The most recent Game Design Challenge asked you to design the next costume pack for Sackboy, star of the PlayStation 3 game LittleBigPlanet.

Costume packs are fun little ways for players to spend more money to get aesthetically appealing items that let them customize their characters any way they want. They usually don't change gameplay in any way, which is important to remember.

The costume entries we received were fantastic and ranged from the absurd to the philanthropic (see Andrea Wästlund's entry). The key to this challenge was to offer a costume or set of costumes around a unique theme that fits the world of LittleBigPlanet. LittleBigPlanet is a cute and goofy game. While there are some costumes of PlayStation characters like Kratos, Solid Snake, and Nariko available to players, for the most part, the best costumes fit the feel of the game, by being quirky, charming, and childlike. A bloodied zombie with pus boils all over him would not fit LittleBigPlanet very well.

The best entries made us laugh and giggle, and had a very cool theme to relate the set of costumes you would get. Additionally, they weren't things you would find in other games very often, if at all. Here are this week's winners.

Best Entries
Stephen Teodori, Information Technology Student at Rochester Institute of Technology, LilBigMonsters (see page 2)
We really dug the monster theme put forth by Stephen Teodori of Rochester Institute of Technology. (Our only regret is that there was not art!) Still, the concepts were hilarious, different and totally in-tune with the feel of LittleBigPlanet. "Werewolf bar mitzvah," anyone?

David McClure, Surely Some Mistake? (see page 3)
"Surely there must be some mistake?" is the question employees at Media Molecule are supposed to say when they see this set of costumes designed by David McClure (see page 3 for artwork). Someone misheard the name "Sackboy" and designed various characters based on the false impression: Sickboy, Stickboy, you get the idea. It was a unique theme and funny, again fitting the mood of the game.

Andrea Wästlund, Karlstad, Sweden, Protect our Little Big Planet (see page 4)
Call us sappy, but we fell for Andrea Wästlund's noble cause venture: costumes sold to raise awareness for the World Wildlife Fund.

Honorable Mentions (see page 5)
Tie: Loïc Ramboanasolo, computer science student at Universite de Montreal, Sackameleon!, and Nikhil Murthy, student at BITS, Pilani, "Of Programmers and Paintbrushes"
Both Loïc Ramboanasolo and Nikhil Murthy presented similar programmer-centric ideas -- a "chameleon" costume, or "dynamic costuming" -- and while neither function the way costuming is intended in the game, we felt they were far-reaching enough as concepts to deserve honorable mention.