We went to Develop and came back with some awards!

Last week was the annual Develop conference in Brighton, and we were there to give some talks, come a cruel 4th in a games quiz, and win a nice stack of shiny awards!

Mark and Kareem gave a talk entitled The Art of LittleBigPlanet - A Big Medley discussing how the visual style of LittleBigPlanet was decided upon and evolved, how the feel of the game was defined by the materials, and everything being bolted together. They also discussed how you guys have been using the game to make all kinds of different visual treats for us to enjoy. Highlights of the talk included peeks at early sackboy sketches, prototype videos such as the famous YellowHead demo, and some screenshots of some of your levels and sackboy costumes.

Kenny gave a talk to the audiophiles of the conference entitled Real-time Audio: Context Is Everything in which he apparently ‘explored the history of game audio to establish how and why we’ve manipulated audio in the past in order to help understand many of the inherited methods and problems we now take for granted’. When I asked him what that meant he said ‘stuff’ and then said ‘it’s about the why, and not the how, of audio manipulation’ so there you go! Sadly I wasn’t there to see the talk, but knowing Kenny, it would have been fairly awesome, insightful and full of bonhomie.

On the Wednesday night a small gang of Molecules attended the Develop awards, where we had been nominated for five awards, all of which we won, thank you Develop! Look at all these great things we won:

Media Molecule

• Best Independent Developer
• Best New Studio

LittleBigPlanet

• Artistic Achievement
• Technical Innovation
• Best New IP

The trophies are apparently really shiny and will look great in our new trophy cabinet, but Mark took them home with him and immediately buggered off on a tropical holiday somewhere (jealous!), so the report of just how shiny they are is pure hearsay at the moment. We shall confirm in coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, we are very humbled, and overjoyed!

Shininess update! One of the awards arrived in the post just now, and they are indeed nice and shiny, also very heavy, provoking some scary murderous comments. Check it out!