Items tagged with 'Develop'

Last week was the annual Develop conference in Brighton, and we were there to give some talks, come a cruel 4th in a games quiz, and win a nice stack of shiny awards!

Mark and Kareem gave a talk entitled The Art of LittleBigPlanet - A Big Medley discussing how the visual style of LittleBigPlanet was decided upon and evolved, how the feel of the game was defined by the materials, and everything being bolted together. They also discussed how you guys have been using the game to make all kinds of different visual treats for us to enjoy. Highlights of the talk included peeks at early sackboy sketches, prototype videos such as the famous YellowHead demo, and some screenshots of some of your levels and sackboy costumes.

Kenny gave a talk to the audiophiles of the conference entitled Real-time Audio: Context Is Everything in which he apparently ‘explored the history of game audio to establish how and why we’ve manipulated audio in the past in order to help understand many of the inherited methods and problems we now take for granted’. When I asked him what that meant he said ‘stuff’ and then said ‘it’s about the why, and not the how, of audio manipulation’ so there you go! Sadly I wasn’t there to see the talk, but knowing Kenny, it would have been fairly awesome, insightful and full of bonhomie.

On the Wednesday night a small gang of Molecules attended the Develop awards, where we had been nominated for five awards, all of which we won, thank you Develop! Look at all these great things we won:

Media Molecule

• Best Independent Developer
• Best New Studio

LittleBigPlanet

• Artistic Achievement
• Technical Innovation
• Best New IP

The trophies are apparently really shiny and will look great in our new trophy cabinet, but Mark took them home with him and immediately buggered off on a tropical holiday somewhere (jealous!), so the report of just how shiny they are is pure hearsay at the moment. We shall confirm in coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, we are very humbled, and overjoyed!

Shininess update! One of the awards arrived in the post just now, and they are indeed nice and shiny, also very heavy, provoking some scary murderous comments. Check it out!

So says this report from Develop magazine, which rated the top 100 most successful game studios in the world, based on sales figures, review scores and industry standing. 18th! Go us! Check out the rest of the list on the Develop 100 site.

A number of heroes from our merry band of warriors will be heading down to Sunny Brighton this July to speak at Develop 2009. Some others might be there to just enjoy some ice cream. Others of us may or may not live there all the time anyway, because we’re cool. Gamasutra reports… on the conference, not the living in Brighton thing.

On the art track, Media Molecule’s Kareem Ettouney and Mark Healey will present a wide-ranging discussion on the art of LittleBigPlanet, and how the team integrated the game’s visual style with its functionality to serve its user-generated content goals.

Kareem and Mark will touch on a broad range of subjects, from the desire for LittleBigPlanet to be a collage of visuals mixing the ancient with the contemporary; how the look and functionalities of LittleBigPlanet are highly integrated; and how cutting-edge visual technology was used to serve the vision of user-generated content.

Kenny Young, the lord of the sound booth, will also be representing us and giving a talk, although unrelated to LittleBigPlanet. His talk is, he just told me, all about real-time audio type stuff, and will ‘explore the history of game audio to establish how and why we’ve manipulated audio in the past in order to help understand many of the inherited methods and problems we now take for granted’. Fun!

Develop will be held between the 14-16 July, and there will also be speakers there from Microsoft, Nokia, Real Time Worlds, Traveller’s Tales, Mythic, Hansoft and Ubisoft. Maybe see you there?

Two weeks ago,  a little gang of Molecules attended the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. Here they would give various talks, hang out with Tim Schafer, eat some giant burgers, and win several shiny prestigious awards (yay!).

Straight after one of their talks, Aleks Krotoski of the Guardian Games Blog managed to grab 20 odd minutes with Mark and Alex, to discuss the lessons they feel they’ve learned from creating LittleBigPlanet, and what they hope to achieve in the future.

This might be slightly old news, but the view count on the Youtube page tells me not many of you have seen it! :)  You should give it a shot, it contains some good nuggets, such as Mark revealing he comes from Ipswich, and how unhappy he is with wobble bolts. Ok, Ok there’s more than that, see for yourself!

Part two is available over here on Google Video.