At its European media event last week Sony announced that its highly anticipated PlayStation 3 exclusive title LittleBigPlanet had been pushed back a month to October 2008. Shown at just about every major game conference in the last year or so, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who isn't excited for this game--a title that seamlessly mixes single-player, four-player cooperative play on or offline, and a user-generated content building system limited only by the player's imagination. We trapped three members of the Media Molecule team: studio co-founder Alex Evans, audio designer Kenny Young, and the game's producer Siobhan Reddy to pick their brains on everything LittleBigPlanet.

　　GameSpot AU: This is a fair whack of Media Molecule sitting at the table here. How is it that a team of just 25 has managed to do so much with so few people?

　　Alex Evans: Yeah, this is around a fifth of the team. Well the thing is, they're all super talented. On some level we've picked our battles--that's the honest answer. We couldn't have made a Final Fantasy or a GTA IV, both incredible games, but we picked our battles and then picked our people and that's what we tried to do.

　　Kenny Young: Another thing is that a small team facilitates quick decision making and allows for good communication.

　　Siobhan Reddy: When you have a small team like that and you have someone like the character guy who's in charge of the characters, they're the best person at them, and it becomes really easy to work out who should be making the calls.

　　KY: It can be brutal too because you can't hide. You can see everyone and you're on first-name terms with everyone. I know that sounds silly, but I've worked on teams of a hundred people where you just don't know what's going on at the other side of the office. But when it's a bunch of people based in a room you just can't hide anywhere.

　　SR: It's like the game. The game has co-op versus competitive and that's where we are as a team [laughs]. We're really ultra co-operative and collaborative but everyone is really very good at what they do and you can't have that without there being a bit of "oh, wow, that's excellent, that means I have to raise my game and be more excellent". The bar just keeps getting raised. There's no time to rest.

　　AE: That's one of the things about the game; it makes you pick it up. The cool thing is, there's going to be a dark side to our game too, and it's exactly the same as our company. If you read our blog, it's the same vibe as the company. We do this Friday feature where one person has to show off what they've done that week--there's pressure, it's serious pressure, but it's good natured.

　　SR: When you get good people in a small room you all just want to work. We've all left other places and chosen to work here by choice. We all collaborate together and make sure we're constantly getting better and achieving our enormous goals.

　　GS AU: User-generated content plays a huge role in LittleBigPlanet, would the title have been possible without its rise in popularity?

　　AE: Yes. When you say user-generated content I trace it back to God games and loads of other things like shoot-em up construction kits.

　　SR: I think of building blocks, Lego, and sand castles.

　　AE: I'm a total Lego geek. Siobhan always makes a point about character design. Every game that has character design in it--and ours is obviously more awesome than everyone else's--is user-generated content. When we pitched the game to Sony it was mental. We didn't realise the bandwagon. You're right, in hindsight it's this massive, massive thing, but I don't think we were that canny, we just knew we wanted to do creativity. Less of the bandwagon, more of the "we enjoyed these other games, let's do this thing".

　　SR: Everyone at Media Molecule comes from a background or has a personal interest in some kind of creation. So it wouldn't necessarily be them being involved with user-generated content programs somewhere, but it would be about people creating something. We make games, so the most natural thing is for creative people to bring that into the games medium.

　　AE: We scaled that right back in the pitch to Sony. When we pitched to Sony we were like "OK, it's going to be this core gameplay and it's going to have this tactical element". I think that's the really important message we fail to get across to people now, there is this great fun game to play, and you don't have to make stuff. That's what we pitched to Sony and then we were like "oh, yeah and it's creative, cough". The cool thing was that Phil Harrison--who we were pitching to at the time--at the end of it was like "That was cool, but I wish you'd talk more about the user-generated content side" and we were like "OK…" and then realised. The meeting was literally booked for 45 minutes, and it ended up taking three hours in the end. We've always been passionate about users and making it fun.

　　GS AU: Without sounding like the creative industry's death knell, how long will developers play a major role in making games if user-generated content is getting so big?

　　AE: Forever

　　GS AU: Is it changing then to a scenario where developers are just creating the tools and the building blocks to let the users make their own games?

　　AE: Yeah, there's always room for editorial decisions. The thing with user-generated content is that it changes the game. There's always space for professionals, and I don't mean trained, I mean people who have chosen to commit an insane amount of time to something.

