Fajitas last night. Yum! Dinner and back to work….

left to right: Danny -levels, Victor -levels, Matt -sound, Francis -animation, Men Lu -art, Luke -tools, Allan -online, Kengo -levels, Mark -design

the geniuses at libipl.net have discovered the discarded archive footage of sackboy interviewing kenny and seamlessy re-edited it into its rightful place. for the full scoop, visit: http://www.libipl.net/libiplblog/?p=79

it’s fantastic! and if you think it’s hard being SCOTTISH at an english game developer, just you wait till we interview THE AMERICANS in a future episode. oh lord, the chicken wings. the baseball.

(and finally… 2 more people have been filmed for devface but sackboy appears to be distracted making the game or something so the next episode will be forthcoming soon… just as soon as he can get his felty paws off the ps3 devkit for long enough…)

Meet the Molecules! In the first of what we hope will be a (regularly?) recurring series, we present to you: KENNY, or Wee Kenno as his dad calls him – audio designer extra-ordinaire and lover of bad movies….

He was interviewed by sackboy so we had to edit out the questions – the only clues are that the first one is ‘what is your name’ and the last is ‘what are you going to make first when LBP comes out?’. Without further ado, KENNY:

Sorry for the lack of updates, but we’ve been having a hectic time here at Mm Towers. Having finally sobered up after the Surrey Business Awards we’ve been slaving away pushing LittleBigPlanet toward the Alpha stage of its development cycle. Basically this means all the cool stuff we said will be in there should be playable, even if it isn’t pretty enough to release. The game seems to change every day at the moment and it is very exciting to be able to sit down and play what feels more and more like a complete experience.

One of the things that keep us sane during these stressful times is to drink maintain personal projects. Some people draw, some write music. Some people, like Victor one of our ace level designers, unwind by making even more games. Games like the awesome Blacklist:

He’s been working on it for about a year, and plans to release it on deadtoast.com soon. Check it out!

  Somehow this got lost amongst all the drinking working that went on at the end of last week, but Mm won the ‘creative industries award’ at the 2007/8 Surrey Business Awards! Hurrah! Many thanks to the judges who gave us this nice surprise, and the organizers of the event for what turned out to be a most enjoyable evening/night/morning :)  It provided us with the first bit of silverware for our trophy cabinet… :)

We’ve been playing about with the Face Research averager – a neat bit of software that lets you upload faces then combine them. Apparently, if there was to be a big old Media Molecule love-in, then this is what our collective child would look like. (S)he’s so… weirdly smooth. mmmmmmmm. Buttery.

While the program seems to be most effective with a large number of samples, you can get some of the most freaky and ‘characterful’ results when the number of parents is low… behold our inbred Sackboy and sound departments (top-left and bottom-right respectively):

Clockwise, from top-left: Sackboy team, coders, sound team, artists.

The games industry is famously male-dominated. We’re not immune from that here at the molecule, but being a lovely fair and gender-agnostic place, we have a fair few ladies here on the dev team. Here’s what a female molecule looks like:

We’ve just noticed that Media Molecule is 2 years old today, we’re growing up fast! According to Baby Centre this means the team are at the stage where: “He starts to form images in his mind, organise categories and arrange things in order. His memory is also improving and a minority at this age will already know their basic colours. Some can even count up to five”  So that sounds about right. And according to Jonny it’s also a couple months more than it takes an elephant to gestate – if only we’d impregnated an elephant back then, things would be so different now.

It also means its 2 years since we painted our office, here it is then:

And here’s the same wall now!

So many memories!

I even wore some special socks to celebrate.

Just a little something we’re preparing for you.

Play board games and drink wine! Such dedication on the part of the Mm team.

(ps – says luke – he won. yeah. right)

…to play the latest ‘user-created’ level. in this case, our art director Kareem’s latest creation.