Little Big Planet 2 - Development

Development

The game was first hinted at by a Sony representative in March 2010, who stated that the game was in production and would support PlayStation Move controllers, and in April 2010 by musician Ochre who revealed one of his songs had been licensed for the game. It was then formally revealed by video game magazines Edge and GameInformer in their June 2010 issues. On 8 May 2010 Media Molecule officially confirmed that they were developing LittleBigPlanet 2 on their Twitter account and hinted that the game would be formally revealed on Monday 10 May 2010. On 10 May 2010, the official website launched an announcement webpage and news article announcing the game with game details and an announcement trailer. The announcement was also made on the PlayStation Blog with a Q4 2010 release date. Numerous gaming websites reported about the game when an embargo lifted, including EuroGamer and IGN.

In October 2008, BBC reported before the original game was released that Media Molecule had already begun development of a sequel to LittleBigPlanet. The statement was later clarified in an interview with IGN, in which Siobhan Reddy of Media Molecule stated, "we see LittleBigPlanet as a platform... There will be a lot of additional content and it will vary in size and what it does. And we've already started that, yes." The "huge emotional investment" users have made in LittleBigPlanet, Alex Evans stated, is the reason he does not want to ship a traditional sequel. Because they don't want all of the user-generated content to be made obsolete, their focus was to "expand the game without partitioning the audience".

In July 2008, Media Molecule mentioned that should there ever be a LittleBigPlanet sequel that the game would feature backwards compatibility with the original game's user-created levels. In November 2009, Media Molecule Level designer Danny Leaver said that a sequel would fragment the LBP community, calling it "the most counter-productive thing you could do".

On 23 March 2010, IGN reported LittleBigPlanet 2 was in production and would support the upcoming PlayStation Move controller. Sony later denied this report saying that future content for the original title would be compatible with PlayStation Move. Later on in May, along with the release of the trailer, Sony confirmed that LittleBigPlanet 2 would be compatible with Move. Keyboard and mouse support in Create mode was initially announced however it was later confirmed that this feature was not included in the game at launch.

Stephen Fry narrates the game as he did with the first one.

On 8 December 2010, Media Molecule posted an article entitled "The Music of LittleBigPlanet 2" in their official blog, in which they revealed the identities of the composers who had created original music tracks for the game. The list of seven composers included Paul Thomson, Richard Jacques, Winifred Phillips (with her music producer Winnie Waldron), Baiyon, Keith Tenniswood, Daniel Pemberton and Media Molecule's audio designer, Kenneth Young.

Media Molecule was asked in an IGN Q-and-A session how Move will be added into the game in future updates, the company revealed that they are working on integrating motion controls into the Play, Create and Share modes of the game: "The exciting thing to do with Move is, we're working on a play-create-share pack. We're still in the R&D phase and working out what the features will be, but it will be announced in a little while and we’re really excited. In the same was as in, you have the Controlinator and you can remap the controls, you'll be able to do the same thing with Move. It'll also allow the community to make their own Move games and that's very cool." A software update allowing users to play the game using PlayStation Move was released in September 2011. A premium DLC pack titled Rise of the Cakeling was released shortly after and added new story levels and tools for creators enabling them to create PlayStation Move games.