Media Molecule – we make games.

This morning we all crept downstairs to see what Father Christmas had left for us in our stockings. We got an orange, and some chocolate, a doodad, some wotchamacallems and that neat little toy we’d been coveting all year long, what a haul! We hope Father Christmas brought you all nice things too!

Now it’s time to feast upon roasted foods, watch the Queen’s Speech, have a bit of a family tiff, make up with some chocolates, and settle down for some classic Christmas TV. Bliss.

A very Happy Christmas to all of you, from all of us!

Oh! We’d also like to welcome all those people who found a special LittleBigPresent under the tree this year – this is a good place to look for some hints and tips, advice, and new friends. Happy Crimbo!

We are proud to announce that the Pirates of the Caribbean Premium Level Kit, along with water, and the Pirates of the Caribbean Costume Kit will be arriving in time for Christmas, on December 22nd!

Rumours say that the fearsome Davy Jones and his mighty Kraken have come to LittleBigPlanet to wreak havoc and claim some sack folk to serve as Davy’s Crew. Once again, it’s going to fall to Sackboy to locate the only ship on LittleBigPlanet that has any chance of sending him back to the bottom of the sea.

Head deep into the Caribbean to battle The East India Trading Company and Pirates alike, find the legendary ship and take on the Kraken. This new kit features a set of six swashbuckling levels, each containing a treasure trove of stickers, decorations, materials, music objects and 11 new trophies.

Find out all about it over on LittleBigPlanet.com where we’ve uploaded videos, screenshots, trailers, renders, wallpapers, and all kinds of useful snippets of info!

LittleBigLand are running a themed create contest, to create a level based on a fairy tale, and the winners will receive a much coveted rare prize crown!

All you need to do is choose your fairy tale, and all importantly, add a LittleBigPlanet themed twist to it, and make that into a cool level. The competition will start from right now, and submissions must all be in by 12th Jan next year, when judging will begin! Check out the rules and how to enter, over on LittleBigLand.

Wildr_Kids sent us some pics of their awesome LBP cake, and accompanying Sackboy based cup cakes too. It’s good to know that a year down the line there are still amazing LBP Cakes being eaten!

Here at Mm, we make the server software that lets the LittleBigPlanet community play, create and share. We provide scoreboards, ratings, favourites, tags, publishing services and search indices to millions of players (tens of thousands concurrent) and millions of levels. We often serve tens of millions of HTTP requests and over a terabyte of traffic in a day.

We need someone who knows what it takes to make big services like this go fast — reliably.

You will be using the following tools and techniques to help get our server technology ready for life as a high-volume production system:

• Continuous integration – including acceptance testing and performance testing
• Automated deployment
• Automated virtual server provisioning
• Automated everything else!
• Grown-up monitoring systems
• Helping design processes that interface with various teams in Mm and Sony

You will understand the value of (and hopefully be excited by) working on internal tech like this:

• A fast HTTP server with an embedded Ruby interpreter
• An in-memory, hierarchical key-value store with on-demand indices, eventually-consistent replication and sharding
• A Ruby web framework with a NeverBlock-style calling convention to the outside world, which makes adding features easy
• A simple RPC protocol that helps us write non-blocking, distributed systems
• Telemetry processing of lots of data using MapReduce

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Those lovely folk over at LBPmedia.co.uk have made an virtual advent calendar, which will reveal a new thing every day. Behind the first door was a joke! What else is there in store for us?

“More outlandsish trivia, wordsearches, jokes, objects, games for the pc and levels for littlebigplanet itself. There’s even an exclusive item on the way! So hold on and enjoy, one and all! Make sure you come back every day to open the door to new nuggets of goodness, both little and big.”

Wowsers! We’ll be opening the calendar daily, Thanks LBP Media!

LittleBigPlanet picked up the award for best Video Game at the Children’s BAFTA Awards last night! Mega Woot!

Mark spoke to GamesIndustry.biz shortly after picking up the award, and he spoketh thus:

“It means a lot. It was always an early ambition to make something that appeals to adults and kids, specifically that adults and kids could play together and have fun and I suppose winning this some way confirms that maybe we did that. We’ve won so many awards for it, it’s like, how do we ever top this? I don’t think I’ll appreciate how really cool it is until I’m old!”

Fire up your consoles and get downloadin’ – Leerdammer, the biggest EVAR free update to LittleBigPlanet, is now live.

Leerdammer will update LittleBigPlanet to version 1.21, bringing all manner of delights, including online create mode, a bigger profile, loads of networking improvements and more other tasty extras, far more than you could possibly fit into your mouth in one sitting. Find out more at the recently relaunched LittleBigPlanet.com.

It’s nearly here, the cheese we’ve all been waiting for! On Monday 30th, Leerdammer will update LittleBigPlanet to 1.21, and deliver Online Create, Save and Networking improvements, increased profile space, and and loads of awesome enhancements and new features! All for free I might add.

Head over to LittleBigPlanet.com for the full details, and a handy walkthrough video explaining all the new features and how to use them.

Tonight we are celebrating with a cheese feast, we’ve ordered big chunks of all the cheese patches to date, and will be scoffing them down with some nice biscuits and wine, we strongly suggest you do the same thing. Happy Leerdammer!

