Eurogamer Expo Sessions: Media Molecule presents LBP2

We've got 16 pods with LittleBigPlanet 2 on. They're all playable. Today Dan and John, a couple of our designers, are doing a session in the morning. They show off some of our levels and the background, and explain how they were made and put together with some of the new tools.

We're showing some beta levels as well. We'll show how people can improve and tweak them. We should have more Molecules here as well, maybe 10 of us. So we're having a bit of a fan meet and have people come build crazy things and hang out with us for the day.

Don't bog us down with the science! Some kind of incredible compound.

The most recent beta code. There are five playable levels from the story mode from different places – different tasters of the games. There are a couple of platform levels.

Tower of Whoop is on there. That's a racer from the first theme of the game, using the grapple hook to get up this enormous tower. You bounce all the way up with bounce pads, and you can get high score and chain combos going up. It's really good fun.

You can get all the way from the bottom to the top with one long combo of points if you're incredibly good. I'm not.

There are two versions of a mini-game called Block Race. That's a four-player mini-game with really simple gameplay, just blocks falling down and you hit the corresponding buttons as fast as you can within a minute. That's great fun – a great little game, that.

There's Pipe Dreams, which shows off the sackbots. That level is all about rescuing little sackbot fellas that are in love with you and chase you throughout the level. The last one is Lift Off. It's a spaceship level. There's anti-gravity with bouncing around and some sackbots.

Yes. We also have the create mode unlocked in the build. People can sit there and start jamming if they want to. If they're already LBP fans and know what they're doing they can start playing with the new tools. We have two really good creators from the community, Jack and Grant, sitting there for the whole three days just making stuff. People can watch the progress of something being built up.

Jack worked with a company we worked with called Maverick Media to make all the tutorial levels in LBP2. It's quite good to use people in the community who are so enthusiastic and love the game.

Yeah. We would have designers sitting out there but they're busy finishing the game at the moment. They'll be here for a little bit and they'll be doing similar stuff. If people want to get hints and tips on, how on earth does this work, those creators and our designers are here to explain everything.

First of all we give some basic demonstrations of a couple of the new tools, probably the controllanator, which is the thing that allows you to wire up the buttons on the controller directly into contraptions and make your own spaceships and vehicles.

There's also a thing that allows you to make a mini-game where you just press X... I played a game yesterday where it was just who can tap X the most. A classic game.

Yeah.

We had the whole office sitting there going, ahhhh [mashes imaginary pad]!

Then they will take some of the levels from the story mode, hopefully some stuff no one's seen before. Then flip that into create mode and show how it was pieced together and what goes into making one of our levels.

A lot of craziness. The main difference is most levels people make in the community they make on their own. Our levels, the designers build a lot of motifs, gameplay elements they think are fun, and they stick ones together they think will go well until they have a good level structure.

That will go over to an art team and the art team will make it look beautiful. Then it goes back to the design team so they can fix all the bugs the art team introduced. It's a back and forth. Then everyone will play it and feedback on it.

Sometimes a level will take a long time and no one really knows who built what. But sometimes someone will just sit down for four hours and make some incredible thing, and everyone will just say, I guess that's done. We might put that one in.

It is difficult because there are a lot of good levels. Tower of Whoop for me. It's always been good. The fact that Danny, who designed it, has a high score that is almost unbeatable makes it even more playable. It's out there. That's the one in the beta client, actually, so people are playing it. At some point in the beta trial we're going to have a score challenge to try and beat Danny's score.

For me, there's a level quite near the end of the game that people have seen a bit of in progress. It involves leading your army of sackbots – throughout the game you're collecting sackbots and rescuing them so you can have an army to take on the evil Negativatron. There's a little game where you have to guide your army while flying on a bumblebee. It's a side-scrolling shooter. Your army is on the ground and you have to blow up bridges so they can get across. It's really awesome. It's a really cool bumblebee that shoots honey at things. Things are really goopy.