Little Big Planet - Game of the Year version out NOW!

[GTAce]

LOL I love the freebies. 8)

[masteratt]

Man that sackboy up turkey's head thing is a bit....hmmm lol

[cliffbo]

a few bits of information from MM in the OPM

gravity change coming
wind change coming
and probably a painting ap

[GTAce]

gravity change coming
wind change coming

[err_ok]

gravity change coming
wind change coming
and probably a painting ap

Awesome!

[cliffbo]

they are also working on new features to make other game type possibility... i suppose he means triggers, pistons and stuff like that

[Luis]

First post updated. Thank you once again, Raitei!

[Raitei]

the game is 19.62 at simplygames now

[cliffbo]

LittleBigPlanet Has Over 600k User-Made Levels
Keane Ng posted on 20 Mar 2009 8:14 pm
keane ng, littlebigplanet, playstation 3, sony, user-generated content
image

According to Sony's latest figures, Media Molecule's do-it-yourself platformer has more than 600,000 user-made levels.

Whether or not Sony and Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet has had the epochal success its creators and supporters were ascribing to it before its release is a matter of opinion, but Sony's most recent numbers show that, regardless of quality, LittleBigPlanet's user-generated content certainly has quantity in spades. To date, the game has more than 600,000 user-made levels.

Those 646,135 levels, according to Sony, are created at the rate of 35,373 every week, churned out at a breakneck pace by the 1,934,700 folks in the LittleBigPlanet online community.

Nice to know that people are flexing their creative muscle, though I'd wager that probably not every level is worth playing. There have been plenty of remarkable user creations, though, like LittleBigContra, a bit-by-bit recreation of Konami's NES classic. And who can forget that one guy who popped the question to his girlfriend via a LBP level and is even getting married in the game. That Sackboy marriage will be awful heartwarming, I have to admit.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...er-Made-Levels

[masteratt]

Oh man getting the "Get 50 people to play your level" trophy is getting harder and harder now lol

Good to see people are digging in.
However is it me or is 1,934,700 people going online not very encouraging for PSN?
Didn't LBP sell near 3mil?

[Kiwi]

Having 2 million people join PSN through just one game is pretty impressive, you can't expect every person who buys the game to have the internet. By those numbers, it's two thirds, which I think is pretty good.

[cliffbo]

Oh man getting the "Get 50 people to play your level" trophy is getting harder and harder now lol

Good to see people are digging in.
However is it me or is 1,934,700 people going online not very encouraging for PSN?
Didn't LBP sell near 3mil?

Having 2 million people join PSN through just one game is pretty impressive, you can't expect every person who buys the game to have the internet. By those numbers, it's two thirds, which I think is pretty good.

LBP has sold around 2.5m copies. to have 1,934,700 of them online is simply astonishing... and it can only get better

[Viper]

It's at just over 2 million in sales. Those 1.9 million with accounts are not a 1:1 with sales. Duplicates, US/Euro/Jap accounts, brother/sister accounts, people who rented the game, bought it used, borrowed it from a friend, etc...

You can't judge sales via accounts. For instance, CoD4 has more accounts than actual sales.



The number of user made levels is damn impressive though.

[frosty]

i personally have 2 accounts i publish levels with.

[cliffbo]

Little Big Planet community grows to 'nearly 2 million'

* By Tom Magrino, GameSpot
* Posted Apr 2, 2009 1:30 am GMT

Sony and Media Molecule's highly customizable platformer almost reaches milestone five months after launch; 725,000 user-generated levels created.

The promise of Media Molecule's Little Big Planet from its beginning has been an open sandbox in which users can explore any number of level creation and customization options. And, it would appear, Little Big Planet owners have taken their cue. Sony Europe announced today that 725,000 user-generated levels have been created for the PlayStation 3-exclusive title.

Sony also announced today that "nearly 2 million players worldwide have joined the Little Big Planet community since its launch in November 2008." The publisher did not delineate the specifics of what that figure entails and did not indicate if more than one player can become a member of the community using a single copy of the game. Sony had not responded to requests for clarification as of press time.

Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer said in January at this year's Consumer Electronics Show that Little Big Planet had sold 1.3 million units worldwide. The well-rated platformer has also received a number of awards this year, walking away from last week's Game Developers Choice Awards with accolades for Best Game Design, Best Technology, Best Debut Game, and the Innovation Award.

For more on the game, check out GameSpot's video review below.

http://www.gametab.com/news/2936412/

[curryking1]

That's great. I find it more important that there are probably over 10,000 levels that are worth playing for one or more reasons each. There's really no way to experience all of LBP... there's always new stuff. I haven't played it in over one or two months. I know when I pop it back in there's gonna be so many cool levels I haven't tried.

