LBP: Honeymoon's over.

Down times 3

There's a reason I haven't been playing much LBP for the past week. I just can't seem to muster much enthusiasm for the game anymore. It's because of all this moderation business.

I understand Sony and Media Molecule need to cover their asses. Marvel's lawsuit against NCSoft over the City of Heroes character creator proves that even user generated content can be a touchy legal subject.

But it just seemingly goes against the spirit of LBP when I hear about all this corporate and legal stuff.

To make it all worse, quite possibly THE most inventive and unique user level so far, Azure Palace, was pulled. I just can't help but feel all that enthusiasm I had for creating things drain out of me.

A rep from Media Molecule has responded. But really. There's something broken here. MM and Sony need to figure this out before they lose their entire community. I know I'm not up to finishing my level anymore. Why should I when it could get pulled for no obvious reason?

LBP: When players die.

A few nights back my friend Mike and I were playing some user created LittleBigPlanet levels. We jumped into one of the Shadow of the Colossus tribute levels and we reach a part where we have to ride our sponge horse, Aggro, across a bridge. *Spoilers* The creator was obviously trying to emulate Aggro's pivotal fall down a chasm because as soon as we reached the end of the bridge it disappeared. Sponge Aggro falls into the spikes below, dragging me and Mike with him. Now in hindsight we were supposed to jump off at the last second. I could go on about how bad that was in level design terms, but that's an entirely different post.

What I'd like to focus on in this post concerns what happened after we respawned. Not only did the creator not put a checkpoint before the bridge scene but on our trekk back to the bridge to try again, we found that the bridge does not respawn. Not only that, but an entire portion of the level was missing. Obviously, the creator didn't expect anyone to die at this point in the level inspite of the entire lack of indication that the bridge was going to disappear.

It's a disturbing trend I've been seeing now and then in user levels. I've run into a similar problem while creating my own level. A section involves hanging from a sponge trapeze thing as shown in this blueprint I made at LittleBigWorkShop.com


If the player drags the trapeze sponge thing all the way to the other side and makes it, then all's well and we can move on. However if the player dies and spawns back on the left side of the fire pit...

Well, now we have some trouble, don't we? The player went back, but the trapeze sponge didn't follow them. At this point, you can expect the player to become frustrated, go back to their pod and never play your level again. Perhaps they will also leave your level a nasty rating.

But how do we resolve this? One way would be to make an emitter of the trapeze sponges, but then you've got to implement a complicated set of triggers going back and forth. Respawning a sponge when the player spawns and killing the sponges stuck on the other side.

A simpler solution is to attach elastic to the trapeze sponge's bar to pull it back when the player lets go of the sponge.


So we want the elastic to be really low strength. Strong enough to pull the sponge back but weak enough to not impede the player while they're pulling it across the hazard. LittleBigWorkshop's blueprint tool is interesting, but kinda rough. As you can see, it's hard to represent exact things like where to attach the elastic.

Social gaming in 2008

Internet and video games. Who woulda thought?

I'm playing Little Big Planet in ways I've never played games before. Ever.

No, I'm not talking about all that fancy creation mode stuff. I'm talking about turning on my PS3 and having at least 2 or 3 people I can play the game with. And this isn't some hardcore shooter where we all the planets have to align in order for us to have fun. I'm jumping into games with my friend and his "non-gamer" sister. My sister and her boyfriend(who happen to live in a different city than me). We're just casually moving through levels, having fun without even trying.

This experience is enabled by the online capabilities of these current gen consoles. The constant connection to the internet. Knowing what your friends are playing by glancing at the buddy list. Even before LittleBigPlanet launched, this connectedness of game consoles was setting my expectations. However inconsequential it might seem, seeing what your friends are playing and them seeing what you're playing has some sort of psychological hold on me.

Connectedness is even making me play PS2 games less. Loading up PS2 games on my PS3 causes the console to enter an emulation mode. Meaning no friend list capability. No one would know what I was doing. How horribly solitary.

Over the course of a few weeks last month, most of my PS3 owning friends had bought PixelJunk Monsters. Though the game had online leaderboards, there really wasn't a way to interact with everyone. LBP's release a few weeks later answered all of my prayers.

Comparing contemporary gaming to my middle school days of sinking hours into Final Fantasy or GTA 3 alone in the living room seems so primitive.

I know to anyone who owns an Xbox360 this must be news from 2 years ago. But my little clique of PlayStation fanboys over here is just now catching up.