Little Big Planet doomed?
Attending Alex Evan’s talk at Develop this year was an eye opener, especially when Alex opened the talk with ‘We made all the same mistakes that Lionhead did’. See that scares me - mainly because I used to work for Lionhead and I remember what it was like to be a coder there. Don’t get me wrong, Lionhead was a fantastic place to work and has some amazing talent there but one factor that was missing at my time there was planning and it appears this is what Alex is referring to. One of the exciting aspects of working for Lionhead was the relative freedom to experiment with different systems and techniques in coding however this was also its downfall because you found that you had a lot of code that was written, dumped, written again, dumped again and written yet another time. An example of this was a newspaper system I was working on for the console verison of the Movies. I found after we dumped it that at least three or four other coders had implemented the same kind of system and also had theirs dumped - not because it was bad code but because once it was coded it was decided that it didn’t really fit and then they dumped it only to be re-coded when somebody declares that ‘wouldn’t it be great if we had a newspaper system in the game?’. This kind of iterative re-factoring is expensive to projects and I have seen it at a lot more games companies that just Lionhead and I am sure I will see it again. The way Alex was telling it he seemed to believe that LBP had it bad and as a result they are having to pull stupid hours to finish it. His one advice to everyone - place constraints and adhere to them.
So why could this spell doom for Little Big Planet? Mainly because what you end up with on these types of projects is a mixture of messy code masquerading as design that sometimes works but often doesn’t. It worries me that the innovation that is Little Big Planet will not be able to deliver on its basic promise of a social networking game because the approach to delivering that vision was flawed. We need Little Big Planet to be different and we need it to be damn good if we are to change how this industry keeps pumping out ‘me-too’ games.
The ray of sunshine we have is that Alex has a brain the size of a planet so he should be able to pull the game out of the quagmire it appears to be in.
LMAO, ok buddy.
Poorly written article, and shows a clear lack of research. Where to start? How about the game is called LittleBigPlanet and not Little Big Planet. Clearly you know nothing about the game.
Thank you for the article, I’m pretty sure it’s going to come together just fine. I wish I could have attended this, I’m hoping to go into the gaming industry after finishing my degree.
P.S, I don’t know how I could have any disrespect for a former Lionhead employee
WoW. This article is reaching for something in the dark, and never quite manages to get a grasp on it.
TOTAL UBER-FAIL
I doubt LittleBigPlanet will be like you said, with only 25 people and Sony watching their every move they could’nt afford to make the mistakes Fable did. Though anything is possible I hope LittleBigPlanet turns out to be all it is expected to be
I hope so too - the industry needs this game as a wake up call to the publishers out there.
Reassurance Topic of the Xbots #7563452
LBP could be classed as one of the breakthroughs of this gen (along with the “Wii franchises”) it think we are failing to understand that the industry is going main stream…marketing is all that matters…it will we well marketed and
as fun as wii fit.
You’re alone on this one my friend.
LBP is not a ‘Sim’ game, so I have no worries whatsoever about this typically British masterpiece, it has Stephen Fry on board as a narrator and has the visuals of cult children’s TV shows like Bagpuss, Paddington Bear and The Clangers, while being able to customise everything and built in physics like Garry’s Mod; Seriously. What can go wrong?