LittleBigPlanet: Taming the Burger Monster

I'd like to bring you better news about the tomato-sauce rocket, but I'm afraid I can't. The team spent hours crafting it, nursing it through that eleventh-hour transformation from mayonnaise to ketchup (the switch was made "in case the mayonnaise coming out the end gives people the wrong idea" in the words of our star designer), building it out of polystyrene so that it was light enough to take to the skies but still allowed Sackboy to cling onto it for the ride, and finally constructing, one at a time, the hamburger buns that would cushion its landing.

But then we had that problem when we tried to plug an extra controller into the PS3 and, well, I'm sorry to report that the whole thing went haywire and we had to reset the game. And we hadn't saved. When LittleBigPlanet came back to life, the whole rocket enterprise was nothing but a sweet, sweet memory. If I'm being honest, the team could never get it to land without violently ploughing through the rest of the stage anyway.

So, how long does it take to make a LittleBigPlanet level then? The answer, resoundingly, is that it takes a bloody long time. And that's even if you have a trained "Super-User" named Barra on hand to help, and even if you have a design document for a brilliant barbecue-themed playground drawn up by Eurogamer competition winner Michael Williams (Lazlow on the forums), and even if you have me safely relegated to documenting status, following my disastrous two minutes at the helm early on. LBP is great - never doubt that for a second - but it isn't particularly quick.

There's no question that it's rewarding, however. Eight hours after we first sat down in the LBP Brand Space in Covent Garden, with the finishing touches going onto the climactic end-of-level Burger Monster, we all felt such a palpable sense of reward - even me, and I hadn't actually done anything - that it was almost enough to justify the fact that we'd had to listen to Britney's Womaniser over the PA at least twenty times during the day. Finally, the great moment arrived: pressing the save button, switching from 'Create' to 'Play' mode, and then triumphantly blasting through Michael's entire level.

Michael's original design documents. You can see how they look in the game at the Eurogamer Expo, starting tomorrow.

Well, I say entire. The truth is we found a series of fairly devastating conceptual flaws popping up about halfway through, when the collapsing bridge section collapsed a little too quickly, tumbling our rugged Bananamobile into some toxic gas we'd stuck around the level on a whim, and killing us all instantly. Thanks, Michael. And we gave you a PS3 for this?

But it's not all bad. Crash bugs aside, our official winner proved a remarkably capable leader. His initial inspiration for his winning design was simple: "I don't have a PS3," said Michael, "and I really want one." I'm sure that's the same stuff that gets Miyamoto out of bed every morning. Michael's an aspiring 3D computer modeller - and a good one from what I saw of his portfolio when he wasn't looking - and admits that, like Proust and Fellini, there's a healthy chunk of autobiography in his work. The central theme for his barbecue level came to him, "after I had a barbecue the night before, I think." It's a good thing, perhaps, that he didn't start work on the competition while recovering from a sigmoidoscopy, then. That would be a hard environment to render in LBP's handicraft range of sponge and quilting.

With his concept pinned down, it was a simple task to mock up the design in his back garden, using cocktail sausages, plastic beakers, a fair amount of lawn furniture, and an origami Sackboy. It didn't help that it was a windy day and Michael had to take the photos while also holding the props in place, but quality design is never easy, and the results were more than enough to justify the ten pounds he spent on coke bottles, value burgers, and fruit at the local supermarket.

Looking over the plan at the start of the day, our Super User, Barra, looked a little uneasy. Michael's level was an ambitious design: not only did it call for vehicle sections, with the ketchup rocket and the Bananamobile, it also featured a panicky scramble over some burning hamburgers, timed leaps from one orange to another across pits filled with spiked cocktail sausages, and an opening section where you get across a bowl of water, log-rolling on beakers. But Barra, like Michael, had a strand of steely resolve running through his character. "We can do this," he said, eventually sitting down and picking up the controller. "You can actually do pretty much anything with this game in the end if you think about it right."

Interestingly, Barra describes LBP as "Brechtian", because in most finished levels, people opt to let you see all the wires and cables and switches that made the design possible, and also because he's got a background in acting so he would say that kind of thing. (It's probably good that he didn't do our review.) But maybe the theatrical angle holds up for Media Molecule's game: in Sackboy's world, you certainly spend a lot of time improvising.

Take the beakers that roll across the bowl of water at the beginning of Michael's level. I think we'd naively assumed that there would be a menu somewhere called "Glassware", where we could select the exact sort of thing we had in mind. LBP may be amazing, but it isn't Habitat: if we wanted those beakers, we'd have to make them ourselves. And that was only half the problem: LBP features fire and electricity, but it doesn't have any water to speak of. Seconds in and we'd already hit a snag.

Luckily, Michael's mind was fresh and alert, and after a few false starts, he'd created an alternative - a bowl covered with electrified glass which has to be navigated using toilet roll tubes (glass beakers would be too heavy to roll, and we couldn't be arsed to make them, anyway). Fall off the tube, and you get zapped: a classic bit of videogaming beckoned.

Mmm, burgers. We'll probably have those at the Expo as well. Did we mention we're doing an Expo? We're doing an Expo.

One obstacle down, and Michael was onto a prolonged hot streak. With only a handful of short hiccups, like losing the rocket or trying to create a believable cheese-grater to work as a launch pad, both he and Barra never let up until the very end, when Sackboy has to run the gauntlet of the Burger Monster's flaming projectiles, before knocking him off the top of the barbecue with a boxing glove. You know, like in Call of Duty 4.

I'll admit - there were moments when it seemed impossible. Getting the spacing right for the flaming burgers was a nightmare, and working out how to dispose of the corpse of the Burger Monster once he's been punched into oblivion posed some serious challenges. And, when I saw Michael creating weird creatures from twitchy disembodied doll limbs and photos of his best friends, I started to seriously wonder what sort of person I was spending the afternoon with. But in the end, his level was a triumph: inventive, quirky, constantly surprising, and just the kind of thing that should win competitions.

"It takes a lot longer than I expected," admitted Michael, summing up his first taste of both game design and prolonged exposure to LBP. "But it's been a really good experience. When it all comes together, everything's perfect. The game just gives you so much opportunity to be creative."

Before we left Covent Garden, I asked Michael to provide a twenty-five word mini-review of his own level. "Twenty-five words? That's too many," he said modestly. "It's just awesome. Just think 'awesome', twenty-five times."

At the end of a long day, Michael headed back to Basingstoke with his level on a flash drive, and presumably spent the next few days perfecting the design, fixing the bugs, and removing all of those troubling references to the Qur'an that had crept in along the way. And that brings us to the real treat about LBP: buy a copy, and you can try out Michael's award-winning stage for yourself. Friendly advice: just watch out for the Bananamobile section.