Heavy Peeps Redux
by BONZO, HSM team writer & artist
Seldom do we have Home content see a retroactive improvement.
Taking existing items which have been out for a while, units sold, and later going back to modify and improve upon them is incredibly rare. LOOT has done this with their active camera, and the studio stage set, and to some extent with the LOOT Sunset Yacht. That was a very practical approach to include new functionality to an existing product.
How does it benefit a developer to do this? For one thing, the fickle gamer will love you for it. For another, rather then exhaust development resources in fully conceptualizing and generating a new product from the ground up, a small, less costly improvement on a current commodity will breathe new life into a product. If you already have a hugely innovative development project as Heavy Water has with Avalon Keep, this upgrade to the Heavy Peeps would just work in conjunction to boost your presence in a market where virtual goods have the shelf life of ice cubes in the San Fernando Valley.
So what are the upgrades introduced into the Heavy Peeps? Both the personal space active item peeps and the companion models are seeing a considerable upgrade. Their size has been increased, and if you own any of the Peep companions or the active item variety, you may be aware how relatively small they are.
The active items have been one of the coolest innovations introduced in Home. This active item allows you to take over the Heavy Peep and control it as a mini avatar. Wrap your head around that concept. You are a human being, controlling the Home avatar with your PlayStation controller and within Home your avatar has an item that allows you to control it and you see this virtual world through its perspective.
While that little feature was cool and worth owning a Heavy Peep active item, besides their awesome design, controlling the mini avatar was very difficult and counter intuitive. Camera control was capricious, and locomotion control often stubborn. At least the Peep had a jumping function, which for most users hopping around was more effective than walking. However, if that was one reason to deter you from these items, the upgrade sees an improvement in animation control. A new control scheme will allow the manipulation of the Heavy Peep to more closely resemble the control of your standard Home avatar. The companion will also see an update to their animation.
Another deterrent for some when it came to the active item was the standardized memory allocation of twenty-two memory blocks, whether the active item required so much memory or not. Thanks to the upgrade to the Home core client, developers can now reallocate memory specifications to closely match an item’s actual requirements and free up more memory for personal spaces. This upgrade to the Heavy Peeps benefits from that memory reallocation and instead of the twenty two memory blocks they will now only require six memory blocks. That in itself is a huge improvement that the rest of the active items in the Home inventory really need to see. While previously you were only allowed to place four active Heavy Peeps, now you have the option of placing up to sixteen. Of course you still can only have twelve avatars in a personal space so you may want to limit yourself to only the amount of Heavy Peeps you and your friends can actively control, but that shouldn’t limit clubs.
That Heavy Peeps function as a mini-avatar was a milestone innovation in Home’s history, and now Heavy Water introduces yet another innovation with the companions: sound! You heard me: now the companions will include a sound effect for the Heavy Peep jump. It’s a small step, but really why haven’t we seen this before? That is a key improvement to companions that would change the game. How much more impressive would Kiburi or Maliki be, for instance, with a roar to accompany the animation? Sounds cool, but then again too loud or too repetitive of a sound would eventually be a hindrance; however, an option to turn it off would eliminate that problem.
It’s not surprising we haven’t seen this before. Sound is tricky. Companions are an extension of your avatar, and thus have their own limited budget of memory. Sound files are big; even a compressed file format like mp3 can still add up the memory. Anyone remember floppy disks? They were the computer equivalent of the cassette tape for interchangeable storage memory. Back in the early 90’s computer games were installed by a series of these things. Without getting too caught up in nerd history, these diskettes held a whopping 1.44 megabytes. That’s about a minute of the average length of an mp3. So next time you wonder why a companion doesn’t have sound, keep that in mind; audio is a memory hog.
The main component that attracted me to the Heavy Peeps were their representation of a pop culture icon. The designer vinyl toy movement of the late 90’s, which thrives even today from labels like Kid Robot with Munny and Dunnys, or Tokidoki, and DevilRobots.
If that last one sounded familiar, it’s because there are a series of square-headed companions in Home from that brand under the AAA label as well. The beauty of these toys, and subsequently the Heavy Peeps, is the skewed juxtaposition of the design aesthetics. You at once have something very bright and colorful as a child’s toy, but with the subtext of a mature context or some twisted sardonic humor. For an example of this, take a closer look at Chim or Up-Chuck. A twisted, edgy approach is something we have come to expect from Heavy Water, though, and if you can appreciate the humor, the design, and the pop art then you’ll be elated next time you activate your companion or that active item after this update.
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I had a go of a Peep a long time ago, and had a great laugh with it! My main problem though, was the memory it takes up. This is true for a lot of my active items, they’re rarely out on display as I need all the slots I can get. Now these have been reduced to a more space-friendly six slots, I might just go buy one today!