Trophy Monkey

I did a bit of designing in the third dimension recently, as I had the huge privilege to design this years re-skinning of the Vector Monkey trophy for Spike TV's annual VGA Awards (the Video Game Awards er.. Awards). Because we (as in Media Molecule, my LittleBigPlanet-making pals) won the award last year for Best Team, Spike TV thought it would fun if we designed this years trophy, so I got busy with the neon paint.

I wanted it to fully embody our Media Molecule way of reusing and re-appropriating found materials, so I came up with a design that changes the content of the statue without changing the physical shape. So, instead of the monkeys face being straight-on, he's looking upwards and crunching on the crown with his bitey maw. OH NOM NOM NOM he later commented.

Here's Jack Black waving one around (which apparently I'm told he broke later, the butterfingered rascal) and Jake Gyllenhaaaal staring at one, wondering what the hell he's looking at.

As it's now become a new tradition for the winner of the Best Team category to design next years trophy I can't wait to see what Rocksteady design. Especially after having my socks and spats blown off by their tremendous Batman: Arkham Asylum.

City of Game

(Original photo by TigersHungry, new characters revealed by Photoshop)

Last week I made my first visit to Gamecity, up in Nottingham, a festival of games, talking, and education, and good it was too. I had been invited to talk on a panel with Robin Hunicke (of the always-inspiring ThatGameCompany, creators of Flower & Flow) and Dr Barbara Lippe (visual goddess behind the fascinating, and completely unique Massively-Multiplayer Online game Papermint). Where we talked about some of our influences, (I talked about SchoolDaze a favourite game of mine from the Sinclair Spectrum) ways of working, highs and lows, and took questions from the audience.

Having met up with my old pal Jon Burgerman for lunch I was able to drag him onto the next panel with me as well, which led to lots of rude jokes on stage and a impromptu session of game-designer Chinese Whispers. A particularly strange experience, as we were doing this with Masaya Matsuura (creator of Parappa the Rapper and Vib Ribbon) Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy) and Adam "Atomic" (creator of my current gaming obsession Canabalt ).

Other highlights included too much curry, playing the games in the indiecade including the epic projector games, meeting up with some great folk, and being introduced to 1-up Megazine by its creator, truly one of the most beautiful videogame magazines I've seen.

And this:

Playful 09

Playful is a great event full of people talking about interesting technology used with playful applications. It's right up my street. So it was nice to be asked to do the branding duties for this years event. Here's some of what I've been doing for them (using the lovely stuff that Poke did for last years event as a jumping off point).



You can see more on the official Playful web home here. Maybe you'd even like to score a brace of tickets while you're there too.

I'll also be speaking at this years event, so would be grand if a few folk turn up to see. I'll probably natter about some LittleBigPlanet related stuff, like about avatars and customisation and remix culture. Or maybe I'll just draw a cock on a flip-chart. We shall see soon enough.

Fngz Of Fury

Yikes. So busy. Can't complain though - but it has been a month since I updated on here so I'm going to try and start hacking through the backlog. So first up is this the Fngrz of Fury web game I made for Orange with my pals at Poke London and Player3.

The game stars the two guys from the Orange cinema ads (Which are actually really good. The Steven Segal one is my favourite) fighting past a number of characters with the power of texting. So the faster you can type the better you do. A bit like Typing of The Dead from back in the day, except with no shooting, and no zombies. But featuring deadly udders squirting corrosive bad juice.

This was a fun one, as I could really concentrate on the character design and animation (just as well as I had only a few short days to do it). Here's some of the characters, combined together into what we technically call a jpg:



And you can play it now here. I still really struggle to beat the giant hamster. See if you can...

Guybrush Threepwood

One of my favourite games from childhood, Monkey Island, is getting a re-release next week, all smartened up for the HD generation. Personally i'm not a fan of the new HD visuals, probably because I grew up with the old version, I'm a big fan of pixelly retro-ness and the youngsters shouldn't listen to old salty dogs like me.

