LittleBigPlanet PSP has just had a huge great chunk of premium DLC, dubbed the Turbo Pack, made available.

But how do you make sure people are getting their money's worth out of DLC for a game that thrives on free, user-created content? How do you approach creating new goodies for a game that's built around constantly-available new goodies? Will we ever see DLC that brings in a multiplayer mode for LittleBigPlanet PSP? Yes, we had some questions. The sort of questions that itch and niggle like bluebottles in your pants.

We at SPOnG are not the sorts of chaps to sit with bluebottles in our pants. So, off I trotted down to Cambridge to see the good folks of Sony who made LittleBigPlanet PSP for some answers. Andy Knowles, LittleBigPlanet designer of such wonders as the Turbo Pack's pogo stick, and Mark Green, Sony senior producer, were the gents to enlighten me.
Read on for more details on the Turbo Pack, the head-twisting problems behind designing it, how LittleBigPlanet has affected the gaming landscape, and phrases such as 'dissolving logic'...

SPOnG: For our readers who don't already know – could you tell us what the Turbo Pack contains?

Andy Knowles: The Turbo Pack is basically a premium DLC pack that contains five full developer levels and one mini-game. It's themed around a kid's bedroom, so we tried to almost play on the rivalries of the boys and the girls bedrooms. So, we've got fighting in the dolls' house with the tank and this kind of stuff. We tried to get as many different vehicles in as possible, and a nice wide variety.
The most powerful thing, we think, is that every vehicle that you can drive or fly in the pack – you can collect all of the separate pieces of those vehicles, so all of the components are there as separate objects and you can combine them however you like. Of course, there are loads of new stickers, loads of materials, sounds, there's a few music tracks as well.

Mark Green: There's a music track for every level. The idea being, originally, that because everyone seems to like the camel and the racing car from the original pack, those stable vehicles, to give them a whole bunch of stable vehicles that they could use in their own levels. So, we created a whole load of them and I think there are over 100 objects that we're giving away that can be pieced together to make all the different vehicles in the game, from a pogo stick – which is one of Andy's favourites – to tanks and racing cars.


SPOnG: What's the weirdest vehicle you've been able to put together out of the different pieces?

Andy Knowles: Well, we built the actual vehicles themselves so we haven't taken all of the parts and made different ones. We made specific parts that we needed. The most random of all the vehicles is the pogo stick, because it looks bizarre and it's not something that we've seen in any other LittleBigPlanet levels (so far, anyway).

Mark Green: It's going to be interesting to see what the community actually takes and uses.

Andy Knowles: Yeah, there are going to be some great levels with that.
Mark Green: We did see someone actually creating a tank from scratch just using the current parts just using the video we put out.

Andy Knowles: Yeah, a couple of guys – they built using that using the standard LittleBigPlanet PSP components. It was a little bit rough around the edges, but they should be able to come up with some quite impressive stuff I think, once they've got all of the components.


SPOnG: Yeah, the stuff that stood out to me was the pogo stick and then the submarine. Did the oddness of those vehicles make designing the levels more difficult?

Andy Knowles: Well, the pogo stick level was based around getting the pogo stick working. There were probably about 40 different versions of the pogo stick before we got one that felt and handled correctly and had the right buoyancy that would always right itself. That is the mini-game, the pogo stick level.
The submarine was quite a lot more complicated, because it needed to feel like it was underwater, but of course you don't have fluid dynamics or anything like that, so you have to emulate that sort of physics by adjusting the environment and making it sound correct and everything. So it is actually a floating object, just like the harrier is, in a way.

Mark Green: The jumpjet!

Andy Knowles: Yep.
SPOnG: So, why a kid's bedroom and why an emphasis on the vehicles?

Andy Knowles: Well, it's because we were able to have so many different toys. In a kid's bedroom there's quite a lot of variety, so we've got a racing level, military levels, the pogo stick which is more of a kiddie sort of thing.

But yeah, it just allowed us to play to all those different strengths of the different toys. We've got a lot of construction stuff in there as well. It was just for the variety and making it all fit into one, big theme. We wanted it to be a nice, big pack. We've released lots of little pieces along the way, but this is a nice meaty bit of DLC.

Mark Green: We also liked the idea of blowing up a dolls' house with a tank.


SPOnG: With all the community content out there, I guess creating DLC must be quite tricky. How do you make sure you're providing value as developers versus community creators?

Andy Knowles: Well, the biggest part of DLC that a lot of people are looking for was developer-made levels, just because you ensure the quality. And of course we can make new materials and new stickers so we can make it look how we want it to.
And yeah, again, splitting the vehicles up into components means that people can do impressive stuff with it. Also, they get to see how we've done it and check that we've done things properly.


SPOnG: Has the Sony acquisition of Media Molecule affected development at all?

