This almost isn't even off topic Has everyone heard of the PS3 game Little Big Planet? I got it for Christmas and started playing it a few days ago, and found it quite enjoyable, but not until last night did I realize how little its popularity probably has to do with the game itself and how much it probably has to do with the ability to build your own levels. I thought maybe playing the game was one third of the fun and building your own levels was two thirds. But the power and fun of building your own levels outweighs that of playing the game by far more than than. For me, building levels is probably going to be at least 90% of the fun, though I will still play through the whole game.
I started out building levels a couple days ago after playing it only once before. I saw that you could add to your own levels many of the fancy pre-designed objects that you had encountered in the game. And then there were a few simple objects (basically solids that you could shape and texture) that you could add beyond that. I didn't have time to investigate further at the time. But last night I discovered that all these fancy pre-designed objects could be built from components available in the level editor. Suddenly I realized the power of Little Big Planet and almost got depressed at how much this game had over SGDK2. Why would anyone want to build games with SGDK2 when you could do it in Little Big Planet instead? Well, there are a few reasons, I hope, but LBP has an amazingly usable interface for building remarkably complex levels.
As I started to use more of the objects in the level editor I realized I hadn't even begun to see its full power. I picked one of the objects that had a question mark on it, indicating that there was a tutorial about how to use it. And when the tutorial was done it filled my toolbox with a dozen new objects and tools that I could use to create levels. Many of these new objects had their own tutorials. As I proceeded to review more tutorials, the power just exploded with subsequent tutorials adding dozens more new objects and tools to the toolbox. And I still haven't played with everything. But as I played with what's there, I realized that this game is like a super version of a physics simulator that my family and I were once playing with on a laptop. You draw shapes on a screen and attach forces to various places on the shapes, then tell it to go and watch how things play out. It was very fun even if it wasn't perfect and some objects would fly off with some calculation problem from dividing by zero or something - who knows. But it was fun. Well this it like that times ten. Not only can you draw the shapes, apply forces and tell them to go. You can design a whole game around it. And you can add multiple layers of shapes, and apply textures to the shapes and attach machines and buttons and switches to the shapes. And I haven't seen anything flying off into outer space by dividing by zero yet
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Have you ever played a video game too long, and then you dream about it when you fall asleep. Except the dream is much more interesting than the game because new and impossible things develop in the dream that weren't possible in the game, and the game takes on a whole new magic? Then you wake up and find that this amazing game or device from your dream is sadly not real. I feel like Little Big Planet is that impossible dream. It's like the impossible toy you dream about and can never have... but it's real this time.
