LittleBigPlanet is a unique platform adventure game with a large social community that enables people to play, create and share together in a universe of craft materials.
Players control their own highly customisable 'Sackboy' character to solve puzzles and move across levels, some of which are available with the game. However, the main focus of LittleBigPlanet is on players creating and sharing their own levels, using the level and object editor.
As a team, we felt this should be the full ethos of the game - not just a graphic style - so we designed it to resemble paint and glue, rather than polygons and extruded vectors. We wanted players to feel comfortable making constructions in the game, without being put off by talk of level editors and poly-counts.
Building the software to enable this was a tremendous technical undertaking, but we embraced everyday techniques and playfulness in the development. Here, I'll take you behind the scenes of the design process, focusing particularly on character design and the animation of the game.
