“To make a good modelling tool is easy,” argues Ettouney (pictured). “To make it friendly and empowering is hardcore.” Yet that’s just what the team has managed to do. Take speech. If you’re making a level and you want to put in a hint box or create a talking NPC, you just open Popit, select a mouth, stick it to wherever it’s needed, and type in the text. “It’s everything you need for a do-it-yourself cutscene,” says Healey. With just that single object, in five seconds you can offer instructions, crack jokes or begin to tell stories.

How about setting the scene? Select which of the available backdrops you want, from dew-spattered garden to sun-scorched desert, then use the sliders within Popit to change the time of day, increase fog, alter brightness and even colour-correct. Adding a soundtrack is even simpler: just stick a ‘music box’ object to the environment. Once it’s in place, you can select the song, adjust volumes for individual instruments and change the audible radius of the music. You can even place multiple boxes within the same level.

The music box is a good example of what makes LBP so simple: every gameplay feature is also a physical object. If you want a respawn point, pull a door from Popit and stick it to the wall: the game will automatically understand what it’s meant to do. If you want sound effects as well as music, pull out a speaker and slap it on some rocks before selecting the noise you want it to make. And, incredibly, if you want to create scripted events to occur at certain moments, Healey and his team have worked out how to make that object-based too.

Scripting is the most daunting aspect of most level editors, and the one point at whichLBP seems doomed to lose a little of its easy class. If this were a conventional game, this could be the boss encounter that everyone gets stuck on and makes some give up. But it’s not, and Popit contains simple tools that let you easily trigger enemy attacks on cue, create locked-door puzzles and even control NPC behaviour.

The tools in question are switches, which players can drop in to the game and then physically wire to objects. At their very simplest level, a switch can be connected to a motor; once it’s flipped, the motor will turn and raise a nearby door. Voila, you’ve made a basic Zelda puzzle in less than 15 seconds.


But with the range of switches available, variety emerges. There are motion-sensitive switches which act a lot like conventional scripted triggers. Pass a certain point in the level, and a new enemy will drop down from the ceiling, or platforms will start to move, and a mechanical assault course will fire up – all of the movement wired in to the switch via simple pistons and cogs. Then there’s the sticker switch, which is a variation on lock-and-key – it’s slapped on to surfaces and is only flipped once a pre-selected sticker is placed on it. Or how about magnetic switches, split between two objects and activated when the pieces are brought together: in a single move, the colour-coded keys and gateways of Gauntlet and a hundred other RPGs are suddenly brought within reach.

These are just some of a handful of different switches, and the complexity that can emerge when all these pieces are in play with the rest of the game is staggering. Healey shows us an example level: a meerkat is blocking a door and won’t open it until you’ve located her missing baby. The mother is actually a collection of boxes, with a proximity switch that works pistons making her come to life as you walk up. When you find the baby and bring it back, the magnetic key attached in parts to both meerkats triggers a set of pulleys which move the mother into a standing position, yanking open a door that’s attached to her feet. It’s a fully scripted sequence with a challenge, a reward and a prod on towards the next part of the level, and the coding is entirely mechanical: switches, levers and wax lips, with not a C++ command to be seen.

And that’s about as complex as it gets. Every time the team has faced a potentially difficult problem, it appears to have found the most elegant and visual way of explaining things. To show players how many more objects they can place in a level, there’s a thermometer on the left-hand side of the screen that slowly fills up as the space gets more crowded. And to chain separate levels together to form a game’s different stages, the team has come up with a simple key system: for each level you build, you’ll get a different key added to your inventory. Simply add the key for your ice level at the end of your fire level, and you’ll warp from one to the other – although why stay shackled to old-fashioned fire and ice when you could have corduroy or sandpaper levels instead?

From these relatively simple components the team has already made RPGs, complex platformers with numerous stages and hub worlds, and puzzle games like Tetris. It’s even made a version of OutRun, which simulates the changing road ahead by moving about a set of painted strips of wood on hinges. If you know what you want to do, and you can think of a way to make it work mechanically, it’s probably possible. And Popit’s the perfect tool for the job: a branching menu that manages to organize a dizzying variety of in-game objects and tools so that you’re rarely more than three seconds away from what you want.