I got frustrated trying to make my fire beetles for my Befallen Level 0 — Commonlands level. They are supposed to be hard to kill unless they open their wings, exposing the insta-kill button beneath. Coordinating the wings, having the switch be protected until they are open, moving the beetle around, etc. These are hard problems.

And then I had this idea, it was right out of Jurassic Park, that scene where all the Apatosauruses are feeding in the trees at night, and one sneezes on the girl? Those long necks rising out of the tree canopy… what if instead of dinosaurs — we used Dippy Birds?

I could just imagine a level built around them. Sometimes you’re above the trees, sometimes below them. Running along their swiftly tilting backs… hanging on to beaks for dear life… yeah, that could work.

It didn’t take long to bring one to life, and climbing around on them was everything I thought it would be. Now I have to make dippy birds of different sizes — mine doesn’t scale down well — that do different things. Like breathe fire at you.

Tanglewood Labs, my private level where I develop stuff, is getting a little spread out, so I made a rocket car to get through it faster. Grab the red cushion to jet to the right, the green to jet to the left. Best thing? Get up to speed, and then jump off. You’ll go running through the level like the Flash. Which is something ELSE I can put into a level. A place you can only get to by running real fast, by jumping off a rocket sled :)

This is awesome stuff. I just can’t help thinking how wonderful this would all be if I could import critters from Spore into LittleBigPlanet. That would just be about the best thing ever.

What LittleBigPlanet REALLY needs is a command where you can shift EVERYTHING up and over to the right.

Creating a level in LittleBigPlanet is just the same as playing a really good game, because, where DOES that time go? Fiddling with the difficulty of puzzles, figuring out just HOW to make bats drop on someone just after they managed to get past the slamming door, getting elevators to work properly, trying to make it dangerous enough to be fun but not frustrating, playing the damn thing over and over and over again … it was 3 AM before I went to bed this morning.

Knowing that I’ll have to do it all over again for the real dungeon is kind of depressing, because I’ve put hours of work into it this far. But just like writing (and a shout out to all my NaNoWriMo-participating friends!), I have to admit that everything will be better when I do it all over again.

Hey! Of COURSE it has quests! I had a long explanation for why the skeleton needs his book and how he came to be sitting down here and what happened to his tower, but that didn’t fit and was probably boring anyway, so I just shortened the quest to “Get book, I’ll help you.” One of the pacing problems is that you don’t yet NEED his help. The well that he helps you cross is a screen past him, you can’t see it from where he sits. That will be fixed in the real one, as well as the little feature where if you jump out of his tower, you land past the well. You could play the entire level and never see the feature that is supposed to be the central challenge of all levels of my version of Befallen.

So, yeah.

That said, creating levels and trying to figure out all the tricks and mechanisms of the game is amazingly fun. And also amazingly frustrating. WHY does the piston that slams the door disappear if I nail the entrance portal to the wall? LittleBigPlanet’s subtitle should be “Unintended side-effects”.

Stargrace came by and ran through part of it this morning. It was weird seeing someone else play it. I could see she was having trouble with the skeleton puzzle. I tremendously simplified it from how it started, since it was virtually impossible to do, even for me. It’s CLOSE to where I want it, now.

I would very much like to import stickers and other art assets from the PC, though. Though maybe it’s better this way.

Last night was a LittleBigPlanet night. I didn’t know that it was going to be a LBP night, but when I sat down to play, my cat pinned me to the couch and I wasn’t able to leave for hours. Besides, when Stargrace and Sirhyl stopped by the Pod of Love, ready to play, how could I not?

Things went pretty well when it was just me and Sirhyl, but when Stargrace popped in, we ALL had problems. I dunno what the deal is, or if this morning’s LBP patch fixed it, but with three, we just weren’t in control. My character would be zipping around, or go in some mystery direction… it was very hard to complete anything.

The other issue is the camera. The camera is the hidden extra player in the game, and this is the player who wants you to die. Unless all three people stay really close, the camera struggles to show everyone — and even a missed jump that leaves someone at the bottom while everyone else is at the top can do this — it becomes so zoomed out you can’t see or do anything and just have to eat a death and respawn.

We played solo after that, but even though we weren’t playing together, the achievements we made and levels we finished got flashed to each other’s screens, so it was nice. I followed them to some user-made levels which are designed to give you certain trophies, and those were kinda cool in a god-mode kind of way.

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With EverQuest’s expansion, LittleBigPlanet and Rock Band 2 for the PS3 all launching on the same day, deciding what game to PLAY would just be tearing me apart.

Thankfully, LittleBigPlanet has moved its launch date out a bit so as to make my life somewhat less stressful. Media Molecule, I didn’t know you cared.

Well, actually, it’s because one of the songs in the soundtrack contains phrases from the Qu’ran, so they are recalling every copy of the game so they can replace it, as they would rather not take any risk of offending Muslims.

Now, if it had been offensive to Christians, they’d likely have used it as a selling point, and free publicity.

I don’t mention religion much, this not being a religion blog, but I’m a Christian, and I’m a gamer, and I don’t get offended when people bash Christianity. It can take it. And I think Muslim gamers are not much different. The Qu’ran can survive having some of its words used in a song. Sony is just being cowardly. The point is not to take religion away from the world, but to make it more a part of the world.

If *I* were a Muslim, I’d be offended that Sony would fear the Qu’ran so much that it would recall, at great expense, all the copies of a game to take a harmless mention of a holy book out.