Project Spark is LittleBigPlanet, Next-Gen Style

It’s impossible not to make the connection. Project Spark is a whole new way to enjoy the create and play genre of games and is everything I’m sure LittleBigPlanet fans wished that that franchise could have been. Built upon by Kinect and Smartglass technologies, Project Spark makes building games easier and more intuitive than ever before, giving players (creators?) the ability to create entire third person RPGs, table top games, pinball, retro titles and more all from a single piece of software. That’s pretty impressive.

The example used in the game was an action game of sorts, in the same vein as Kameo. The world was started with an example of how the technology works. A developer told Kinect to create mountains, rain forests, oceans and more, and the world changed depending on the player’s command. Once he’d settled on a forested area and added some mountains, rivers and the like, he took control of a character that allowed him to further alter his world. He created a village, and built up some of the locations within the village. Then he created a goblin village across the way – things were about to get hairy.

But not before an important foundation of the game was revealed. Behaviours allow you to tell everything in your world what it should be doing. The example was a rock, which the player created to bounce after him like a little pet dog. The pet rock could be changed on the fly so that it would fight enemies with a sword. These behaviours, as well as different resources with which to populate your game, can be downloaded from the cloud.

The developers skipped forward to what was possible after a little more time. It might as well have been a full title. The Goblins were attacking the village, villagers fan away frightened and the gate which surrounded the village was destroyed by a barrage of catapult fire. Two players chased towards the enemy, one taking them on by hand, the other creating land out of thin air in order to get a vantage point. As the Goblins began to overwhelm, one of the players turned that original pet rock into a giant mech, which blew away every attacking Goblin with ease.

Dave McCarthy said he wanted to “give the gift of games,” and that he wanted to turn “making a game into a game itself.” If what we’ve seen of Project Spark so far is anything to go by, they’ve fulfilled both of those goals perfectly.