Mark Green: Not for us, really. We've had a great relationship with both External Development, who handle Media Molecule, and Media Molecule directly, so right from the start we were kind of independent here and we could go to Media Molecule for the finesse, if you like.

So, we went down there when we started to find out 'what is the philosophy of it? What's the idea behind it?' To kind of get under the skin and make sure that what we created on the PSP followed the same vein as on the PS3. And then we went down there again with the art style, because we had a whole new art style for it. We went and said, 'is this OK?'

As you can imagine, the tutorials in the game are a completely different visual style in the PSP version, which we had to do for technical reasons. We obviously had to go them and say, 'look, we're making Sackboy look like this, is that going to be OK? And the whole world's going to be in a graph paper style, is that going to be OK?' But they were cool about it and it worked well for us and allowed us to actually have them as a sounding board at certain points throughout development.

SPOnG: One of the things that I think everyone's been saying is how well the PS3 version's been translated onto PSP. I actually saw in the comments section beneath one of the PlayStation Blog developer diaries someone saying, 'the graphics look a bit off for the PS3', and someone else had to kind of say, 'well, duh'. That transition must have been a pretty huge challenge. How do you go about tackling that?

Andy Knowles: Well, we were very careful about how much memory we had, and [careful about] just tiny, tiny little things about how to limit the number of collisions that are going on, just to free the machine up just enough to hold the framerate there. There were lots of sneaky little things.
Mark Green: Lots of physics things that went on behind the scenes. For example, in the PS3 version anything that you build, any land chunk in there is permanently checking against all other land chunks. Because everything is dumbed down for the PSP, we decided to differentiate between the dynamic and static land chunks, which saved us a hell of a lot in processing power. And actually, I think it makes it easier for people to build levels now that you can just have something that seems to be floating in the middle of space. Whereas, you had to use the dark material in the PS3 version. Little things like that made a big difference for us.

You know, you're never going to be able to do all the fancy lighting techniques on the PSP, but you can do other things.

Andy Knowles: I think at the end of the Turbo Pack levels, we got to the point where some of them were so complicated that we have to have self-dissolving logic as you go through the level to push everything as hard as possible. They're very big levels, as well.
SPOnG: I can imagine with the vehicles, as well, you move faster so you have to make the levels longer.

Andy Knowles: The Formula 1 car level, it can go from one end of the level to the other [really quickly] so we have laps that it goes round upside down and stuff. There's some quite impressive stuff going on in there. Again, with the jumpjet, the logic is spread all across the bottom of the level as you go through it to lock it into place, so it has emitting static geometry to hold it in place, and it even has a reverse thrust so that the vehicle handles correctly in the air, because obviously it's a floating object that can move at speed. So, yeah, there's some really complicated stuff going on in the background that the users probably won't see.

Mark Green: One of the features of my days for a while now has been Andy coming over and going 'argh! It's hurting my head!' I think the landing of the aircraft had [Andy] going for months.
Andy Knowles: Oh yeah, it was easily the most complicated thing that I've had to work on in LittleBigPlanet.


SPOnG: Were there any points when you were worried that you just weren't going to be able to do it?

Andy Knowles: With that one, yes! Again, with the pogo stick, that was another one that I didn't know if it was going to work. In fact, quite a few people told me not to do it, but I thought, 'it must be possible', and going through all those versions, like 'right, just adjust the buoyancy a little bit, swap the materials over, I can adjust the strenght of this piston', just going through every iteration, it's like 'right, that's it. It's nailed, spot on.'
Building the level around it was actually really easy. I think the level was only a few weeks work, where getting the actual pogo stick was more than that just for that one little object. There are some tricky things to get right and it's all about standing back and just having a think about it first. Thinking, 'how is this going to work? What materials do I need? How heavy does this thing need to be to make it fit and feel like it should do?

Mark Green: And hopefully, with reverse engineering, rather than spending months picking over it, people will be able to work out how it's done for themselves.
Andy Knowles: They've got all the components as well, haven't they?


SPOnG: One of the things that comes across, reading the developer diaries, is that it's almost listening to someone talk about what they've been doing with their Mechano set, or LEGO Technic or something. Often when you hear someone talk about development, it's hardcore coding stuff that non-developers don't really understand. But reading you guys discussing things like the weighting of vehicles and the arc of projectiles and so on, it's almost like you're having fun just mucking about with it...

Andy Knowles: Yeah, it's a great system to work with. I think it's also good for teaching people about physics and how all the mechanical things work, as well. I did read an article a little while back about libraries in America. They were getting copies of LittleBigPlanet in for people to look at and learn, people in schools, as well. Because, it's such an easy, visual way of teaching how physics and logic work. It's actually quite a good learning tool - I wish I had it when I was at school, anyway!
SPOnG: So, LittleBigPlanet 2 has been announced. Do you guys have more DLC in the pipeline, or perhaps a sequel...?

