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Those lucky few who got into the beta might not recognise the name Ole-Marius Lakselv, but will probably know his username Geosautus. In fact it is likely you played one of his excellent levels such as World of Color or Mad Mansion.

Here, in the first of an irregular series of creator interviews we track down Ole-Marius to his Norwegian lair and ask him questions until he tells us to go away.

Media Molecule: So, introduce yourself!

Ole-Marius: PSN, Gamertag, Steam ID etc: geosautus.

My name is Ole-Marius, I’m 21 and from Norway. I don’t think I have a favorite color, I like them all. My favorite sackboy costume so far is the pirate outfit. Especially if colored completely blue and with an underwear-sticker on the hat. But when playing with friends it often ends up with a costume covered in donkey tails. When I’m not busy designing levels in LBP I’m usually at school studying animation.

MM: How did you find out about LBP? How did you get on the beta trial?

OM: GDC. I was blown away instantly. And so was everyone I showed it to. When the beta keys went out on eurogamer.net I sat for about an hour just refreshing the page because their server went down. But it paid off! I got a key, and 10 minutes later it was LBP time!

MM: Where do you start when you’re designing a level, do you begin with a specific idea or just doodle until something happens?

Read the rest of this entry »

can anyone guess what this crazy machine is

[edit] damn some of you are quick… and some great ideas. see? inspiration. more hires version here

A super exciting thing happened today! The beta trial went live to thousands of people, mainly via eurogamer.net. In fact, I believe you all briefly brought down their site! WOWZERS! At the moment the feeling in the office is somewhere between unbounded excitement and mild panic - personally I think I’m losing my mind (in a good way!) Had to bash out a few songs on our newly acquired office copy of rockband just to de-stress while the beta downloaded in the background! just had our first few playthroughs with some of you people and with some of the levels that have been published.

What AMAZES me is how good the first ’sketches’ of levels are. it took our testers at least a few weeks of heavy create before incredible levels started appearing. and now something cool for you all to think about: you’ve only seen the first 3 levels Remember, this is a *beta* to test our servers, NOT a demo. Can’t stress that enough! So, what’s is so cool for us to see, is that you haven’t even seen the amazing story mode yet, which serves as inspiration, and yet the levels going up are already interesting. I can’t wait to see what y’all do when you see the full game, and start cranking out levels.

Also, since it’s a beta, it’s already quite an old build. We have some cool new stuff that’s been in our private test for a few days, I won’t give it all away but there are things cooking such as 5-star ratings, (much) better performance and less lagginess, better online stability, better UI for publishing, faster downloads…. so in a way playing this version is simultaneously exciting and an odd throwback to a couple of weeks ago.

Finally, to everyone who has supported the game, played the game, left comments, posted levels, and really got into the spirit of LBP, understood it, and well, enjoyed it, it makes me incredibly proud! Thanks for all comments and constructive feedback, we’re listening and we already have *stacks* of stuff lined up for the beta, and the full release. If you liked the first 3 story levels, the other 50 odd levels are going to blow you away HOORAY! I AM SO EXCITED!

ok I’ll stop now.

 FINALLY PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT BETA KEYS: 

PS sorry but beta keys and their distribution are actually entirely in the hands of Sony. MM have no control over this, so we can’t help if anyone wants to get on the beta trial, I am certain (100%) there are more keys coming SOON but we’d recommend checking the playstation forums and all the usual places for news. In fact, even MM hasn’t received our own full set of keys yet - we’ve only got about 10 between us all so far! (ok so we can play the game anyway, but, y’know, in case it makes you feel better!)

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

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…