I don’t have any pictures, but maybe I’ll get some later.

My concept for my latest LittleBigPlanet level was simple — a large mazework of iron girders, which you’d run through at high speed for awhile and then have to solve cute puzzles to proceed. The problem comes with the complexity meter.

This is a little red thermometer at the left of the screen that keeps track of the complexity of your level, similar to the one in SPORE. Once it fills, you’re done.

The same happens in miniature with the complexity of individual shapes. Every object you create from scratch starts out as various geometric primitives, which you then carve or combine with others to make objects — a process called Constructive Solid Geometry, or CSG. When dealing with something as massive as a maze, I’ve been bumping up against this time and again. I’ve dealt with it by carving the maze into large chunks, which let me get away with running secret tunnels through it.

Back to the complexity thermometer. I don’t know how the Media Molecule LBP levels get so incredibly complex. I started off with a puzzle where you use a rocket sled to push you through an area you can’t walk through. It’s a really complicated machine which rolls the sled back to its home after it crashes, so you can try again if you didn’t make it the first time. The barrier you are flung over is a complicated pile of machinery with a little spring-operated mechanism to keep it all from falling apart. Following that is another rocket sled to cross the bottom, which tosses you onto a piston-driven platform that flings you way up and deep into the maze.

This is the opening of the level, and once you know the course, you can get to this point in about fifteen seconds.

And that brought the complexity meter to about 20%. Adding the next puzzle — one where you have to jump on cushions being fired from a cannon to reach a high crawlway (and, if you keep going up, a secret passage) — and the beginnings of another — where you have to fling a balloon into an overhead opening in order to lower some stairs — brought me to 30%.

I’m really getting concerned that some of the set pieces I have yet to do — a cart race and my Dippy Bird area — will fill the meter. But what I’m doing just doesn’t seem as complicated as some of those MM levels. Plus, I still have to put the point bubbles, prize bubbles, NPCs who give puzzle hints, and the polish in. I left the entire back plane empty so I could fill it with stuff going on in the background, but my original designs of having giant pistons and gears going on in the back probably won’t happen.

My largest issue isn’t really an issue. But this is taking an incredibly long time. Doing level design with a PS3 controller and level after level of menus for everything is tedious to begin with. Having to deal with the physics engine for everything is also not as cool as it should be. I wanted to have flying fish swimming through one of the sections. Making flying fish was no problem, but putting the brains on them so they could be destroyed by the player weighed them down so much that they just ended up pinned to the ground and looking really pathetic.

I guess no design survives implementation.

I ran some more user-created levels to get inspiration. There’s a LOT of great designers out there.

I’ll be glad when I’m done this one. It’s been a real learning experience, but it does have some nice points. It’s big, so I can try different things, and it’s not based on anything, like an EQ dungeon, so it doesn’t have to make any sense. There’s no room for rocket sleds or pillow cannons in Befallen. But based on my experiences with the maze, Befallen will be a lot faster and more linear when I do get back to it. In retrospect, it was stupid to try and do Befallen as my first level. Especially since the dungeon itself has no specific goal. Dragons of Norrath missions would be way easier to rip off.

I was going to title this, “Friends don’t let friends play Wizard 101″ because it’s so addictive, but I couldn’t. I really, really enjoyed playing my current crush with friends this weekend.

I have this dream… that someday, I will fight through the Master’s Tower in Ravenwood and at the end of the battles, when I meet the final boss, Pumpkin Head, he will look at me in his terror, and just before I play that final card that will call down a centaur from the heavenly plains upon which he runs to split the villain’s vegetable head with a fierce arrow, he will say… Pumpkin Head will say…

“Damn. How many times are you going to KILL me?”

“Just until you cough up that Clockwork Spider.”

“Well… if I knew it meant so much to you… here, and good riddance!”

Yeah, then I wake up and run the instance again and no spider. I have a dozen little imp pets from it now. I’ve seen low level people running around with the spider so I know people do get it. I don’t NEED the pet, but once I heard that this was the uber-rare prize of the Halloween festivities, I wanted it.

