The team at Moonbot Studios are a highly creative team and master story tellers. Little Bo Peep, the Itsy Bitsy Spider and Three Little Pigs together in a film noir mystery? Definitely not your run of the mill game. We’re pleased to lift the curtain on the development of Diggs Nightcrawler in this first video diary.

With the book as the starting point, the world, the characters, the story and the interactions were born (or as Humpty would say, “hatched”). Diggs is a detective bookworm who knows he’s inside a book, whose world is made from books, and who travels throughout the course of the game to different sections of the library, meeting unique characters along the way. Of course, being Wonderbook, this is no ordinary hardcover. It is your controller as you tilt, rotate and turn the pages to help Diggs get the bottom of Humpty’s downfall.

We hope you enjoy the diary — we’ll have more in the coming weeks. And in case you missed it, check out some additional game play here:

At long last, the very first title for the new Wonderbook peripheral, Wonderbook: Book of Spells, officially launches today in North America! The team at SCE London Studios worked hard to conjure up a truly amazing experience using the latest in augmented reality technology that combines Wonderbook with the PlayStation Eye camera. Starting today, you’ll be able to immerse yourself in the world of Harry Potter and begin learning the art of spell-casting while using your PlayStation Move motion controller as your magic wand. The book features new and original writing from J.K. Rowling, and will allow you to learn about the histories of some of the well-known spells from the Harry Potter series, as well as other interesting insights.

Over the past few months, we’ve shared that Wonderbook: Book of Spells unlocks the secrets of casting your favorite spells like Incendio, Wingardium Leviosa and Expelliarmus. Today, I’m excited to share that the book will also teach you a very powerful spell – Expecto Patronum! With this incantation, you’ll have the chance to discover the animal form of your very own Patronus, the manifestation of your positive thoughts and your best weapon to drive away attacks from Dementors. That’s just a small taste of the magic that we have in store for you!

To help celebrate the launch of Wonderbook: Book of Spells, we’re excited to give you a glimpse of the spellbinding experience in action in the new TV commercial (seen at the top of this post). Thanks for watching, and we hope that you enjoy checking out Wonderbook: Book of Spells with your families this festive season!

I wanted to give you an update on a project that we are incredibly excited about here at PlayStation: Wonderbook. Although we only announced it a few months ago, our team at London Studio has been working hard on the technology behind Wonderbook for years.

We recently sat down with the team to create a series of “making of” diaries that give you a closer look at the development of Wonderbook. To kick off these developer diaries, the team focused on the core technology that helped form the foundation of the project.

The first game to use this new technology is the product of our collaboration with J.K. Rowling, Wonderbook: Book of Spells. By taking PlayStation Move’s augmented reality capabilities and pairing them with the Wonderbook peripheral, we were able to create a truly immersive, magical world in which you’ll be able to learn how to cast many spells including: Incendio, Wingardium Leviosa and Expelliarmus, with your very own spell book and wand.

Wonderbook: Book of Spells will launch in the U.S. on November 13th, 2012. For those of you who are ready to get your wizard training started, we’ll be offering two cool ways for you to pick it up.

First, there’s the Wonderbook: Book of Spells Move Bundle that comes with everything you need to start practicing spells on your PS3 system including the Book of Spells game, Wonderbook peripheral, PlayStation Eye camera and a PlayStation Move motion controller – all for just $79.99.

If you already have a PlayStation Eye camera and a PlayStation Move motion controller, we’re also offering a Wonderbook: Book of Spells standalone for $39.99 that comes with the Book of Spells game and Wonderbook peripheral.

I hope you’re excited to check out Wonderbook when it hits stores this November! Stay tuned to PlayStation.Blog for the latest information on Wonderbook: Book of Spells and additional Wonderbook titles for 2013 including Diggs: Nightcrawler, BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs and experiences from Disney.

While Book of Spells led off our Wonderbook announcement at E3 earlier this year, there are plenty more projects in the works for the forthcoming PlayStation 3 augmented reality platform, including Walking With Dinosaurs from the BBC, and an exciting partnership with Disney Interactive Studios. Diggs: Nightcrawler is a little different, however – unlike Book of Spells and Dinosaurs, it’s a brand new IP, promising quirky detective noir with style to spare.

Less than 24 hours after the game’s new trailer debuted during the Sony press conference at gamescom last week, we sat down with Adam Volker from Oscar-winning animation studio turned game developer Moonbot to find out what it has in store.

“So, Diggs is a detective bookworm and he’s really good at what he does,” he explained.

“He works for the godfather of Library City, Humpty Dumpty. And you know his story – someone pushed him off the wall, someone bumped him off – and the cops think it’s Diggs. So when you start the game he’s framed for the murder of his old buddy. The story unfolds from there, with you attempting to clear Diggs’ name and find out who actually committed the crime.”

So how exactly does this eccentric set-up translate into gameplay?

“Because Wonderbook is new, we’re still figuring out a lot of specifics about what the gameplay is,” said Volker, who lists stints at EA and BioWare on his CV.

“We’re trying to make the characters in the game self-aware that they are in fact in a book. The mechanics of Wonderbook are all very physical and we want to encourage players to actually pick up the book, turn it around, hold it upside down – so the game will focus on that a lot.

“We designed the IP to be a book about books, so that the characters can help the player. We give Diggs the user interface stuff, so he says ‘turn the page!’ when it’s time to turn the page, he says ‘Go back, you missed something’ when it’s appropriate to backtrack.

“Wonderbook is celebrating the really old and beautiful interface of the book,” he continues. “People know how to use a book, so we want to monopolise on that. It’s definitely celebrating the medium.”

