Behind the facade of celebrity is where the real work begins: TV Superstars was created specifically for the new Move controllers and the PlayStation Eye. In these ‘Making of TV Superstars‘ videos you can go behind the scenes with the development team to see just how they made the game. In the first video the team talk about the design considerations behind making a ‘Move‘ game; what worked well and what was changed. In the second video, the team discuss their inspiration for the game and the mechanics of how you can become the ultimate TV Superstar, and in the third and final video, the developers talk about the way in which the game captures your facial likeness and shout-out and presents you as an avatar in game.

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‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 11: ‘Plane Stupid’

– Andy Knowles, Designer

The final level. No pressure, then! To be honest this level was a bit of a headache. And not just a normal headache, but a big, fat headache, one of those ones that the ibuprofen doesn’t even take the edge off.

The main reason for this was that, like Jon’s submarine, the jump jet is effectively ‘floating’, and so can be really difficult to control. Now, Jon’s luckier than me because the sub’s supposed to be underwater, so moving really slowly is a good thing. Not for a jump jet though, eh? Oh no, something like that’s got to be moving pretty quickly. And we want it to have controls for four directions, not three (the sub is naturally buoyant). Four controls for one cockpit. Grrreat.

And another thing: the trouble with something as big as the jump jet being made to move at any speed greater than ‘quite slow’ is that you can’t see where you’re going. With the tank, for example, you can point the camera in front of it, and as long as Sackboy’s on-screen, everything’s fine. But the tank only needs to move forwards in its levels; the jet has to be able to go forwards, backwards, up, down, in fact it’s more than four directions because you can go diagonally as well.

The point is, I cracked it. The jet has a variable counter thrust when the player lets go of a control, making it stop quickly, so that you don’t fly into any of the hazards. The cockpit walls, floor and ceiling are all controls, meaning you just have to grab in the direction you want to move. The jet also gets locked into place whenever a magic mouth triggers making sure the player doesn’t fly off in a random direction while they read the text. The cameras are set up in the level (and not on the jet) so I know they’re always pointing in the right direction.

Okay, that’s my last development diary for the ‘Turbo! Pack’. We hope the insight into what we did was helpful to you. We’re looking forward to what you, the community, start doing with all these magnificent machines.

Enjoy!

‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 12: ‘Plane Stupid’

– Sarah Hefford, Artist

Daga daga daga! If we’re perfectly honest, the jump jet caused us rather more problems than we would have liked. It’s such a cool vehicle though we struggled through, since we couldn’t bear to let it fall by the wayside. The plane itself again follows the military style from the last two levels, so you can now expand your domination of land and sea by taking control of the Little Big skies too!

As with all the other vehicles we designed what the jump jet looked like before we designed the level, because its capabilities really defined what sort of gameplay we could use. This one took a little more thought than most of the others however. The first major decision we made was to build the jet from a front-on perspective, whereas all the other vehicles (barring the pogostick) are portrayed from the side. This was because it had to be very balanced in order to have as much control over flight as possible – the solution to this was to make it symmetrical, and enclose Sackboy in a small space so that his weight wouldn’t upset the balance as he moved from side to side.

Originally it only took up two thin planes and one thick plane, but fairly early on we decided to make it use two thick planes and two thin planes, so that it had space for a cockpit that could be reached by running up the wings.

Recreating the jet out of 3D meshes was simple because the design was so dependent on its shape to start with that all we needed to do was give it a splash of colour. Actually this was probably the easiest part of the whole level! Did you know you can manually alter how big the bevel on a material is? Using the Corner Editor tool, move one point (one near a corner usually works best) really close to another and you should see the bevel get smaller. If it doesn’t work at first, try picking another point to move. Since our stickers only cover the front of an object, this is really useful for using stickers to disguise materials that have a noticeable bevel, such as dissolve, pink and peach floaty.

From an artistic point of view, the main problem that we’ve had while building this level is that the jump jet’s flight is blocked by objects in any plane except the front thin (unless they’re made of gas). In addition, we’ve had to be careful that there aren’t any weird nooks and crannies that the jet could get snagged on. To maintain the freedom of flying we’ve had to leave as much open space as possible without allowing you to wander off and get completely lost (eek!), whilst at the same time providing enough interestingly shaped landscape to let you know exactly where you are in the level. This means being really cunning with our materials in order to signpost the different areas of the level as much as possible, and the stickers have to be really punchy and stand out. As Andy said, headaches all round.

Since this is the last level in the ‘Turbo! Pack’ we won’t give too much more away. Those tricksy toy soldiers are up to something though, so expect big explosions and tons of destruction. Oh, and a nice happy ending.

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‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 9: ‘Tanks A Lot’

Sam Dickinson, Designer

The Bridge Builder was a tricky proposition, because it had to be able to move around easily, but also create a bridge that the tank could cross (and the tank is a pretty weighty engine of destruction). Also, the gaps had to be big enough that the tank couldn’t just roll across them, and so the actual bridge emitting bit was getting a bit big and unwieldy. So we made bridge sections that cleverly expanded immediately after emitting. Not only is it useful, but it looks cool too!