Sigh. I even made an alt to help run the instances faster — that’s her in the picture. She’s a Balance/Death mage, which is a pretty awesome combo, actually. Not a huge DPS machine, but better than Life. I have her there to shut down the enemies with Weakness, boost my elemental shields so they can’t hurt me much, and to help with the killing. Plus, I figured, twice the chance that a character of mine gets the spider!

No luck so far.

I was SO THRILLED, though, when Stargrace and Cownose made characters and dropped by. I was two boxing at the time; running through the Plague Oni instance with my friend Keelan AND leveling my alt via the low level quests (while the Master’s Tower is great for loot, the experience for an entire run of Rank 4-5 monsters is less than 100 xp, so can’t be used for leveling).

Wasn’t too long before I suggested a perfect group opportunity for us all — the Master’s Tower!

Oh well :)

These last weeks before all the new expansions and games seem to be giving people an excuse to try out newer, indie games. And though I didn’t see him online, Hudson was also running around, crisping ghosts and skeletons.

Wizard 101 is taking over the blogosphere by Storm, Fire, and Ice… :)

—

I spent several hours working on Yet Another LittleBigPlanet level. One thing that is clear in all the best LBP levels is that they are GAMES. Befallen is a level I do want to finish, but the slow, steady, spooky pace that seems best for Befallen is opposite of the frenetic action and over-the-top puzzles of the typical LBP level.

Yesterday I started work on a level I’ll likely call The Ironworks, which is a sky-scraper sized open framework of girders which give lots of spaces for puzzles and being shot at high speed through all manner of things. As well as being a maze.

For all its size, I’d like to keep the player generally moving fast enough so that you could clear the thing in five to ten minutes. Medium danger. High speed. Some tricky puzzles.

It took a really long time to build the building, so much so that I only had time for one puzzle — using the rocket sled I built in Tanglewood Labs. Here’s the video of that first puzzle. (The sound for some reason doesn’t seem to have been captured).

Wizard 101, why can’t I quit you?

I spent most of the night last night working on my LittleBigPlanet level. Well, almost. I spent most of last night feeling like an idiot. A frustrated idiot.

Since LittleBigPlanet is based around a physics engine, everything you make there has to actually work to some degree. I started working on a sorta free-floating player system as is used in the hugely popular Gradius level, and got it kinda working, but I didn’t like it. Then I decided to make a game set not in space, but underwater, and the space ship becomes a submarine — or a bathysphere, really, since the thing has to be connected by chains to a hidden, remote-controlled trolley which handles the mechanism of bringing the bathysphere through the level.

First part of the level, you control only the depth of the bathysphere as you negotiate a maze of twisty passages, all different, looking for treasure and prizes. Then comes a boss fight where you’ll have to hit various buttons with the bathysphere to defeat it.

Second part, you control the speed, but not the depth. Your depth will be adjusted by lifts that will bring you up and down, ending in another boss fight. Not sure how you’ll defeat that boss.

Third will be a shooting level, along with mazes and lifts and stuff and a bigger boss battle and again, dunno anything about that because after about three hours work last night, I’d only just managed to get the bathysphere working and under player control. (I’d spent some time running levels in LBP before I got started).

Now that that’s working, making the first part of the level will be pretty easy; just drawing in the maze and placing the traps. But I bet it’s harder than it looks.

I’d love to get back to Befallen but it’s beyond my ability to make levels yet. I have to work up to it. I am hoping this will do the trick.

—

After that, I logged in to EverQuest 2 with my necromancer and grouped with Said’s conjurer in Ruins of Varsoon. That worked out amazingly poorly. Lots of death. So we decided to head over to Loping Plains and see if the Haunted House was still open, but it wasn’t (got Said some druid rings and the Butcherblock griffon towers, though), and by then, it was getting a little late.

