation in the game. For instance, creating an object on the outside edge of another will cause them to merge when you finish their summoning, resulting in a shape that is the combined result of the two basic forms. As an example, the two Media Molecule developers quickly created a wooden snowman-like construct using only resized circles--you can resize and twist shapes in the world before you summon them by manipulating the right stick.
Another cool tool at your disposal is a "cut" tool that will let you remove sections of any object in the game. The cut tool comes in several shapes--square, circle, and triangle--and just like a "real" object, you can manipulate the size of a cut shape in order to remove exactly what you want. An easy example of the cut tool was a huge wooden block, which the developers sliced sections from, in order to create a makeshift staircase that the Sackboys could then climb to progress through the level. In our experimentation, we noticed that when cutting a hole in the middle of a fabric object, the game will intelligently "stitch" the remaining fabric around the new hole.
So what do you use all of this customization for? The easy answer is just to mess around and have a good time. The more compelling answer is to create objects you can share with your friends. Any object you create can be sent to a friend, who can then add on or subtract from it, and send it on to someone else, essentially creating an endless cycle of creativity as the object moves around from player to player. Developers showed off a couple of examples of objects created by Media Molecule staff simply using the shapes and tools found in the demo build--standout examples included a huge lumbering, mechanical dinosaur, and an absolutely mind-blowing binary adding machine made out of wood.
The best thing about this entire process, though, is that you can build entire worlds populated with funny gadgets and obstacles in minutes. LittleBigPlanet is one of those rare examples of finding something that really is limited only by your imagination. Expect plenty of awards for this one in '08. According to a Sony producer, someone fairly experienced with the game's level design tool could probably put together a level of the demo's size and complexity in a few hours.
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Credits go to original writer.
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