#Blaugust Day 15 -- The Living Puppets in Little Big Planet

Our family digs Little Big Planet. We own the original LBP plus LBP2, LBP3, and the kart racing game, and while we haven't put in thousands of hours in creating new content for other players to enjoy (And there are a TON of levels out there in the wilds of player-made content . . .), we've done our "fair share" of goofing off with the level creator in LBP. :)

One of my first attempts at building my own level was a weird homage to Wizard101 that didn't really translate well.  When people search a game name (like Wizard101) on Little Big Planet, they want to find either an LBP version of the same game or a simple level that provides Sackboy costumes that look like the ones you would find in said game.  My strange little Wizard101 creation did neither. LOL. I don't care. It was fun to make and, strangely, not many people have ever even finished it.

Anyway, none of that has to do with what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is this particular way of creating objects in Little Big Planet that's striking a chord with me today in a weird fatherly way that I'm going to try to explain . . . but probably fail at.

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When going through various objects that our family had created in the past for level creation, I found a random sackgirl object.  I placed her down in an empty world and pressed play. The sackgirl object came alive and started singing "Firework" by Katy Perry in my daughter's higher-pitched voice from four or five years ago. It was a little minute long song and dance of what very much seemed like a puppet possessed by the spirit of that little girl who no longer exists in the living and breathing world (she's a moody teenager now). And it was hilarious as well.  Firework?! By Katy Perry?!  My girl?! WHAT? LOL!

It's quite fascinating actually, and because it is a moving object in a game world, it feels a lot different than say a video of her from around that time.  Conceptually it's the same thing, but I think very different because it's an object that you can place in a scene, any scene, in this particular game world. It feels different when it's an "object" for some reason.  Hard to explain, but stick with me.

My daughter is tragically embarrassed by it, but, without getting too sappy, there's that "dad" part of me that finds this little dancing doll in a virtual world hugely sentimental. Up until this morning, she was the only one who had ever figured out how to make a dancing puppet that "acted" like this . . . and that could partly be why it amazed me so much. But anyway, this morning I made it my quest to figure it out myself.  As it turns out, it wasn't too hard -- just took a bit of hunting around and making a few educated guesses.

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Step 1: Pardon the quality of my pictures! There is possibly nothing worse than pictures of a TV Screen.  Unfortunately Little Big Planet 3 is one of those games that doesn't play nicely with the standard PS Button, Screenshot method (especially when in a menu). Now that we got that out of the way . . .

Step 2: Go to Tools, scroll over to Creatures and Characters, Select "Sackbot," and press X to use.

Step 3: Assign whatever character look you want to your Sackbot and then select that the behavior you want your Sackbot to have is "Act."

Step 4: Scroll down a couple steps, make sure to turn on record audio and have an audio source hooked up (the eye camera works nicely, although distorted), and press record.

Step 5: Wait for the count down of 3, 2, 1, and then go Crazy!  After you're all done, stop the recording, and press the left joystick to watch your living puppet dance and do its thing! (bottom right hand corner can turn the volume on for this vine btw.)

It's like you're creating a little virtual doll out of your kid's play, which is really awesome.  That moment of play -- that living doll of your kid -- may just end up being in a level someday, and if not . . . when your family rediscovers LBP many years down the road, you'll have this strange recorded Living Puppet of your child in a moment that will never be recreated in quite this way ever again.

Am I the only one that finds this awesome? hehe, I hope not. Maybe some other time we'll talk about the creepy weird "Captured Soul" voodoo doll aspect of this feature, but I'm going to stick with the sentimental vibe I got this morning. :) It's all good.

Happy Dueling

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This post is part of the Blaugust challenge -- Thanks to Belghast from Tales of the Aggronaut for hosting.