As Media Molecule continues to augment LittleBigPlanet’s many charms with paid downloadable content and free updates, we meet with Kareem Ettouney, the art director behind the game’s stunning visual style. With his team still hard at work on creating more stickers, characters, tools and objects for Sackboy’s world, we ask what DLC to expect in the future and how it has transformed his attitudes to how to develop games.

What new DLC do you have planned for LittleBigPlanet?
One of the new things I’m excited about is the History Pack, which will have lots of educational applications. It’s a prototyping tool with which young people can do their history assignment or tell stories. I wanted to give a whole library of visuals - some aesthetics from ancient Egypt and Greek, Indian, Japanese, Celtic and American Indian architectural vocabularies, and a big collection of famous characters from history like Mozart, Genghis Khan and Beethoven. We also have a Monster Pack – you’ve got zombies and meanies and bats and things, a whole library you can create your own horror game with, but always with a LBP twist of friendliness. And then we’ve got two other ideas, a small 2000AD sticker collection, and to work with artists to do their own collections of artwork, like the next one is Jon Burgerman.

We were wondering whether you might try this idea!
Jon Burgerman’s a good friend of Rex [Crowle, the graphic artist behind much of LBP’s original stickers and its box art]. He asked Jon if he could do some illustrations that we could have in the game and he just did a heap of them. They are so empowering those bits because you just stick them on materials, cut them out, and you’ve got a handmade character Jon Burgerman piece. We got really excited about doing that one so we want to expand on it and we’re looking at the moment at very, very cool artists, trying to get some of their collections, too.

Can talk about any of the other artists that you’re talking to?
The difficulty is – I’m not a fan of the whole top-secret thing in the game industry at all. I’m one of the people that they have to warn me every time – ‘Kareem!’ So up to now we have a wishlist, if you like, for artists we’d love to work with, and we still haven’t confirmed them but from people like Claire Wendling in Paris to Mike Mignola but obviously we haven’t approached everybody yet.

What’s the reaction been from these kinds of artists to your proposals?
You know, we talked to an artist that we all love hugely, that we’re fanboys of, and their first response was, ‘Oh I just love LBP, I have just played the game with my kids,’ which is really humbling and makes us really excited that they even know it. So they know it and so far have been very happy to jam with us and give us some of their beautiful artwork.

Any plans for DLC that isn’t visually-based?
Stuff that is coming later down the line I don’t think I can mention, but I’ll give you some hints – they have functionality this time, so there are things that the users have been really asking about for a long time and we wanted to give them some new functionality and that will just generate a whole new heap of gameplay possibilities.

How are you creating this DLC? In-house?
No, we have an extended family now. One of the big things that we wanted for Media Molecule was to stay small in order to keep the culture of jamming and big personal ownership and multidisciplinary staff. But at the same time we have multiple threads going on, like supporting DLC, we want to think about what’s next, and we want to think about how can we seriously take LBP to the next level as well. So we’re working with other groups – including Leading Light Studios and Fireproof Studios, and they all have the same culture. I was very keen to make the kind of relationships that we have out of house still completely revolve around people sitting together, talking to each other and jamming. Because once it becomes more of a production line kind of mentality it just doesn’t fit with how we work.


^{Upcoming DLC includes the Norse Mythology Mini Pack}

LBP’s DLC is now covering a wide collection of original sources, from Street Fighter to Father Christmas. As art director, has it been a challenge to keep the consistency of your original design and vision?
The biggest challenge is how can it not be just a mish-mash. How can you have a game that has a consistent visual style and feel and still be versatile to accommodate these things? With the stylistic variety, we did definitely open the range because we chose from the very beginning that LBP isn’t about choosing, for example, Paris 17th century style, the game is about eclectic-ness, and that stems from creating families. Instead of choosing a certain illustration style or theme for stickers, we chose the constraints for a family of styles. We’re trying to have that combination of commitment to constraints and boundaries but also allow us to have the versatility of style – because we wanted it to be like a celebration of popular culture.

Have you wondered how it would be possible to incorporate a certain pack you’ve been asked to create into the style?
It’s challenging but the game protects itself already by the way it’s broken down into families. That already solves half the problem. The other part is stylistic, and definitely people’s imagination is always literal at first – like if I’m making a costume for Sackboy that looks like Ghostbusters or Metal Gear Solid or something, you can go literal and just look at the costume and do a sort of version. But even if you go literal, you’ll still modify the proportions to fit Sackboy. Another step would be thinking you can maybe make the hair from cardboard. The solutions provide themselves because we decided a long time ago on the arts and crafts kind of flavour. We didn’t just do it because it’s a cool look but because helps creativity be user-friendly. Following that path has become easier and easier.