But in the meantime I couldn't resist a sketch of the games sometime-hero Guybrush Threepwood as he exists in my world of doodles and piratey memories:

DuckMonster Destroys PixelToyko OMG!

I've been a bit slow to post this one (although its now very relevant, as if you purchase The Sun newspaper (U.K.) tomorrow you'll find out more) but I was involved in a crazy project recently called RubberDuckZilla for Coca-Colas tasty fruit cocktail "Oasis".




If you visit the site linked below (and have a webcam) you can play various games that I did the 16-bit retro visuals for, after being asked to do them very nicely by PokeLondon. And by harnessing the power of GEEKMAGIC (tm) your webcam puts you inside the game and turns you into a giant duck shooting lazers out of your eyes (a bit like this Project Natel that my old pals at Lionhead are making for Xbox360, but with more wonkiness and lazerin' and explodin' and for a whole load less less money and with less digichildren).

Anyway, you can play the games here:
www.rubberduckzilla.com

And you can watch the tv spot in this handily embedded video:



And, as I said at the top, if you buy The Sun newspaper tomorrow (11th June) and wave it around in front of your webcam you'll be able to unlock some extra special features. Blimey!

WibbleDone

The cream has curdled, the rackets are splintered, the nets are packed away, and Cliff Richard has been returned to his sound-proof cage. And now we are left with the artwork that Cookie & I frantically generated in our Layer Tennis match last friday, and the fine prose commentary of Anne who managed to write it up at a zillions words per minute.

Each volley lasted 15 minutes, here they are all stacked up. Cookie won the toss and went first, creating the beautiful image of Albion which set a fantastically high standard. A standard that I fumbled with in my first volley, panicking about time-management rather than getting on with making something nice. At least my return had a sea monster in it, and an obscure reference to LittleBigPlanet with him saying YARG! (the name of cheese that was chosen as a codename for our latest game update, which is produced in Cornwall, where I'm from).

Anyway, here's the collected volleys. Scroll down for more waffle.



I think I managed to improve with subsequent volleys, finding my stride and just getting more comfortable with working in this way. I guess the x-ray of the cod-piece is probably my favourite round of my images, I'm not really sure that's what a gentleman would keep in his cod-peice, but if I could carry around some ninja stars, a pint and a cod with me at all times I probably would.

It was great fun to participate, and a real honour to play, exhausting too. A combination of exhaustion and a couple-too-many post-match Margaritas led to me falling asleep on the Tube on the way home and me getting picked up by the police. Beat that Mr McEnroe.

Little Big Disc

Finally today, after about 3 years, LittleBigPlanet, the Sony Playstation 3 game I've been fiddling around with and designing comes out in Europe! (It should have been out a couple of weeks ago, but we had a slight hiccup with a licensed music track which was all over the news for a few days until Mr Russell Brand and Mr Jonathan Ross managed to divert the press once again).

Look here it is, in the box:



Note the cunning use of the Rexbox knight logo that has sneaked onto the disc, and is about 4 times larger than the Sony logo next to it, mhahaha.

Anyway, so now you should be able to buy the game pretty much anywhere - and although I would say this, I hope you do, because its a really fun game and more than that, it's been designed so that anyone can build and share their own levels and enviroments in the game with the rest of the world (well, the rest of the world that has a PS3 and a net connection).

I'm really looking forward to seeing what everyone makes - because its been a long time since it was possible to really make games in your bedroom (I once made a very ambitious cyberpunk RPG with my friend Richard on the Amiga written in AMOS, with a disturbingly realistic death animation of your character slipping around in their own blood. Ah, happy days.) So I'm really hoping with this game we'll see the same kind of mad creativity you used to get back in the 80's when people used to make games about stuff that interested them, no matter how small and mundane or surreal and fantastical - rather than just rehashing what sold quite well last season.

