Interviews// LittleBigPlanet PSP

SPOnG: So, why a kid's bedroom and why an emphasis on the vehicles?

Andy Knowles: Well, it's because we were able to have so many different toys. In a kid's bedroom there's quite a lot of variety, so we've got a racing level, military levels, the pogo stick which is more of a kiddie sort of thing.

But yeah, it just allowed us to play to all those different strengths of the different toys. We've got a lot of construction stuff in there as well. It was just for the variety and making it all fit into one, big theme. We wanted it to be a nice, big pack. We've released lots of little pieces along the way, but this is a nice meaty bit of DLC.

Mark Green: We also liked the idea of blowing up a dolls' house with a tank.


SPOnG: With all the community content out there, I guess creating DLC must be quite tricky. How do you make sure you're providing value as developers versus community creators?

Andy Knowles: Well, the biggest part of DLC that a lot of people are looking for was developer-made levels, just because you ensure the quality. And of course we can make new materials and new stickers so we can make it look how we want it to.

And yeah, again, splitting the vehicles up into components means that people can do impressive stuff with it. Also, they get to see how we've done it and check that we've done things properly.


SPOnG: Has the Sony acquisition of Media Molecule affected development at all?

Mark Green: Not for us, really. We've had a great relationship with both External Development, who handle Media Molecule, and Media Molecule directly, so right from the start we were kind of independent here and we could go to Media Molecule for the finesse, if you like.

So, we went down there when we started to find out 'what is the philosophy of it? What's the idea behind it?' To kind of get under the skin and make sure that what we created on the PSP followed the same vein as on the PS3. And then we went down there again with the art style, because we had a whole new art style for it. We went and said, 'is this OK?'

As you can imagine, the tutorials in the game are a completely different visual style in the PSP version, which we had to do for technical reasons. We obviously had to go them and say, 'look, we're making Sackboy look like this, is that going to be OK? And the whole world's going to be in a graph paper style, is that going to be OK?' But they were cool about it and it worked well for us and allowed us to actually have them as a sounding board at certain points throughout development.


SPOnG: One of the things that I think everyone's been saying is how well the PS3 version's been translated onto PSP. I actually saw in the comments section beneath one of the PlayStation Blog developer diaries someone saying, 'the graphics look a bit off for the PS3', and someone else had to kind of say, 'well, duh'. That transition must have been a pretty huge challenge. How do you go about tackling that?

Andy Knowles: Well, we were very careful about how much memory we had, and [careful about] just tiny, tiny little things about how to limit the number of collisions that are going on, just to free the machine up just enough to hold the framerate there. There were lots of sneaky little things.

Mark Green: Lots of physics things that went on behind the scenes. For example, in the PS3 version anything that you build, any land chunk in there is permanently checking against all other land chunks. Because everything is dumbed down for the PSP, we decided to differentiate between the dynamic and static land chunks, which saved us a hell of a lot in processing power. And actually, I think it makes it easier for people to build levels now that you can just have something that seems to be floating in the middle of space. Whereas, you had to use the dark material in the PS3 version. Little things like that made a big difference for us.

You know, you're never going to be able to do all the fancy lighting techniques on the PSP, but you can do other things.

Andy Knowles: I think at the end of the Turbo Pack levels, we got to the point where some of them were so complicated that we have to have self-dissolving logic as you go through the level to push everything as hard as possible. They're very big levels, as well.