I'm kind of just waiting to get home to play it too. I now have three controllers so I should be able to play with three people any time I want now instead of just two

[gnznroses]

LittleBigPlanet for PS3 for $25 + $3 s&h
http://dealnews.com/Little-Big-Plane...-h/294663.html

[Fillibuster]

^Nice. Ordering right now!

[Raitei]

it's expensive

LBP around £16 at Zavvi online :P

£9 offer finished

[cliffbo]

i'm putting this here because i feel the LBP forum is not getting much traffic and think that perhaps the occasional reminder of this game and it's sheer innovation may inspire more visits:

The Future of Little Big Planet
Media Molecule's co-founder drops loads of LBP revelations, including a level-sharing web hub, upcoming DLC, and PSP version details.

By Andrew Hayward

It's been more than six months since the release of Little Big Planet, and while we've seen a steady flow of downloadable costumes and creation kits, as well as word of a PSP version, we're still waiting for the next big evolution of the game and its community. We caught up with Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans at the Nordic Game Conference in Malmö, Sweden this week, and he revealed a number of exciting new features coming soon to LBP, including a web-based portal to advertise created stages, an ongoing beta test for new features, and a slate of downloadable content that he likens to the Burnout: Paradise bikes add-on.

1UP: Can you give us a preview of your presentation for the Nordic Game Conference?

Alex Evans: It's about a thing called Conway's Law. Basically, any system you make ends up reflecting how you made it and I'll be talking about how that affects developers and communities. The example I give is: You've got your tools programmer, your gameplay guy, your tech guy, and your art department, right? If these guys hate each other, they don't talk. Then you end up with a game design that reflects those personal relationships, and this guy, in 1968, sort of worked this out and stated it.

One thing I realize in retrospect with LBP is the way people interact with the game is different. There are creators, and there are players; there are kids, and there are old people. And the tools we give them to either get along with each other or not get along with each other completely change the feel of the community and the feel of the game. That's really what the talk's about, generally speaking.

I'm personally doing online coding at the moment, even though I'm a graphics coder, because I'm really excited about changing the way you interact with LBP, especially with the user-generated content.

1UP: What kinds of online programming are you working on?

AE: Everything, low-level to high-level. But one of the things that's coming out shortly, one of the things I'm most excited about, relates to every level that you publish.

The biggest question that we get is, "How do I advertise my level?" Right now, our system is like the iTunes Store. In iTunes, if you're on the top 25 page, you get insane sales, and if you're anywhere else, you don't. In LBP, if you're in that first page of results, then you get more exposure. We've done loads of tweaks to it, and we've made it so your level has to have been published recently to get a bit of turn. But I think it gets way more interesting when people can effectively advertise their creations outside of the PSN world; outside of the PlayStation 3.

So the first thing we're working on is a website. It's like a portal page which you are given every time you publish a level. You get your own, and it's unique to you; it's your level. It has embedded links to fan sites, and we're releasing an application programming interface (API) for fan sites to use to link into this as well. So you'll see leaderboards, comments, photos -- like a snapshot of your level -- and, ultimately, YouTube video links.

But what's really awesome about it is on that page, you can just click to say, "I like this level, I'd like to play it later," and it queues it up for you in the background on the game server. The next time you boot up the game, you'll see that level promoted and you can play it. So, creators will be given a cool way of advertising.

It benefits everyone; "Play, Create, Share" is the marketing/PR thing we came up with, but it also describes some of the ways the community is split up. It benefits players because, hopefully, it'll improve the quality of the results. And it benefits creators because rather than going on forums and saying, "Please search for my level," they can just say, "Here's a link." When people drive traffic to that site, we track those numbers, and use it in the computation of how hot the level is on the PS3. Then I hope it will really benefit a group that I call the "LBP journalists" -- the sharers and aggregators. People can run blogs on "The cool shit I saw this week" and post links, and it will have a real, noticeable effect.

I think we'll show more at E3, but we have some really powerful ideas I haven't talked about as well, like different ways of getting information to the PS3. The URL web link is just one way of advertising a level, but we'll also have ways of using the PlayStation Eye to bring in the real world. We've got sticker grabbing now, but there's more stuff coming. We're trying to find different ways to engage with LBP beyond just booting up the game and playing it. It's going to be really cool.

1UP: Now this website you're talking about, will that be like a social network? Are people going to register and interact with each other?

AE: We're actually trying to take a really open approach. We're currently working with Sony on the LittleBigPlanet.com site, which is going to be a hub for everything. But the site I was talking about, I think of it more like a portal page. In the web world, it's all about the API; there's a Flickr API and a Google Maps API that both let people do mash-ups on their page.