　　SR: In that same argument we would say that people who write blogs will take over newspapers, and amateur photographers will take over professional photographers. There will always be a role for game developers.

　　AE: Modders are matching the quality of professionals and Flickr photos are often professional quality, and blogs are often the same. It doesn't remove the need for other channels. I'm really hoping the quality of the stuff made in LittleBigPlanet will be beyond the quality of what we ship with the game. We're not going to be out of a job, but there will be loads of people with the same talents we have, and maybe more of it.

　　GS AU: It wasn't until we saw the alternating camera views in LittleBigPlanet that we considered a kind of hybrid Echochrome meets LittleBigPlanet spin-off. Is creating a game like that possible with your current game engine?

　　AE: The funny thing is the engine in LittleBigPlanet is full 3D. But anyway, yes.

　　GS AU: But you're not offering a full 3D camera view?

　　AE: One of the biggest challenges we've had since we first showed [the camera] was actually adding walls to push off. The decision to go side-view was a conscious, not a technical constraint, but rather one of simplicity and ease of use. It was a really good game decision. We could do Echochrome, I think the funny thing about LittleBigPlanet is we can change it over time. When the community starts doing stuff we'll be there to support it, and I would love to do crossovers with other games, that would be really fun. There are loads of ideas we've had to shelve or put on hold for a while but will surely see the light of day.

　　GS AU: What are your plans to update the user-generated content tools once the game ships? How will you evolve them over time?

　　AE: That's definitely a direction we see it going. We have the ability to patch as much code as we like, but I think what's interesting is more the way people abuse stuff. I don't know if you've ever seen Line Rider on YouTube, but people totally abuse the tool without the tool needing to change. The more I see someone abusing something in a really cool direction we just go and help them out. The funny thing is people are making levels now in LittleBigPlanet that I hadn't expected to be made, and to me that's the sign of a good tool. You watch professionals use Photoshop and everyone has a different way of using it, or if you're using a sound editing package, everyone will have a different way of using it. People are already using LittleBigPlanet in different ways, so we just have to make sure that we can patch in stuff, and I don't think it'll be new features per se. There's a niche here, we should just support that. The community can help itself as well, because you can make unlockables in the game. You can construct items that we never thought of and start trading them and collaborating. We've given quite basic building blocks, but someone might be known as the car dude. You'll have levels that aren't really levels, it's just a garage full of 30 or 40 awesome cars and if you're his friend you can go and unlock it and use them yourself. That's exciting.

　　GS AU: You mentioned abuse, and it's an issue we've seen handled a few different ways, in many cases managed by the title's community. What are you doing as a team to manage a potential influx of inappropriate content into the gameworld?

　　AE: I'm a bit relentlessly positive about that stuff. At baseline we have griefing, we have moderation systems in place, and we have ways to report content, and that's the stick side--but we also have the carrot side. I'm actually more interested in stuff like the rating up system, like if you look at the way comments work on so many websites, they solved a lot of the griefing problems by just screening stuff people said was rubbish. It just vanishes. It's like the positive version of moderation, the positive stuff bubbles to the top. We give people more opportunities to say "hey that was awesome!" and push people in that direction. When I was saying abuse before I meant it in the positive sense of things I hadn't thought of.

　　SR: More like manipulate, or take advantage of.

　　AE: It is a total fuzzy area. You see people exploiting a physics bug, and it's really hard to know where you go with that. If it's not destructive to people then we want to help the community. You see communities online, and some of them work, and some don't. It's all about not being too draconian and at the same time helping the good guys out to be good guys. It's not just constant ban hammer, ban hammer, ban hammer. That has to be there, we have to deal with them, and that's part of the Internet. There's a form of community based moderation, and ultimately there are super moderators that are internal to us, but we certainly could do little features that help the community moderate itself.

　　GS AU: What are your plans for integrating Sixaxis gameplay mechanics?

　　AE: We're not actually affecting gameplay with it except in one really crucial way. Whether multiplayer is online or on your sofa, one of the important things, especially when you're online is that you can point your finger at something, and nod or shake your head. Obviously there's voice chat and text chat and all the other ways of doing it, but we purposefully left it so you could see all the characters all the time, even when you're in the menus, even when you're in the lobby screen. So you're choosing a level to play and people are going "yeah! yeah!" and nodding their heads. It sounds bizarre, but you forget it's there. We're not doing the whole "Ooh balance on a rope thing" and there's no reason we couldn't do that in future, but we didn't need that. We're using it for this thing that's actually more direct and intuitive, plus we don't have to do so much animation! [laughs] We put it in pretty quickly and we didn't expect it to be so well received. It doesn't feel bolted on.