Back in April, a fansite orbiting the LittleBigPlanet unexpectedly crashed into the planet’s surface, and the team that ran it were hired by Mm. That was Tom (me) and Spaff, your community managers at here at Mm Towers.

Since starting the job, there has been one project occupying a great deal of our time, especially in recent months; To build a much needed LittleBigPlanet Community site.

Today it launches: A one-stop place to get all your LittleBigPlanet news, latest community updates, full details on all the latest downloadable add-on content for the game, details on everything from the trophies, game patches, a help and FAQ section, videos, screenshots, and a Mermahuataur.

Of course, this week also marks the Launch of Cambridge Studio’s LittleBigPlanet on the PSP, and the site supports our new friend too – with full information and details about the brand new LittleBigPlanet PSP, including playing, creating and sharing on the go. Everything LittleBigPlanet!

So we’re all really pleased to bring you the new www.littlebigplanet.com: A mountain of in-game assets combined with over 25,000 of Spaff’s beautifully handcrafted words (translated by Sony’s localisation teams in to 11 languages no less) all bundled together with some peeper shattering visual spazzle-dazzle.

It’s the first part of a bigger plan for LittleBigPlanet’s presence on the web, a board from which to build on, and you can be sure that there will be much, much more to come in the future, as LittleBigPlanet continues to evolve its community through the web, and through the games themselves.

Huzzah!

Games Industry.biz has published an interview with our very own code master and Lead Architect, Paul Holden!

Paul was speaking at the Montreal International Games Summit this week, giving a talk entitled Tools and Testing in LittleBigPlanet: Consequences of a user-generated world. Here’s one of the questions now…

Q: The game’s just over a year old, so what have been the biggest lessons you’ve had to learn?

Paul Holden: We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches. It’s surprising that even fairly small changes that we’ve made have had large impacts on the community. We have limits set within the game – such as a maximum of 1000 physics objects in a level – but that’s all interconnected. So if we try to bump up one of those limits to give people a bit more freedom that might increase the cost on memory. So we’ve learnt pretty quickly to be very thorough with those updates.

You can, and should, read the full interview with Paul over on Gamesindustry.biz!

Are you aged between 7 and 14 (and in the UK)? Then you could vote for us to win the BAFTA Kids’ vote games award this year! The BATA’s kids’ vote awards are a chance for young folk to have their say, and vote for their favourite game, TV show, film and website of the year. Sadly you can’t vote for this website, probably because it would just be unfair to the others when we got 100% of the votes… yeah it’s gotta be that.

Head on over to the BAFTA Kids’ vote site, and vote for LittleBigPlanet; There are two ways to vote, the quick and easy HTML version of the site, or the rather funky flash version, featuring character selection and trailers of the things you can vote for. Vote!

Out today is a nifty set of fan made levels created by some of the Curators at LittleBigPlanet Central: The Logic Pack, a set of levels containing logic gates and tools aimed at bridging the gap between Creators who understand logic and those who don’t. Such as me for example.

I asked ConfusedCartman, one of the minds behind this excellent teaching tool, what this was all about…

“Our goal with this pack is to demonstrate what’s possible with logic, through interactive demonstrations and the actual levels themselves, so that Creators of all skill sets can learn how to utilize logic in their own levels”

“At LBPCentral at least, we’ve witnessed a divide in the quality of levels which seems to be based on the use of logic. Creators who understand it, and use it well, generally have higher-quality levels than those who don’t, and currently there’s no easy way to learn about logic and get started with it on your own.”

“If you don’t have a friend who’s good with logic and is willing to teach you how it works, you’re pretty much stuck. But now, there’s an option for those Creators, a way for them to discover how useful logic in LittleBigPlanet actually is.”

In the LBPC Logic pack you’ll take a trip to LogicTech, and it is here that you’ll learn easy, intermediate and advanced logic techniques, and gain access to a vault of pre-made logic switches. It might sound a tad complicated, but the team have put in a lot of work to make sure even the most complicated ideas are accessible to all. It’s definitely worth checking out.

To find and play the LBPC Logic Pack, Search for “LBPC Logic” alternatively, find the author @LogicPack via the search.

If you head over to LBPCentral, you will also find some accompanying guides to more advanced techniques, featuring hundreds of screengrabs and levels to copy to your Moon to play with and pick apart!

The Logic Pack was made over five long months by mrsupercomputer, comphermc,
CuzFeeshe, rtm223, and ConfusedCartman, all of whom shall now be crowned for their impressive and helpful work! Good work guys!

We are currently recruiting for a new position within our company!

We are a small, friendly team who encourage all of our staff to contribute wherever they can to make a positive difference to the game. As such you will be expected to be self-motivated and confident working within this type of environment.

Working closely with the rest of the Studio you will be responsible for leading a small Mm QA team. This role will require the candidate to have the skills of a hands-on tester, the experience of putting test plans together for a console game (preferably PlayStation 3) and represent Mm in discussions with Sony and Testology (our outsourced QA team).

This role needs someone who has experience as a QA lead.
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