We found that you can have fun emitting bridge sections while swinging the bridge emitting arm around. We also found that the bridge sections can get in the way, and that you can just emit lots on one gap to easily bridge it, so we limited number of bridge sections that can be emitted to one at a time.

The tank was good fun, but we decided that what we also wanted something that actually fires missiles. Technically (here comes the science bit), the tank fires projectiles, which aren’t self propelled, and we want missiles, that zoom towards their target rather than arcing towards them like a grenade (okay, not very scientific).

Making these guys actually go in the right direction was quite a challenge. Have a go yourself and you’ll see that quite a few factors come into play: what it’s made of, the angle it’s launched at, exactly where the rocket is attached, the power of the rocket, and the position of any explosives attached to them. Lots of fine tuning (and the invention of the microbomb) later, and it was done. Lovely.

‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 10: ‘Tanks A Lot’

Jason Evans, Lead Artist

Aaaah more tanks and destruction. Spiffing stuff. Here the landscape of the level changes once more as we introduce the bridge builder and missile launcher. These vehicles are both built in the same style as the tank, so you can create a whole matching army assault force should you so wish.

A problem that we encountered however, is that if you want the vehicles to be able to run side by side you’re kind of limited to using stickers and the front thin plane for decoration. The vehicles in this level only take up two planes each (a thin plane and a thick plane), so they can drive past each other easily as long as the back and middle thin planes are kept free – we also use this handy tactic on the crane and cement mixer in the construction level (Construction Derby).

As previously mentioned, the military levels see the introduction of not one, not two, but eight (yes really!) different toy soldiers. Well OK, four different ones, in two different colours. We really love these little guys. In fact, we love them so much we stuck brains on them so that we could blow them up. Ka-boom indeed!

Whilst previous levels have been wholly based around using the vehicles, this level sets you loose to explore more on foot. Did you ever get a shiny new toy, and have more fun building a fort out of the box? We certainly did, and this “homemade” aspect was largely our inspiration for this level. The style is quite simple but very strong and effective, making great use of cardboard materials and some wicked new castle-themed stickers. We’ve also put our lovely fire effect to good use in order to make certain sections look like they’re smouldering away, again in combination with some cunning sticker usage.

To all this we’ve added a good spattering of 3D objects to pep things up – look out for some cunning secret areas to make sure you pick all the prize bubbles up! Rounding things off is a rather unusual boss that you have to defeat using the rather satisfying might of the missile launcher. We don’t want to give too much away however, so you’ll just have to believe us when we say it’s wheely good…

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‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 7: ‘Sub Standard’ – Jon Torrens, Designer

Ah, the Submarine. We don’t have water in LittleBigPlanet PSP, so the submarine was going to be a very different challenge to the other vehicles, because it has to have an almost neutral buoyancy. Let’s put it this way, it took a lot of trial and error. The submarine is naturally buoyant, and sinks by emitting a metal block in its base.

Something I hadn’t realised is that all the gadgets have their own weight. Now, this only comes into play when you’re creating something that requires an exact amount of buoyancy to counter balance Sackboy’s weight. And sure enough, once I’d got the sub ‘floating’ just right, I needed to add the rockets, and they each had their own little mass which I had to allow for. Also, they have to be at the same height as the centre of gravity, so as not to rotate the submarine when they’re firing.

(more…)

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LBP ‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 5: ‘Hopping Mad’ – Andy Knowles, Designer

When I was young, my pogostick was one of my favourite things. When we came up with the list of vehicles for the this pack, we had mostly wheeled vehicles. I decided to just make the pogostick anyway, because I thought it would be fun to see what happened, And it worked!

It can be a little tricky for people to control to begin with, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be bouncing pretty long distances. Boing!

‘Turbo! Pack’ Development Diary 6: ‘Hopping Mad’ – Laura Dilloway, Artist

When Andy first handed this level over it was visualised a lot less clearly than the first two levels, and was literally made up of rubber blocks dictating where the floor and various objects should be! However the necessary parts of the level like the logic and basic landscape took up very little thermometer, and because of this we could pretty much go to town and add as many stickers, objects and materials as we wanted.

We really had a lot of fun doing the art for this level! This was made easier by the fact that there were only a couple of small design considerations that had to be taken into account. Firstly, that once you got into the pogostick there could be nothing in the back thick plane otherwise Sackboy would plane switch back out again (and where would the fun in that be?); and secondly that the pogostick worked better when the floor was rubber.

Like all our other vehicles, the pogostick itself is a 3D object. There was quite a lot of head-scratching over the design to start with because obviously if we made one that was realistically proportioned then it would be about half the height of your Sackperson. In other words, ridiculously tiny. We think our solution works pretty well however!

For something so simple, this level is a real success. It just goes to show that you don’t have to make something massively complicated for it to be fun! Remember though, that when decorating, less is sometimes more. Don’t go too crazy with your stickers and materials just because you can.

Now, what are you waiting for? Hop to it!

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