Its been said that if you find a job you love, you'll never work another day. Well, I don't think that is necessarily true- but it will probably change what you think of as "work"...

A few years ago, my idea of a fun, relaxing weekend would have been a marathon Playstation session. Last weekend, I spent most of my time researching, buying and assembling flat packed furniture. But the weekend before, I found myself working all weekend- on a marathon Playstation session.

The strange thing was that what I really wanted to do was work around the house- the cleaning and tidying that my (now quite heavily pregnant) wife can't deal with at the moment. I suppose this is all part of that "growing up" thing that I've been trying to avoid for the last couple of decades... Still, a weekend of computer games is one thing, but a weekend of computer games with a fixed and ummovable target and deadline at the end is quite different from several hours of "I'll just get to the end of this bit and then I'll switch off."

The reason for this unusual situation was that a pitch was happening on the Monday, and the bright idea came along that it would be good to use LittleBigPlanet to build a level that recreated the story of the pitch presentation- so you could play it, rather than just read it afterwards. (The pitch was all about the idea of "play", so this was perfectly in keeping with the general theme.)

So I picked up the game on Thursday, only to find that, while the level editor is indeed a fantastically well designed tool, there is a catch. While it's very easy to pick up, while still very powerful in terms of what you can build with it, you need to play the game through to pick up all the various materials, object, sound effects and so on that you need to actually build a level with. So I got to work on Thursday afternoon on playing my way through the game (I happened to have the day off, so it was an odd start- working on my day off by playing a computer game...) After a fairly full day in the office on Friday, it was on with another evening of working on playing, and then the kind of weekend I've not had for years- playing Playstation pretty much from first thing in the morning through to last thing at night, virtually without a break.

An interesting experience, to say the least. I'm very pleased with the concept of what I was trying to do, and I think I managed to get everything that I wanted to into the game- all of the key points from the presentation were in the level somewhere; some as simple speech bubbles, others as more interactive exercises. It's kind of like when you see a bunch of slides with just a few bullet points, where unless you've heard the speech that accompanies them, you don't really get the point that is being made- but afterwards, it serves as a refresher, reminding you of the key parts of what you were told. (At least, I hope that's how it came across...)

I'm particularly pleased with my "film festival" cinema screen and "music festival" stage (complete with moving coloured spotlights and music), and a couple of gameplay elements that try to work the points from the pitch into actual gameplay- for example, a ball pit and a destructible polystyrene wall to talk about "open ended gameplay", a maths quiz to make a point about education, and returning a lost golf ball to a sad golfer to make the point that "we bring play to those who need it most" (cheesy as hell, but I was tired!)

My only disappointments are firstly, that you can't export videos or screenshots from the game- you can take "photos", but the speech bubbles (which carry the important text) don't appear in them. I ended up pointing a camcorder at the screen and taping a walkthrough that way- far from ideal...

Secondly, if I were to do it again, I'd like to make it a less linear, left-to-right walkthrough. My original plan was much more of a "choose your path" concept, but complications with disappearing blocks and time constraints meant that I couldn't see that idea through. (I'd like to build a Version 2- but I can't see myself finding the time to actually do it any time in the next few weeks!)

So, all in all a fun experience (apart from a couple of near breakdowns with accidental overwrites and collapsing structures)- but hopefully it will be the last time I dedicate an entire weekend to work...