Media Molecule Blog

LittleBigPlanet Central announce ‘LBPC: The Game’ with a launch trailer!

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:19 GMT

You might have seen our tweet about it but LittleBigPlanet Central have made a trailer for thier upcoming collaborative level building project, entitled: LBPC: The Game.

LBPC: The Game is a project of epic proportions, involving a hard working team of 11 Creators, the project promises to be one of the biggest level creation projects ever, with a total of 13 Story Levels plus mini-games.

We’re looking forward to this already!

Exciting stuff! And not just because there is a Killer Otter in the video!

If you fancy finding out more about the LBPC: The Game project or maybe getting involved, head on over to LittleBigPlanet Central, there’s a discussion thread about the trailer release.

We need a production server developer!

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:33 GMT

We posted this a while ago on the site - but when we got a new site, it got lost in the move. Never mind, we found it in a box and have unpacked it again. So, if you missed it the first time, here it is again :)

Here at Mm, we make the server software that lets the LittleBigPlanet community play, create and share. We provide scoreboards, ratings, favourites, tags, publishing services and search indices to millions of players (tens of thousands concurrent) and millions of levels. We often serve tens of millions of HTTP requests and over a terabyte of traffic in a day.

We need someone who knows what it takes to make big services like this go fast - reliably.

You will be using the following tools and techniques to help get our server technology ready for life as a high-volume production system:

Continuous integration – including acceptance testing and performance testing
Automated deployment
Automated virtual server provisioning
Automated everything else!
Grown-up monitoring systems
Helping design processes that interface with various teams in Mm and Sony

You will understand the value of (and hopefully be excited by) working on internal tech like this:

A fast HTTP server with an embedded Ruby interpreter
An in-memory, hierarchical key-value store with on-demand indices, eventually-consistent replication and sharding
A Ruby web framework with a NeverBlock-style calling convention to the outside world, which makes adding features easy
A simple RPC protocol that helps us write non-blocking, distributed systems
Telemetry processing of lots of data using MapReduce

If you think this is what you’re looking for, we’d love to hear from you!

Nitty-gritty:

We have server tech written in C/C++, Ruby and Perl. If you know a few different languages and are comfortable with learning and getting productive in other languages, that’s fine.
We’d like you to be comfortable developing in, deploying to, getting stats from and tweaking Linux.
The server team is very small (1.5 people right now), so you’ll be making a valuable contribution to both code and culture.
We’ll be operating an on-call rota, but our engineering practices (hopefully) keep calls to a minimum!

New blog, new feature: Found Art!

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:07 GMT

The Mm office is a melting pot of semi-organised creative chaos. Doodles, paintings and idea-splurges line the walls, scribblings on the backs of notepads lie abandoned in meeting rooms. And the desks of the Molecules are each as unique as the Molecule who lives there - covered in pen-squigglings and post-it note artwork.

We thought we’d share some of the awesomeness, which can be found quite simply littering the office, in our new blog feature: Found art.

Every so often, we’ll take a walk around the office, find some art, and put it on the blog for you to enjoy.

First up, is this envelope doodle from Mm’s Commander-in-chief doodler, Rex :)

In unrelated news, Spaff has been kidnapped by his girlfriend and taken to Copenhagen!

New website ahoy!

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:54 GMT

With a company birthday at hand, it was a perfect time to give our website a little makeover, and put it back together after some rather annoying spamhaxors destroyed it recently.

We’ve filled it up with some new bits and bobs that we hope you enjoy, the most poignant one today being the history section, which at the moment contains the first part of the Mm story, as told by mister Alex Evans.

Once up on a time, Dave, Alex and Mark all worked together at Lionhead studios. They had worked here together on many projects over the years, and now made up the R&D dept, building conceptual things such as ‘The Room’, stealing bits of Francis and Kareem’s time, and also working on their indie title Rag Doll Kung Fu in the evenings.

The Movies, Fable, B&W2 were in crunch at the time, and they were all under threat of being dragged off ‘The Room’, and being placed in the other various teams to help them ship on time. Having acquired a taste for making things their own way, they began considering their options. Alex especially, according to him, was looking to leave.

Oooh hot scoops… Check out the rest!

We’ve also got a new section called The Lab. This will run alongside this blog here as another place for us to write about the things that influence us, or things we’ve made, tech ramblings, stories, all sorts of things!

We’ve revamped MmPicks into this handy section, wich has it’s own RSS and Twitter Feed, so you can stay up to date with our favourite levels!

The rest of the site is a mixture between functional pages for helping us hire people or getting in touch with us, and other more random things. Have a lil’ browse and see what else you can find, and as always, if you hind any ERRORZ please let us know!

Oh one more thing, we sadly had to shed all the comments on old news posts, but as a plus point, we now have an awesome commenting system that lets you sign in with all manner of social networking logins, enabling cross posting and ultimate commenting fun!

Enjoy your stay!

Happy fourth birthday to us!

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:47 GMT

Media Molecule was founded four years ago! Okay, okay so it was a few weeks ago now, but we waited for the new site to be ready, shh! We celebrated by piling into a local Italian eatery and plying ourselves with all manner of treats, meats, sweets and booze.

Two years ago, in January 2008, the gang here posted photos showing how the office had changed over the years

I tried to find someone to ask about the history of the yellow wall, but everyone looked mega busy, just at that moment however, Alex walked by and I pounced.

“When we first moved into the office, we had three rooms which we painted pink, blue, and yellow. Pink was a games room, blue was the dev space, with a crappy kitchen, and yellow was empty. Eventually I led the charge into the Yellow room (because I hate people) and some other people moved in there.

Then we rented the big space next to these rooms, and everyone moved into the big room, yay! We had a proper kitchen in pink room, blue become our eating area and yellow became a chillout room.

But these days we’ve grown again and had to expand out there, so blue is now testology and eating zone, and yellow is a quiet coding room, where I once again live because I hate of people apparently.”

Check out the yellow room today, a great stonker of a trophy cabinet has taken over the wall…

Happy Birthday us!

LittleBig Land’s Fairytale contest winner announced

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:09 GMT

Just before Christmas we blogged about LittleBigLand’s Create contest to make a level based on a famous fairytale, but with an lbp twist.

With over 90 levels submitted, a winner has been chosen, and a Sackboy has been crowned. Congratulations to mnniska, whose really quite awesome level - Little Red Riding Sack And the Sneaky H4Her - took first place.

See the second half of the video, and check out all the runners up, over on LittlebigLand!

We need a Network Programmer

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:08 GMT

We make all of our own technology and tools, with one single focus…… making a great game! This is a unique opportunity to be an integral member of an efficient games team; where designing ‘cutting-edge’ solutions directly helps make our game fun.

We are seeking a passionate, technically proficient Network programmer. Someone willing to ‘run with it’ and exceed our expectations, (and their own).

Check out Papermint!

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:42 GMT

Some friends of ours have just launched their first game - Papermint.

It’s a crazy-yet-awesome-looking free-to-play social networking virtual world type thing, and we’re really looking forward to giving it a go!

Check out Papermint.com to find out more!

Snowball fight!!

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:36 GMT

Thanks @rikfuzz :)

Haiti: Emergency appeal

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:27 GMT

Mixing politics with fun and games is not something we’re keen to do, but when it comes to a cataclysmic event, such as the one this week that has left thousands of people in Haiti suffering, we think it’s up to every one of us to do as much as we can to look after one another

We will be donating some money to the various charities doing their best to help out, and we’re posting this here to ask if you might do the same. Pwetty pwease?

If you can spare even a small amount, then please check out this page on the BBC to find out how to help. Thanks all.