Items tagged with 'Mark H'

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!

Mark Healey went to visit Prime Minister Gordon Brown, last night, in a little affair for entrepreneurs.

I managed to sneak into 10 Downing St last night, to scope out the P.M’s gaff.

The P.M came in for about 10 minutes, gave a speech about entrepreneurs being good for the economy, and for us to keep up the good work etc.

Other than that, nothing much happened, other than drinking wine, and talking to other random people about their businesses, ranging from someone that made medical bits to put into shoes (or something like that), to a guy that makes personal aircraft, that are stored in a back pack (just as soon as I can find his website, I’m buying one)

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?

Last Friday we had a visit from our friend Tim Schafer! Visiting Europe on a press tour for his forthcoming metal adventure Brutal Legend, we saw the perfect opportunity to repay his kindness of inviting a gang of molecules to Double Fine when they were over in San Francisco for GDC, and also a good excuse to hang out in the sunshine with our friend.

After a nice long lunch in the sun, Tim, his wife Rachael and their baby Lili, met the molecule gang in the office, drank some tea, and chatted to the star-struck testing team. Then we all headed off to have a Barbecue.

It was here, whilst we chomped on lovely grilled meats and sipped champagne, that the heirs of two of the beardiest and friendliest game designers in the world met. Here we see Psychadets Lili Schafer and Lautaro Healey, very possibly the future of game design, meeting for the first time.  All together now: awwwwwwwww :)

Thanks for coming to visit Tim, we all had a great time!

“What’s it like to work on a great software development team facing an impossible problem? How do you build an effective team? Can a group of people who don’t get along still build good software? How does a team leader keep everyone on track when the stakes are high and the schedule is tight?

These are the questions posed by a new book called Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders, a book which takes a a look behind the scenes of “the most interesting teams in software engineering history,”

One of those interesting teams is us, in fact there’s a whole chapter dedicated to us entitled ‘Building Games’, in which our very own Mark Healey gives a detailed insight into the founding of Media Molecule. The giant interview, spread over 11 pages, covers things like the Making Rag Doll Kung Fu, building and growing a team, pitching to Sony, and getting Stephen Fry on board.

We really needed some tutorials, so I prototyped these as videos, and I kind of had in mind, “If I’m going to have someone teaching me about things, they need to sound interesting, and funny.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy immediately sprung to mind. I don’t know if you’ve seen that film or read the books, but Stephen Fry did the voice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book in the film. And I was just like, “It would be so perfect if we could get him,” not really thinking that it’s a possibility. But someone in Sony heard me say that, and the next thing I know, it’s like, “OK. We’ve got Stephen Fry. He’s into it.”

The next thing I know, I’m in a studio, watching this huge character of a man read through the scripts to the game! I got to meet a hero! So that’s definitely one of the cool things about working with a big publisher. They can make things like that happen. And we were lucky he was really excited and into the whole game. That was a dream come true, really. I do think his voice is perfect for it.

Alongside the Mm chapter, there many more stories from other veteran software development folk, who by way of interviews, discuss their various successes and failures.

In addition, if you were to buy this book, you’d also gain Massive Karma Points, as some proceeds from the book will be going to PlayPumps International, a company set up to provide easy access to clean drinking water and play equipment to children and their families in Africa. They do this using an innovative device which doubles as a water pump and a merry-go-round for children – the water pump is powered by the children at play. Neat!

Beautiful teams is available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, and O’Reiley, and the RRP is $39.99 / £30.99.

Authors: Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene Copyright 2009 O’Reilly Media, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Used with Permission ISBN no. 9780596518028

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.