If you’re not familiar with the Level Creation mechanics of Little Big Planet 2 then much of this will be foreign language. My apologies.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, the first thing I got focused on when I started playing Little Big Planet 2 was making various weapons – and things to destroy with those weapons.

One of my early inventions was a Creatinator that fires metal fists a short distance in rapid succession, giving the appearance of punching really fast. I put a Tag on the fist and then programmed all my destructible objects and enemies to take damage whenever they make contact with something with that Tag. Most of my work since then has been creating environments that either make good fight locations, or are just a lot of fun to destroy by punching the tard out of everything. I’ve been attempting to simulate scenes from films like Kill Bill, Inception, Lethal Weapon 4 and House Of flying Daggers, with very entertaining results. No Matrix scenes yet, but I’ve got that idea on the shelf.

My Ninjas still aren’t very energetic but they’re getting more diverse. In addition to the basic, fists-only Ninja, I now have knife-throwing Ninjas, Claw Ninjas, rare Golden Ninjas (worth 1,000 points if you kill them before they vanish), Liquid Ninjas (based on T-1000) and Ninja Zombies. I’ve even got a Ninja that jumps now. …It just wasn’t a priority before. The programming to get the Liquid Ninjas to split into four blobs that come together and reform the full Liquid Ninja took me a while to figure out.

Over the past week I’ve started working on Power-Ups – objects that will emit different Creatinators when they sense the player. There is now a fist with Wolverine-like claws attached to it, a Golden Fist that causes enemies to explode on impact, a Thunder Fist that causes bolts of lightning to strike whatever it hits, mechanical War Gauntlets that home in on enemies and explode, and a tiny “1-Inch-Punch” for close-quarters fighting.
I’ve decided to add a room to one of the later levels where all of those powerups are spat out randomly during a fight with a random assortment of Ninjas. It’s pretty funny.

BTW: The game froze on me for the first time as I was designing a Riverdancing Ninja. The idea being that with the Gyroscope tool I could make the upper body completely still while the feet flew about in random directions. It was going well until I tested it for combat. After meteor showers, lightning fists, spinning hallways, liquid metal, spaceships and zombie ninjas, the thing that ended up breaking the game’s mind was riverdancing.