This past weekend, M’s niece C came for an overnight visit. An avid gamer at nine years old, C is enamored with LittleBigPlanet (LBP). She often spends as much time outfitting her Sackperson as playing through favorite levels. Up until this most recent stay, C had no knowledge of LBP’s capacity for user-generated levels. When I informed her of this at a previous family gathering, she went about drafting an initial idea for a level on the back of her mother’s Mead notebook.
C presented a second draft of her level ideas at the beginning of her latest visit.
That the sketches were an amalgamation of elements from previously played LBP levels didn’t surprise me. However, I was curious about how those aspects were among the most difficult for her to play through. She often nominated me to carry us beyond those harder sections. I was the one to make it across the wooden planks. I was the one to lead and sustain the escape from Skulldozer. I was the one to hold tight to the skateboard as it raced up and down hills and ramps. When I asked her why she had these challenging elements in her design, she replied: “I want to make the hardest level ever.” And she wanted to get started right away.
Rather than begin with a blank level, we elected to open up a familiar template, one from which C drew inspiration: The Islands - Endurance Dojo. The wooden planks just mentioned appear around the 1:20 mark.
With so much infrastructure already in place, though, our approach to level creation changed. The desire to experiment and play took over. We became "garbage gods," more interested in filling up the space with assorted junk just to see what would happen. The very top of the level template was soon marked by three layers of white balloons. Scores of beach balls piled upon a massive zombie. Odd shapes of metal and plastic toppled what were once thought to be sturdy sections of the in-game environment. Our Sackperson avatars hovered with glee over an LBP landfill.
Impeding this pollution-based progress were the tutorials. Any time C attempted to add something different to our collective mess of crap, we were taken to a different, instruction-based space. Most of the tutorials were informative and helpful, though the requirement to complete particular tasks before continuing proved a problem. For some reason, the audio tutorial was a specific difficulty for us, making for enough frustration that we abandoned level creation in favor of running around with Paintinators in the Metal Gear Solid levels.
My task now is to suffer through each of LBP's tutorials in time for C’s next visit. This way, I can better serve my secretarial function in transcribing her LBP vision.