Media Molecule Talk Candidly About Leaving LittleBigPlanet Behind

While it will continue to support past releases, the British studio wants to put all of its future energy into creating something new. According to the studio, making this decision felt like a child leaving home.

"It's a bit like, if you think of LBP as having a child, Sackboy was our child, you get to the stage where they want to leave home," art director Mark Healey told an audience at this week's Develop conference. "It's kind of like that.

"When my son leaves home, whenever that is, I'll probably care about him even more and want to keep tabs on him and make sure he's not doing the things I did when I was his age. But we're still very involved with it."

Technical director Alex Evans chipped in on the situation.

"One of the funny pains we're having growing – airing our dirty laundry – we're no longer a single-threaded company," he added.

"Siobhan [Reddy, studio director] is no longer managing eight people in a start-up. She's managing this big franchise that Sony are really interested in us being involved with forever, which is cool.

"There are all these different threads, and this stepping away thread is just one of them.

"Ironically, she was the one who publically said, oh, we're stepping away, thus ignoring the other half of her job, which is, for example, the LBP Move pack, which is coming out.

"The point is, we're no longer a one threaded company. That's really difficult for us, but we're doing it to keep it fresh. Because if you do the same thing all of the time single-threadedly, and that's it, you do end up getting stale.

"So what we've tried to do is almost pile things on. But as anyone knows who's worked in a growing studio, that's a dangerous place to go."

UK developer Double Eleven is working on the PlayStation Vita version of LittleBigPlanet in collaboration with Tarsier Studios. According to art director Kareem Ettouney, Media Molecule is perfectly satisfied with the situation.

"LBP involved us working with an extended family of companies and teams of very talented people, like Tarsier Studios. They have slowly learned the language and excelled at it.

"Once a language is established, that's the time to evolve and develop. Everybody speaks that language. The design style and the criteria of what works and what doesn't is much more established now, and it's time to expand."

Nobody knows what Media Molecule's working on next, but that's perhaps one of the studio's strongest assets. The Guildford team is so creative that it's impossible to second guess its next move. We know one thing's for certain: the final product will probably be extraordinary.