I'd love to see -- although it's completely pointless -- a mash-up where you have a Google Map of Craft Earth with all of the levels on it. That's completely doable, right? But we're not going to do that -- we'll do a portal page, which will work like TinyURL. Your level will be something like "littlebigplanet.com/p793," or your user profile will be "tt79" or whatever. You can go there, but it will also embed links to anyone who has registered as a fan site with us and uses our API. You'll be able to launch from that portal page into some guy's mash-up that finds YouTube videos of that level, or another guy who's doing a maps mash-up. So I'm actually most excited about the site becoming more of a jumping-off point to community-built stuff.

1UP: How quickly are you guys are going to try to get that out?

AE: As soon as possible. It's beta testing at the moment, so it's just a question of ironing out the kinks. We're actually starting another beta trial of the game as well; our goal is to set that rolling then start pushing new features out to the beta community. We'll have some press on there and fans as well, and part of that group will have access to the website. I believe the beta trial comes this summer.

1UP: Is gaining access to that going to be like the pre-release beta, where you had codes on websites and the PlayStation blog?

AE: Yeah, that's it. It'll probably be smaller scale than the original beta, because I don't know how it'll go yet. We'll grow it, but it's starting smaller. With the pre-release beta, we quickly went pretty big, but we didn't have much time to test stuff out. This time it's less about testing the online and more about giving the vocal minority a chance to see what's coming and to give us their feedback. You get special costumes in the main game if you're in the beta trial, and those people will effectively become lieutenants in the community, I hope.

1UP: What types of fan levels do you personally like the most?

AE: The quick ones. Basically, I'm a racing game junkie, and the reason is Burnout Revenge...or maybe Burnout 3. I love those short blast games. But the geeky side of me looks at the calculators, and the tic-tac-toe game with a language select screen at the start and all this madness. So those are the two: the quick-to-play and the insane. I call them the insane French and Japanese levels, which is verging on racist. But it does always seem to be French and Japanese people who can make these incredible machines, you know?

There are so many features we axed from the first game, and I'm kind of getting around making some announcements by just talking about stuff we axed from the first one. You know how you have the badges on the Earth? You used to be able to put a badge in your level, which would allow it to link to another level so you could make a huge chain. And if you could start linking stuff together, you could do a MUD or something insane like that.

1UP: So, Little Big Planet is only "the first game"?

AE: Oh, I mean, you know. [Laughs] No comment! I will say that the entire team is working on LBP; 100% of Media Molecule is LBP all day, every day. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm announcing a sequel, because there are some big DLC packs coming up. And I mean big in a "loads of features" kind of way.

To take the Burnout analogy again, with the Burnout bikes EA basically introduced a whole new vehicle type. The Metal Gear Solid add-on pack for us was a really big success in terms of how it went down with the community, and also what it enabled the creators to do. So I see the next big DLC pack as not just designed to be a bunch of good levels -- which it will be -- but it will also give creators a whole bunch of new tools that allow them to broaden the kind of levels they can make. There're a lot of people working on that kind of thing -- as well as something else.

1UP: Let's talk about the PSP version -- was that something that was always part of the plan, or was that borne from the PS3 version's success?

AE: It was always part of the plan. In fact, originally we pitched to Sony the idea of doing two PSP projects around LBP, and then we realized that we didn't even have the capacity to do one. So it's actually being done out of Sony's Cambridge studio, and we're just advising them a bit.

It was really fun playing the early builds. They got up and running fast, and they've done some nice simplifications to the game -- I don't want to steal their thunder by announcing stuff, but you should talk to them about the changes they've made to the Sackboy's handling and weight. It could be seen as technical, but I actually think that some of the levels that they have are really looking nice. We always planned to do a PSP version, but the nature of it kind of changed, and I guess the success meant it came faster.

1UP: You said that everybody at Media Molecule's working on Little Big Planet right now, but do you see your company moving forward with any non-LBP projects in the near future?

AE: Sure, I mean eventually, absolutely. I think there's a point where you begin to burn out. And we're at the point with LBP where there was so much stuff we had to cut, so many ideas on the board, that we can easily satisfy ourselves on LBP for a while yet. I'd say a couple of years. I'd say that the next year, at least, we're totally focused on LBP, but I know that the team, creatively, has non-LBP things that we can do. So yeah, we'll definitely not just be doing LBP for the rest of our lives.

But for now, it feels like there's enough that we can put in. We do features every Friday where someone has to show off what they've added to the game, and that still gets people excited. When that starts falling off, maybe we'll do something else. But man, there's some good stuff coming.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager....=0&cId=3174422