We had to take down the previous post as the competition wasn’t official. However,  it got us very excited so watch this space!! :)

We’ve been demoing the latest builds of the game to various people, culminating in some lovely coverage (and a great PSM3 cover here in the UK which you can customise with your own stickers! it’s FANTASTICO! thanks guys)

So what else is out there?

Here’s one of the videos up at gametrailers:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/34179.html – in which I go through a little about the fire and ice stuff in the game. There are more videos up there – and many more articles to read.

Joe at the LiBiPl.net site has been doing a great job of collecting links – so if you’re hungry for more, I highly recommend his fan-blog. Thanks Joe!

While Matt was testing out some mouth animation code, this came out. CHEW BABY, CHEW!

The new trailer made for Sony’s Playstation Day event. Enjoy!

I’m been up to my elbows in Photoshop, putting together lots of artwork, mainly for marketing, to show how gosh-darn-exquisite our game is. After the dust settled on a rampant session of cutting up bits of cardboard, sticking, photographing and tweaking, I had a few photos left over, one featuring Silvias real knitted Sackboy (who now lives in our office with us). I thought maybe a few people out there might like this “out-take” especially if it was in high-res desktop wallpaper form. So here it is. Save it to your desktop and you can stare into Sackboys eyes everytime the world gets you down, you format the wrong hard-drive, or you realize its still not September, and LittleBigPlanet STILL isn’t on the shelves…

[Low-Res 1024 x 576]

[High-Res 1600 x 1200]

[Widescreen 1920 x 1200)]

To answer the commenters, silvia is a German lady who lives in France, and as far as we can tell a knitwear genius who created the sackboy entirely based on what she’d seen online of our game! we don’t have a pattern (yet?!) and we haven’t even seen the physical toy ourselves – so far only those two pics, sent by the magic of the interweb all the way from La Belle France. We all want one too!

We’re all totally in love with our little Sackboy character, we’ve spent a couple years watching him run, jump and slap his way though dozens of levels, and the little chap has so much personality we could almost believe he’s real.

So our collective jaws hit the floor when we saw what one of our artists MOTHERS had made, Silvia’s actually made Sackboy, for real, in all his knitted and stitched glory! It’s so good we wondered if we’d hired the right member of the family to work here! (Not really, her son is making artwork for the game that will blow you away) but we can certainly see where he gets his talent from..

So adorable. It makes me want to hug him so tightly that his zip bursts and his button eyes pop out. But I won’t.

And here he is in the Chinese dragon costume:

Just in time to wish everyone a Happy Chinese New Year!

Anyone else got anything to show?! :)

Welcome to the first edition of LittleBigLetters! I have selected 3 letters to share today, all tackling the most asked questions. If you would like your letter to appear please send me, Siobhan, an email : letters@mediamolecule.com

First up Mm would really like to thank everyone for all of the really great encouragement. Making games is great, interesting and creative but as with all creative projects there are stressful days!! These letters help to keep us feeling really motivated and remind us that it’s all about community, so thank you very much! :)

Beta Trials?

Hello,

My name is Adrian, and I’ve been following the development of Little Big Planet very closely the past couple months and I was just wondering when the beta would become available, and how I could become a tester.

Thanks for your time,

Adrian

Mm>> Hello Adrian, Thanks a lot for your letter.

We have received a lot of emails asking about how to sign up to our beta trials. We can’t announce anything about these yet, but will post onto our blog when the time has come :) Sorry for not being able to be more informative, but I promise that all will become clear over time. If you want to sign up to Sony’s beta trial program,  the lovely Richard Cole has suggested I direct you to this thread : http://community.eu.playstation.com/showthread.php?t=34218

Release Date

This morning I came across an article on IGN that mentioned that the studio was pushing for a September release for Little Big Planet in the UK. My wife and I have really been looking forward to the game, and I’m wondering if you have an ETA for when we might see it here in Canada.

Thanks a lot – and have a good one,

Jon

Mm>> Sony announced at CES that we are pushing for September/Fall 08! We are incredibly flattered by the letters we have recieved that have expressed disapoinment but we are committed to making a game that is high quality and delivers on the ambition of LittleBigPlanet and that takes time! Needless to say, the team here at Mm are all working really hard and there is some very cool stuff happening here, all of which is very exciting and will be unvieled as it’s ready :) 

What’s the awesome music?!

Hey Mm, I think the game is great, I was just wondering what the music is called from the TGS 07 trailer, I love it. Thanks, Mike.

Mm >> A frequent question in our inbox is “What is that music track in your videos?!”. For the most part we’ve been using Get It Together by The Go Team, from their album Thunder, Lightning, Strike. It’s a perfect fit for the high level concepts of fun and playfulness that we’ve tried to put across in our videos thus far. Get It Together will feature in the game and you’ll be able to use it in your levels if you so wish! :)

We recieve lots of emails from people asking questions about Mm or LittleBigPlanet, specially around the time of events like CES. I try to respond to most but we are very busy making the game at the moment, so please forgive me for not getting to them all promptly! But here is an idea!! As lots of the letters cover similar topics (such as questions about features, working here at Mm, videos that they have seen etc) from now on we are going to use the power of the blog by having a monthly letter/response update. We will start it on the blog and the first update will come this week, once I have chosen some letters and received permission from the senders to publish them! So, please check back soon and there will be some more news from Mm xxx

LBP has been a roller coaster of excitement for us, ever since it was unveiled a little less than a year ago at GDC in March 07. Since then, the anticipation and excitement online took us all by surprise – but is the *best* kind of compliment you could ever by payed as a game developer. Pete, one of our producers at SCEE loves to say ‘it’s the best kind of problem to have!’ when he hears me stressing out over the pressure. And he’s right! But it does mean that whenever a show comes around – in this case, CES in Vegas, where Pete, Leo and Kyle from SCE[E|A] (amongst others) are valiantly demoing the latest LBP build – literally makes me want to hide in a corner, behind a sofa, and peek out at someone else’s internet browser from time to time.

It seems to be going over well, hurrah hurrah, what what, as Bertie Wooster would say (obviously all brits sound like him) and there are lots of little tidbits in the footage that is sure to trickle out that I’m sure longtime LBP fans will enjoy. I really enjoyed reading the posts on the recent kotaku posting – the level of enthusiasm and excitement is really cool and very motivating. Frightning, yes. Not always right. But awesome. Thanks people. Right, back to work…