Mark Green: Yeah, we've DLC lined up for a few months to come as yet. Right up until - we've got a Christmas pack lined up.

SPOnG: And will it be more LittleBigPlanet after that?

Mark Green: Well, as a whole studio, I think you saw TV Superstars for Move announced a little while ago. We're still working on Play TV, Play TV 2. And then we have other guys working on other concepts...

SPOnG: With all the community stuff out there, does that feed back in to what you develop for the DLC? Do you look at the user-created levels and say, 'oh, that's how people are using it'?

Mark Green: I think a lot of the inspiration for this pack came from - and I mentioned this earlier - there's a lot of those racing camels, and there's a lot of those racing cars, and everyone's loving them! But there's only those two fast-moving, stable vehicles that existed in the first one. So, the whole basis for this pack was to say, 'right, let's give people more of what they actually want, and what they seem to be using.' So, that's one big way of doing it.

Andy Knowles: I guess another thing is that most of the vehicles that have been created, certainly in LittleBigPlanet on PSP and PS3, they've been fairly A-B kind of things. So, you've got a forwards and a backwards or an up and a down. With some of the ones that we've built with this pack, there's all kinds of things like boost for the racing car. The Formula 1 car actually goes upside down. There are quite a few extras that we've put in there, just to give quite a bit of variety as to what you can actually do with these things.
Mark Green: And people have been very ingenious in what they've done, just with the set of physics and everything. For example, being able to climb along a ceiling and stuff. My favourite level is the 'Now and Then' level, with time travel going on - it's just genius!

There are certainly people doing things that we didn't even think of, and people manage to do things where you think, 'oh! That's good!'


SPOnG: There was talk at one point of a payment model for the community levels in the PS3 version. Was that ever a possibility for the PSP version?

Mark Green: When we first started looking into that, that was one of the rumours that was out there. But it never really went anywhere so we decided early on to avoid it. We had quite a tight deadline to actually get the game out in, so it was, 'that's a complicating factor. Let's leave that aside. We know the rest of it's worked.'
SPOnG: How long was development on LittleBigPlanet PSP in the end?

Mark Green: So... what year are we in now? So, in June 2008 we heard the first rumblings of 'this might be available if you want to do it', and obviously it came out in November last year. So, not much more than 12 months in development from a zero codebase. We had to start from scratch, we couldn't port anything from the PS3. So, it was a rough ride, but we're pleased with how it's gone.


SPOnG: One of the things that a few people pointed out in their reviews was a lack of multiplayer. Is that something that we could see as DLC?

Mark Green: It's a real tricky one with multiplayer, in that on the PSP, as soon as you turn the Wi-Fi on, you lose a third of your processing power. You lose a third of your available system memory for the libraries and what have you. So, we were looking at it and we think it might be feasible to do something the size of the mini-games in multiplayer. But something of the complexity of most of the levels just wouldn't be possible. And it's still, obviously, quite a lot of work to actually do that. So, it's a real balancing act of 'is it actually worthwhile?' Obviously we'd all love to do multiplayer for the large levels we've already seen, but it's just not going to work.

SPOnG: It's a shame.

Mark Green: It was something where the bosses kept coming back to us all through development going, 'what about multiplayer?' It haunted us for a while, but we think we made the right decision, not including it. It allowed us to do all the physics and everything that I think makes LittleBigPlanet what it is. The mechano set, as I think you described it, for people to build things from.
SPOnG: LittleBigPlanet is obviously part of (or the starter of) a trend of user-generated content - we're seeing it now in particular with ModNation Racers - do you think further down the line you'll be developing more games centred around community content? Do you think it's dug in?

Mark Green: I wonder whether, particularly Media Molecule with the first LittleBigPlanet, have not so much set a trend as changed the landscape of what games actually are, and the fact is that no matter what game - whether it be Call of Duty or whatever - people are going to want to be able to have a larger degree of customisability to create the game that they want, and that anyone creating any game (barring, perhaps, things like Heavy Rain) are going to have to take that into account.


SPOnG: It's very difficult to ignore. Personally, I was the sort of kid who, given a LEGO kit, always ended up with something shit like a square box. So, for me LittleBigPlanet's been more about the traditional platforming stuff, which is really well done. But even if creation's not your thing, it's impossible to ignore the scope of the tools and the way it's appealed to a lot of people and got them involved.

Mark Green: I think, because I don't build the levels, it's certainly not my forte, but I do rather enjoy playing the best of the publicly-created levels. They are great, and I think the ingenuity you get from millions of people is always going to add significantly to what a single team can actually bring up, and it makes so much more of the game as a whole.


SPOnG: Thanks for your time, guys!