So I thought I would just log into Wizard 101 for a COUPLE OF MINUTES to try and farm the clockwork spider from the haunted towers before their Halloween event ends today. Turns out there are three towers, and they aren’t all the same. I soloed what turned out to be the baby, easy tower about a dozen times — no pets. Maybe another tower, oh look, this one is a teensy bit harder but still no pets. What’s this? A THIRD tower with rank 4 mobs in it?

Oh, that’s the one with the pets. It was also fairly tricky. There was a level 12 wizard hanging around, so I recruited him and we ran the tower three times. We got some imp pets (I got two), but no clockwork spiders. I ran it again this morning and still, no spider.

I hope to run it a couple more times before it ends tonight. I only just found out YESTERDAY that this tower has a rare pet in it, so I’m a little late to the party.

But the takeaway lesson from all of this is that, even though I’m at the end game and there really isn’t much more I can do to progress my character (I could make an alt, I guess), I am still in love with Wizard 101.

I’m not that hard to please. If you make an MMO both fun and challenging, I’ll give it a shot. W101 is both.

Plus, out of all the MMOs I play, W101 is the one that works best on my computer (as did WoW when I played).

I was reading Scott Jenning’s concise explanation of the uproar over Linden Labs’ changes to the open space sims in their Second Life virtual world simulation, and as I read it, I wondered why I never really ‘got’ Second Life.

I mean, it has everything I like, right? It’s almost ENTIRELY about community and creating things. All the cool things I am doing in LittleBigPlanet right now, could be done better in Second Life. Second Life, after all, does not restrict your objects to three units in depth, and it lets them turn as well.

While working at Massively, I had plenty of opportunity to talk, a lot, with Tateru Nino, one of the leading commentators on the goings-on within Linden Labs. And as a blogger there, I was in Second Life quite a bit researching articles. And I saw a lot of VERY COOL things in there — groundbreaking stuff in emergency preparedness, art and education.

Second Life, unlike the vast majority of the games I play, even worked fine on my Linux box.

So why am I not there?

I guess the largest reason is that I had no purpose. Nothing that made me think I had to log on to do something. It’s like EverQuest 2. Since my main character is maximum level, maximum AAs and decent gear, I have accomplished everything in the game, so while I love EQ2, I have no purpose there. Back when I raided, at least that was a reason. Friends are somewhat of a reason, but in this world of Twitter, XFire and blogs, I talk to them all the time and don’t need to necessarily log in to do so.

But this isn’t about EQ2. This is about Second Life.

No levels. No rules. No quest grinds, or grinds of any sort. No score, no xp, no death penalty, no loot. Okay, there is loot. But you can make your own loot.

The case could be made that it’s not a game at all.

Someone brought me once to a secret place in SL — an exclusive club in a satellite high above the Earth. She said it was so secret, no pictures could be taken (and though the SL client barred screenshots, I’ve relied on third party programs to take screenshots for a long time. I took pictures, but I never posted them anywhere).

The place was astounding, an amazing construction. But aside from taking illicit photographs, I just didn’t see the attraction. What you did there was mount your avatar on a dancing ball, and then your avatar would dance. That was pretty much it.

I just don’t get it. As much as I like the idea of sandbox worlds, I don’t like playing them. I tried so hard to like Star Wars: Galaxies, but a game like that with no goal is hard to love. (Get two missions. Run for fifteen minutes to get to it. Circle strafe some mound and kill bees for ten minutes. Run ten minutes to the next one. Circle strafe some more. Run back and try not to let yourself die to self-inflicted blaster shots). (Yes, I understand they added means to get places without having to run everywhere at some point after I quit.)

Second Life is like SW:G at launch, but without the mounds of bees.

People loved SW:G before NGE (apparently, haven’t played) added game elements, and they love Second Life now, but I guess, when I come home from work, I’m more interested in relaxing with a game then posing my avatar places. And anyway, I’m a writer, not a 3D artist (though at times I thought I might try), so when I want to create, it usually involves vowels and consonants, not spheres and cubes.

I guess the REAL question is — why do I like LittleBigPlanet so much?