　　GS AU: What sort of balance challenges have you come across trying to build both a compelling single-player campaign and an online title with up to four strangers interacting?

　　KY: There are challenges, but I think we've tried to address them. If you're playing it single-player then it's still a great experience, but we're trying to encourage people to play together by making some stuff--which isn't a requirement to play the game--only accessible to people who are collaborating and playing with other people. For example you can create a little physics problem with a seesaw so that only if someone is jumping on the other end do you get flung in the air. You don't need those things to complete the levels that come with the game.

　　AE: We always talk about co-op versus compete. Every level you play you're competing with the rest of the world to get the top score, but you get the top score collaboratively. So three of you playing a level, you're going to be lumped together and get the top score together, so it's like there's this delicate balance. We realised people were playing the game and they were fighting over who was going to get the next score points. So we put the multiplier system in that basically tracks who got the points, so even though you get a collaborative score at the end, all the way through you see if you collect an item (we call them collectible bubbles) you get that, not the other guy. So there's this co-op with an underlay of competitiveness and that really helped us with the one-player versus multiplayer thing. If you play as one-player you can play the level, you get to the end, you can get all the items, and you can unlock the story, and then [the development team] have effectively done another pass over the levels where they add the underlying competing.

　　SR: The multiplier you'll need other people for.

　　AE: It's chaining. It's just classic chaining. It's really one for the hardcore gamers. Getting the high scores now is Jedi. It really is a case of replayability, because you're working out a route. Then you realise chaining is collaborative. We can do a single-player version where you'll never get the full chaining because you can't be collecting continuously all the time. What you do is get one guy to get a bunch, then another guy to take a different path and get the next bunch. You take the low road and I'll take the high road. Even in single-player you'll never be able to do both. The scoring has really allowed us to do one, two, and three-player games.

　　GS AU: It's interesting to see the reaction of both casual and hardcore gamers to LittleBigPlanet. How do you as a team categorise this title in terms of its intended market?

　　SR: We've been asked that actually, and I think it comes back to that idea of play, create, and share. Everybody will experience each of those parts of the game in different ways. Some people will probably be able to get into the casual side and some will be able to get into the hardcore side and that's why you get a broad audience, because it's not just one audience.

　　GS AU: Conceptually who was it designed for?

　　AE: Mark [Healy] (the other co-founder of Media Molecule) used to say "who is it for?" and then we'd say "anyone with hands". But seriously, it was broad from the beginning, and it's not trying to be a hardcore game, but on the other hand it's a PS3 game and it needs to appeal to that audience. It's presented in a certain style that really disarms you. Personally I'm a huge Metal Gear Solid fan, and it was the first game I ever completed. I'm not a huge gamer, but I got MGS and I was hooked on that. It's that onionskin thing, that if we can disarm you then whether you're casual or hardcore you're laughing and having a good time. Before long you're chaining and wanting to be number one, and we have community ranking features, so you can face off against people and know you're better on this level. On the creativity thing though, people might just make costumes, or make a cool t-shirt, or a cool car. Or they might decide to make the best skateboard run every created and will get 20,000 people to play it in a week and then get the best score and beat them all.

　　KY: You just need to be able to run, jump and grab to play, but then there's this whole layer of customisation, but also the way you can emote. The first time someone picks up the game they learn how to wave the hands and start motioning with the character, but then there's the other layer. Some people will embrace that and learn how to do dance moves with their sack person.

　　AE: The reason it's a broad audience and why it will appeal to both is that we're insanely ambitious and I hope we pull it off. I remember playing a really early build just after GDC with a well-known game designer whose opinion I respect. He put the controller down and he said "you are insanely ambitious, and it's awesome", so having that person say we were insanely ambitious is a sign that oh dear, we really are ambitious. We are trying to reach a very broad audience, and I think we can do it, but we'll just have to wait and see.

　　GS AU: Kenny, Alex, and Siobhan, thanks for your time.