Awesome stuff

one question tho.. is it october yet :)

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How about now?

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and now?

I am sure this letter will get lost in the shuffle, ignored or initiate an automatic “Thanks for your interest in Little Big Planet” response, but in the off chance that it will do any good, here is my letter…

I have been an ardent follower of Little Big Planet for some time. I’ve played it at game conferences. I’ve watched the videos. I’ve read the reviews. And I have driven friends and family up the wall with my near incessant fawning over it. There is no question that in my gaming life (since Atari 2600 was “cutting edge”) that no game has ever had me as remotely excited to play it than LBP. No question.

In particular, I have been especially excited about the “Create” and “Share” aspects of the game. As someone who has been illustrating even longer than playing video games, having gone on into a successful career in both graphics arts and audio production, the ability to customise my character and create my own levels has been an exceptionally big draw for me. And after watching the interviews where the developers said how excited they were to play the levels made by the gamers who will be able to use “the exact same tools” to create and decorate their own levels, I knew I would be in for a treat.

But as of late, several issues have come to my attention which are causing me to become a bit concerned.

First and foremost, it seems as though the ability to make my own “stickers” will be confined solely to images which I bring in from the PS Eye, and not from the HDD as has been said in the past. This is particularly distressing because not only do I somehow doubt that the developers who are using “the exact same tools” to create and decorate their levels brought in their stickers from the PS Eye, but I know that the quality of an image I bring in will be constrained to the limitations of the camera (i.e. compression, inherent degradation of quality of direct image versus photograph of image, potential file size limitation, image dimension / ratio, etc.). I am extremely troubled by this.

I can understand that the PS Eye would create images using only one compression scheme, colour palette, etc. But why not just state that in order to import your own images they must be 8-bit RGB JPG files no larger than 400 x 400 pixels and 100kb or less? Other games which allow for image importing (for even less powerful systems, like the PSP) from non-standardised methods have been able to do this. I can also understand that the distribution of user-generated content means the potential (and probable) headache of copyright infringement from applied source material. It’s doubtful in the inevitable Donkey Kong level that gets created that Nintendo would be too happy seeing their intellectual property scanned and distributed in a Sony game. So locking out image importing from the HDD might help cut down on the number of people who would simply pull an image off the Nintendo site and drag it into their level. But what is to stop people from doing so via holding up a print-out of the same imagery in front of the camera? It’s not as if it will end up being of any greater image quality than the materials we *will* be allowed to import which we have created ourselves.

Secondly, I am curious about the depth of character customisation options. I know I can “apply stickers” to my sackboy, and I know I can choose from a wide variety of costumes – but will I actually be able to use the same Boolean operation tools on 3D objects to construct shapes which can be implemented into costumes? For instance, let’s say I wanted to make a samurai character. (I realise that there may already be the costume components to generate one, but for the sake of this argument pretend there is not.) I have 3D experience and am confident I can use the tools to union / intersect / punch / etc my way into the next life a set of objects which would render a decent looking samurai helmet for my sackboy. Am I going to have the option to be able to do this, or will I be confined to the costume options offered at the game’s launch, and the inevitable downloadable content which will follow? I had asked about this at Tokyo Game Show last year, and was told I could, but having recently heard all character customisation discussion limited to sticker application and pre-defined content selection, my fear is increasing that I will not be able to do this.

Thirdly, and this is similar to the image import point, I am curious if we will be able to import our own sounds in any fashion. I distinctly remember seeing a video within the last couple of months of a custom level where a sackboy was on a hand-car and moved past stacks of cubes which each had a drum machine sound applied to them, which moving past them caused their sound to be triggered. A quaint little beat box drum pattern was then audible, with varying tempo according to the speed at which the sackboy passed each respective set of blocks. This short video had me exceptionally excited, as I can think of a lot os use for this for the types of levels I want to create.

All three of the previous points are quite important to me, as they are all intimately related to the “Create”　and “Share” aspects of the game. As a professional “creator” I have not only the tools to bring in my own content, but the strong will to do so. While I have little doubt that the supplied content will be of the highest quality, I am a finicky bastard and will probably grow very quickly tired of the options which will be available to me. And seeing as how I have been reminded time and again from interview after interview that I can use the same tools that MM has to make the levels and customise my character, if it turns out that this is not really the case, then I am going to be extremely disappointed.

I am sure regardless of the outcome that LBP will be a highly enjoyable game with a lot of room for creative expression absent from 99.9% of the games which are out now and for the foreseeable future. However, when I am told about features X, Y and Z as being core elements to the game and become excited about those – enough to the point where I consider my most highly anticipated game of my life – then the removal or alteration of these specific features is understandably going to make me quite upset.

Hopefully my fears can be put to rest.

Power to the people! Let your voice be heard!

It’s Not Called Complaining!! :P

We have Consirns about things that Someone on here might have a Answer and sometimes us blogers might have that answer to one of them.. :D

It’s called geting along and enjoying the Gaming Life were one Big family in this Gaming world so have the most fun as you can ok ;)

ON TOPIC: I preordered Little Big Planet about over a week ago I think it might of been 2 weeks lol I forget :D

Skater_Ricky, 8)

I agree on the read-the-posts-before-you-post-comment. Most of the times when I answer a question like for the 4th time in the same blog, it feels like I’m writing it only to myself :-D