While the game is certainly aimed at a younger audience, Volker insisted that there should be something here for everyone to enjoy, especially those who appreciate classic adventure games. And although some onlookers might express surprise that Moonbot has moved away from animation – a medium it’s clearly very, very good at – and decided to try its hand at game design, Volker believes its a natural progression for the Louisiana-based studio.

“It’s the creative challenge that Wonderbook represents. The uniqueness of the interface is really exciting and getting to pave that road is a real creative challenge,” he enthused.

“I’ve always had a passion for gaming. Moonbot, as a company, is about storytelling and about characters. We like to be media agnostic and gaming is just another avenue to tell a story.”

Diggs: Nightcrawler is due out sometime in 2013 – we’ll have much more on the title over the coming months.

Nearly four months after the U.S. launch of PlayStation Vita, we continue to be overwhelmed by the positive response from our gaming community. As demonstrated a few moments ago, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of PS Vita’s capabilities and gameplay. With new titles like Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation, Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, in addition to a deep lineup of more than 60 titles that will be available before the end of the year, we continue to build PS Vita’s content library with jaw-dropping titles that demonstrate its full power and unique features. The next few months will be extremely exciting for PS Vita and our fans.

In the home, PlayStation 3 continues to deliver rich, immersive games that can only be found on our platform. PS3 provides developers with the industry’s most powerful palette to create from, and our extremely talented team at Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios is taking full advantage. We will bring more of what you love with hard-hitting adventures, fast-paced action and suspense-filled mysteries in four new PS3 exclusive titles: Beyond, God of War: Ascension, Last of Us, and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. Words can’t do justice to these titles, so be sure to watch the new content we shared tonight. Our publishing partners also demonstrated some amazing content, including Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 3, both of which will offer exclusive DLC for PlayStation customers.

In addition to the core games you love, we also introduced Wonderbook, a completely new experience for PS3 unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Wonderbook puts a physical book in your hands, and when paired with a PS Eye camera, brings to life stories and adventures that allow you to interact with them like never before. We’ve been working with one of the most popular book franchises in the world for our first title: WonderBook: Book of Spells is a collaboration between PlayStation and J.K. Rowling, creator of the magical world of Harry Potter. Book of Spells will feature exclusive and new original writings from J.K. Rowling, and will utilize PlayStation Move – in the form of a magic wand, to help gamers learn and master the art of spell-casting.

All of our platforms are enhanced by the industry’s most robust online entertainment network, PlayStation Network. We strengthened our offering for you tonight by announcing a free new library of games for PlayStation Plus members. PS Plus members now have immediate and instant access to an ever-expanding lineup of great titles that can be downloaded anytime. At launch, the game collection will feature 12 games, including inFAMOUS 2, LittleBigPlanet 2 and Saints Row 2. All of these games will be available to members starting tomorrow, and new games will be rotated in all the time.

PlayStation Suite – which as of today will be called PlayStation Mobile – is about delivering the world of PlayStation to open operating system-based portable devices. It’s our goal to make sure that wherever you are and wherever you go, PlayStation’s quality content is always available for you to enjoy. Tonight we announced that HTC will be our first non-Sony group partner to have its smartphones PlayStation-certified, which will help expand the PlayStation experience to even more devices and entirely new audiences.

PlayStation Nation has made PlayStation the global leader that it is today and I thank you for your support. As I said onstage just a few moments ago, our one wish for all of you is that you never stop playing. Keep pushing us. Keep driving us. We will continue to do everything in our power to meet and exceed your expectations, providing a gaming universe where you always feel welcome, challenged and amazed.

It’s an exciting time to be part of the PlayStation family…and the best is yet to come.

Jack Tretton

As you may have heard, PlayStation had some exciting news to reveal tonight.

For some time now, we have been working on a project called Wonderbook – an interactive book that uses Augmented Reality technology and PlayStation Move products to bring stories to life before your eyes. The AR in Wonderbook has been developed by London Studio – the team behind EyeToy and EyePet. We believe that this is the most advanced AR out there, not least because it utilizes brand new technology which enables enhanced fidelity.

Wonderbook is a physical book that will act as a platform for a range of different titles that the whole family will enjoy. Games, reading experiences, adventures – the possibilities are endless for Wonderbook, and we can’t wait to tell you more about the exciting things you can look forward to on this peripheral. It truly is one book, with a thousand stories. In North America, Wonderbook will be available for $39.99 for both the book and Blu-ray game.

The first story is one we are extremely proud to announce. Wonderbook: Book of Spells is a title developed by London Studio, with brand new writing from one of the world’s most popular authors – J.K. Rowling.

From the world of Harry Potter, Book of Spells is an enchanted textbook written over 200 years ago by Miranda Goshawk. Open the book and you are immediately transported to the Hogwarts library, where your lessons will begin. Chapter by chapter, you will be able to read about and practice 20 spells, picking up valuable experiences and lessons along the way – as well as house points – just like a student at Hogwarts.

We are proud to have the support and involvement from J.K. Rowling herself, who described the experience in her own words: “Wonderbook: Book of Spells is the closest a Muggle can come to a real spellbook. I’ve loved working with Sony’s creative team to bring my spells, and some of the history behind them, to life. This is an extraordinary device that offers a reading experience like no other.”

From interactive reading experiences to dueling, spell-casting, and exciting new content, there’s so much to discover. We’re particularly proud of the Augmented Reality technology, and how we have used it to take storytelling to a whole new level. Over the coming months we’ll be bringing you dev diaries, behind the scenes previews, and much more – so watch this space. We can’t wait to tell you all about it – from what the artists have been working on, to how we brought J.K. Rowling’s background stories of the spells to life, so stay tuned for more on one of our most exciting titles this year.