Here's a few examples of fun stuff people have made so far (as its already just been released in USA and Japan)

Kaneda's bike from the Akira movie.
A music video using the tilt-controller and automatic lip-synch.
A car that plays Sweet Child O Mine as you drive.
A cardboard remake of Gradius.
A very topical election level.
A Joker costume.

Plus 1000s of fun levels that you just have to play to enjoy. The mad thing is everytime I turn on my PS3 theres hundreds more to play, it's a constant distraction and it's ruining my life. But in the best possible way!

And if you make anything with LittleBigPlanet, let me know - I want to see :)

LittleBigPlanet BigLittleShop

As the LittleBigPlanet hype machine rumbles on, Sony have built a pop-up shop in London, themed around the game, to run creative workshops, give punters the chance to play it on PS3, and hopefully buy it once it comes out next week!

It's a really nice design, giant furniture that makes even the largest visitor feel tiny and child-like, huge Sackboy dolls, and it was fun to see my artwork plastered (or should that be stickered) all over the walls. It's basically the closest you'll ever get to being inside the game unless you mess up like Jeff Bridges in Tron and get beamed into your PS3.

Unfortunately when I skivved off work today to return to take some pictures it was closed for the day, so all of these where taken from the outside, and without happy-faced monsters fighting with their parents for "just one more go" - which it was like at the weekend. Even TVs Jonathan Ross was spotted there on Sunday playing it with his kids and doodling on the doodle wall. Awright.








More pictures on my Rexbox Facebook page.

If you fancy coming along the address is:

Unit 1&23 Thomas Neal's Centre,
Covent Garden, London, WC2

Saturday the 11th Oct 2008 to
Monday the 17th Nov 2008

iPOPit

You can also watch it on YouTube here, if you like watching exactly the same thing but on a different page.

PopIt is the name of the menu system we developed, so that any player can build and customise everything in the game, from changing your hairstyle to constructing a LittleBigPlanet homage to ChaseHQ built from toilet rolls and plastic toy soldiers (if that's what floats your boat).

I think everyone's going to have a lot of fun with this when we release the game very soon now...

LittleBigPlanet Box Art

Put your eyes in front of this, it's the final box artwork for LittleBigPlanet. It took lots of revisions and hard work from Kareem & me, and dozens of beautiful character renders from Francis & Men Lu (all visual geniuses that I work with at MediaMolecule) but I think we got a pretty good balance between what everyone wanted out of the cover:

Read more about it on the Sony ThreeSpeech blog..

Taking Stress in the Jaw

Blimey I'm busy. Working my brightly coloured socks off. That PS3 game that I've been working on, LittleBigPlanet, is in its very final stages and looking like a polished and shiny diamond (assuming the diamond is made out of cardboard and milk bottle tops, and has toy wheels bolted onto it, and a rocket launcher). And I'm trying to balance that with some other little projects, and finishing Grip Wrench (Yes, I know, it was supposed to be finished, but needed some last minute changes to keep everyone happy, it was a bit too filthy for TV unfortunately).

In the meantime, here's an ad i designed that's in this months Edge magazine. It was a bit last minute and cobbled it together, but I'm pretty pleased with it. The little Sackboy character in our game is becoming so recognizable that I thought it would be fun to make a version of him out of some of the other assets I've designed for the game. And it you look carefully you'll see my face represents the characters groin, not sure what that symbolism means...

Oh, and if you're a Motion Designer, a Level Designer, or an Art Manager I'm sure Media Molecule would like to hear from you.

LittleBigPlanet: Tokyo Game Show

LittleBigPlanet, the game I'm working on with my friends at Media Molecule, for Playstation 3, just had its first proper showing in Japan at the Tokyo Game Show. So I needed to make a proper Japanese trailer to go with this.

It's a bit of a compliation of previous trailers I've made for the game, but with a new stop-motion intro (made using a glass table, my hands, some programmers piling up packs of paper as ballast, and some pens), and some motion graphics explaining the 3 key principles of the game: Play, Create, Share.