Media Molecule's Paul Holden

It's difficult. The testing side of it becomes increasingly more important as we're going forward and making more changes. We get a lot of help from Sony, they've got a big QA team that help us with every release and we've also got an internal team that are checking the build constantly - day by day - for issues. Now we're trying to automate some of this testing to find issues pro-actively rather than waiting for a tester to find an issue and report it.

We had a beta trial before we launched the game and it was a large scale push to find the last few problems before we shipped, but we've recently restarted that beta trial process over the summer to have 500 or 1000 people helping us play the game and help spot more issues than normal. That's been a big help over the past three or four months to get regular reports back from the community who've been part of the beta. Not just on the new features we've been adding, but also if we've broken a level as a result of the changes we've made. They let us know pretty quickly, so that beta has been a big help.

We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches. It's surprising that even fairly small changes that we've made have had large impacts on the community. We have limits set within the game - such as a maximum of 1000 physics objects in a level - but that's all interconnected. So if we try to bump up one of those limits to give people a bit more freedom that might increase the cost on memory. So we've learnt pretty quickly to be very thorough with those updates.

Another continuous issue is localisation because releasing all these new packs, we support 14 different languages and that's a big undertaking. It's one of the most patched games. "Patched" sounds like a negative term, but we actually patch the game for new content. We're up to our 25th patch and I can't think of any other games on the PlayStation Network that have had that many patches.

Managing that is quite a large undertaking, we're dealing with four different territories, we've got the Game of the Year disc in America so that's a fifth SKU. There's a lot of logistics involved in making everything run in these different territories and making sure they're all localised correctly and inter-operating between them. Because we need to make sure Japanese players can play with European players and so on. And these thing are being done continuously over the last year, it's been non-stop for us.

The next patch to go out is 1.21 which should have a whole bunch of new features that have been in the pipeline for some time. And then there's more planned for well into next year. Sony's been very keen for us to support the game ourselves. A lot of publishers are keen to move on once a game has been released and patched. But Sony has been very keen to give us the resources we need to support the game in this way.

We have community guys that keep a real close eye on that and our level designers do as well, and they're looking to see what kind of things have been created. Early on there were some interesting crazes for developing levels based on musical instruments and reproducing theme music to games. In LittleBigPlanet we get little waves and memes that develop. And as we release new content packs people think of new ways to use them that we hadn't thought of.

Interestingly, we've hired a new level designer who came from the community. He was very active and some of the things that people are creating are amazing. We know how much effort is involved in making a level to a decent quality and to see some of the levels that are being created is very inspiring to us. The Game of the Year edition shipped with around 20 community levels that had been created, and Sony got in touch with some of those guys and commissioned them to make levels. It's interesting that the people who are playing the game for fun end up getting their work incorporated into the finished product and packaged as part of the Blu-ray disc.