“About six months after green light, by the time of GDC 07 and our announcement, we were obsessed with the PS3’s XMB [The menu – ‘Cross Media Bar’] so the idea was that Popit was going to be like that. “
“Up and down chose a tool, left and right chose sub tools, you can see it in the GDC videos.”
“We binned it after GDC though because it was annoying. Stickering was fun, but nothing else was, so we thought, ‘why is stickering fun and nothing else?’ and it was because you could kind of mash around and you’re not worrying about a menu.”
“We called it stamping: The stickers were stamped down, and then we made it so you could stamp down objects ‘great I’ve made 100 oranges’ and that felt fun, but making shapes was still awful”
“Imagine it, all you could do was make a square and make a circle, but you couldn’t join them together. If you wanted to make a bridge it was really annoying; you had to scale up a block and use the un-usable vertex mode to make a shape. No fun.”
“Dave implemented what we call CSG - Constructed Solid Geometry - which meant you could now smear around materials and things. When CSG came in, it was fun.”
I ask about the GDC video, in which there doesn’t seem to be any distinction between layers…
“Before we put layer restrictions in we had some awesome levels, but the camera was massively zoomed out, with wild camera zones. It was 3D, and deep, but it felt slow, and you never connected with sackboy because he was only four pixels high. “
“So superficially, even though when you watch the old videos it feels much bigger and more epic, to play it was far less fun. There was no character customisation, and the levels were realllly hard.”
“Making and designing them was absolutely jedi mind trick, because it was so unconstrained. You spent hours with Auto Z [the thing that makes sackboy automatically change layers when you jump.]
“People complain now… You think it’s a bit tricksy now, but in that version you could just jump and Sackboy would go wooooosh and fly 100 meters back to the nearest block. So building levels was really hard.” “The ‘50 layers glitch’ is the closest you can get to that old mode, and exists because, well, it used to work like that, it’s just constrained now. The backgrounds are all just built with Popit, but with the ability to rotate on different axis to get different shapes.” “When we added the restrictions, which eventually became the layers, we found the designers all started making levels faster and that were way more fun, “ “Ask Danny what it was like, it was crazy!” “Anton had a phenomenal level though. It was a normal platformer, but with some steps going back, but each step was 20 layers deep, and each time you jumped, auto z would zoom you forward 20 layers, and the camera would zoom after you! There were 10 steps so you effectively had a section where the camera would zoom really fast right into the level!” “By the time we’d settled on Popit, we were removing things as much as adding. Constraining. Shipping a game is as much about cutting as it is adding.”