After the results of the Game Critics Awards were announced earlier this week, we reached out to several winners for their reactions and some updates about their games in progress. The winner of Best Original Game was LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule. We emailed some questions to Alex Evans, technical director for Media Molecule. Here's what he had to say:
What was your reaction to winning Best Original Game?
Actually when we got the nominations it was another mad moment of disbelief & happiness that all the people we met at E3 understood the game vision so well. Our policy of basically trying to be as open as possible and show large amounts of the game hands-on, even really early in dev, is unusual but it's really paid off for us! So to actually win Best Original Game from the back of that--well, I don't think it's really sunk in fully yet. Especially against such a strong field this year. It's all awesome, and yet surreal.... :-) The team are totally stoked, and it gives us all new impetus to push forward and make LBP as fine a game as we can!
What was more special to you and why: the audience reaction at the 2007 Game Developers Conference, or the response from individual journalists at E3 2007 as they were playing the game?
They were extremely different. At GDC, it was a special moment just because that was when we burst into view, and the reaction was so wonderful and unexpectedly positive. But at E3 I felt we tackled a much harder and more interesting challenge--letting people (especially critical and knowledgeable gamers!) play the game, see if they had fun--and showing the create tools off for the first time. In a way that was revealing the most ambitious part of our project in a detailed hands-on way, so it's really great that everyone who has played seems to ‘get it'.
How far along is the game, and what are the major things left to be completed before it ships?
I think we're on track :-) and working hard to get something out to people! We're a small team and LBP is still quite a young project--18 months old from when we painted our first office, and I think less than 250 man-months have been spent on LBP so far, for what that's worth--I think we were unusual in showing code so early at GDC (less than one year in to the project) but the reception was so positive we have no regrets at all! Our only battle is persuading people that they're still seeing pre-alpha code, not final :-) Next, what we're really excited about is the possibility of seeding a great community, then watching LBP grow and change with that community. That process really starts with the online beta trial, which we'll really try to *respond* to--and only then can we truly say how close we are to being ‘done'. Being a bunch of perfectionists, I'm not sure we'll ever be happy to say it's 100% ‘done'--but hopefully the user generated aspect and downloadable content will give us the best of both worlds, i.e. timely shipping & evolving :-) We've still got loads of cool stuff to show off, LBP still has some secrets up its sleeve :-)
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