LittleBigPlanet's level design: How easy is it?

Once you’ve gotten the basic tinkering out of your system, you might want to give actual structures a try. It’s easy to create a simple building just by creating a couple of shapes, positioning them on different layers of depth and then gluing or bolting them together. With a little more effort, it’s possible to create simple machines within your structures, like this switch-triggered elevator:

Creating it was simple – we just carved a rectangular hole out of a stone wall, tossed a metal cube into the slot and resized it to perfectly fit the shaft. Using a square cursor to hollow it out made it rideable, and by attaching a winch chain to the top of the elevator car and the ceiling above it – and then tweaking that chain’s length and speed – we were able to make the thing travel between the ground and the simple floor above.

Putting a red pressure switch into the elevator and wiring it to the chain made the elevator move only when we stepped inside, and telling the chain to pause after every movement gave us a chance to actually get out once we’d reached the top. Once you know what you’re doing – which, again, might take some experimentation – it couldn’t be easier.

Above: Just be careful you don’t accidentally delete the wrong chunk of wall, or your machinery may stop working properly

If you want things to get a little more elaborate, you can turn chunks of the stone wall into glass, creating windows. You can even put a front wall on your building, with windows to enable you to see what you’re doing inside, and sculpt the whole thing to your liking.

Actually, it’s possible to transmute sections of any material into any other material, in whatever size or position you like, creating a layered look:

Above: We used stone, glass, rubber, dark matter, some floaty orange stuff, more stone and more glass to create this Sackboy rose window

And then, if you’re tired of looking at it or don’t like the way it’s going, you can wire the whole damn thing up with explosive charges.

To find out what happens next – and to see high-speed video of the full elevator-making process – check out the video below: