“One of the things we cut that I like winding up our level designers with is Ice - Ice was removed because it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t balanced. I really love demoing it though, but I have to admit I never built a level with it, the designers hated it. It used a complicated mechanic, basically if you touched the ice for too long and you turned into a block, and it’s really slippery and grab-able, so other people can kinda grab hold of you, and push you along over things like spikes. You can also survive fire for an extra touch… So it was cool but…. well get Danny to tell you, where’s Danny?“
Tom runs off to get Danny, who comes in looking confused…
“Why is ice unbalanced Danny? Tell us about Ice! Why did we remove it?“
“Wellll….. it’s mainly our fault for not designing it properly, but if you stood on ice for about two seconds you got frozen into a block, but if you keep moving you don’t freeze, so you had to keep jumping and you were fine. Trouble was, if you were frozen into an ice block, you had to shake yourself out, but then you might get frozen again on the same bit of ice over and over, and it just wasn’t fun. It was more fun to just die, and re-spawn and have another go. “
“It was cut for a reason, not because it was awesome, sadly it had to go because it was just really tedious to be frozen. The novelty was great, and it looks great, but, it was crap. It’s funny but not good.“
“In multiplayer it could be pretty fun I guess, but single player was terrible.“
“Another reason for cutting it, which was stupid, come to think of it now, was that we needed animations for Sackboy slipping about… but err then we put glass in, err oops!“
“It wouldn’t be too hard to add back, but for instance, we removed layers and it improved the game, and similarly removing ice made the game better not worse.“
“Oh!“
Alex suddenly remembers another thing that was cut, another example of, in his own words, ‘something that Alex argues is correct but actually is terrible.’
“I put this thing in called the ribbon, it was in the editor, and basically, the gameplay takes place on this 2d plane, the ribbon was like a spline that you could edit, that bent the gameplay along the ribbon. “
“The idea was that the ribbon would be more like a Mario Kart track, and you just build the gameplay in 2D, but as you went through the level it wouldn’t be a long side scrolling thing, the camera would actually tilt as it went round, and it feels at any given moment like a 2D game, always side view, but gradually it’ tilting - I always wanted to do a level built around a tree.“
“The thing is, we now had to deal with a curved co-ordinate system, was horrible, it made the camera become terrible, nothing actually worked.“
“After a while, we realised that none of the level designers were using anything other than the flat straight ribbon.“
“No one told me how to use it! I didn’t even know what it was until it was cut!” Danny defensively points out“
“I actually cried when it was cut.“
“I fought for it tooth and nail, and everyone was like ‘no one is using it Alex, it’s too hard’ and I kept saying ‘no its amazing, the tree, think of the tree!’ but I hated it too, I had to use the code, and the number of bugs it introduced…“
“Finally they said ‘Alex we’ve got to get rid of the ribbon’, and I spent a day removing it, and then the code was suddenly so much cleaner, a bunch of bugs went away, the game got faster, the camera a was better.“
“It’s always a trade off, when things get cut, it’s so other things can exist - maybe if we’d kept ice we wouldn’t have had the collector’s lair.. Who knows? When things get cut you only see the thing that got cut, not the thing we spent time on instead.“
LittleBigPlanet Launched in October / November 2008, without ice, the ribbon, or the physical create mode, but with everything it needed to become an instant success, winning many, many awards, and capturing the creative spirit of millions of Creator Curators worldwide.
What happened next? That’s another story!