A new light
Lego’s new internal development team displays a more philosophical side of the brick with its debut game
Lego’s new internal game team unveils its debut, Builder’s Journey
Lego is not just for kids. While many of the Lego videogames have been aimed primarily at a younger audience, their overall quality and sharp sense of humour means that they attract older players, too. Perhaps childhood nostalgia draws us back to the famous brick. But there’s also an undeniably meditative quality to the act of snapping plastic together, of following detailed instructions to the letter and producing something intricate and beautiful, that appeals to those of us looking for a way to escape the largescale stresses of adult life.
Light Brick Studios is a new internal Lego studio dedicated to creating titles that explore different facets of the classic toy. Its first release, Builder’s Journey, is set to hit Apple’s new subscription service in the very near future – and is a puzzleplatformer that pays homage to the more mature, mindful side of Lego. Its arthouse style looks quite unlike any Lego game we’ve seen before, and there’s a strong narrative focus: by picking up and moving bricks to complete paths through dioramas, you help guide a blocky fatherson duo through a story all about the importance of play – no matter how old we may be.
It’s quite the departure for Lego, then. Indeed, the experimental Light Brick Studios is just nine people – but the team includes experienced creative talent such as Mikkel Fredborg (of Kalimba and Youropa fame) and creative director Karsten Lund, who worked at IO Interactive for 12 years, helping lead development on Hitman: Sniper and Hitman Go before joining Lego in 2013 to work on the (late) Dimensions series. “At the same time, on the Digital Games mobile team, we wanted to set some new projects in motion to see where we could take things in the mobile space,” Lund says. He wanted to create something that could stand on its own as a game: “Not just, ‘Hey, this is Lego, you already love it’ – but to try and add something to it.”
Usually Lego works with other game studios to develop its digital playthings, “sort of because we believe in finding the right people to do the right jobs,” Lund says. “We’re good at making toys; other people are good at making games. But I had this background in game development. And I felt like maybe I could come up with a different way of working.” He cast around Copenhagen for talent new and old: “I always believe in that mix of having people with different experience levels and backgrounds. So people who are fresh and don’t really know what you can and cannot do, and then older people to sort of say, ‘Okay, I know exactly how to do this,’ and then just mixing them up and seeing what happens.” They put together a prototype for Builder’s Journey, pitched it internally, and Light Brick Studios was born. On first impressions, the move to internal development is producing glittering results. “We usually try to get as much ownership into an external team as possible,” Lund says. “This is where I sort of sit in the middle of the team, and turn it into a game team that works with this. So keeping the Lego DNA very close, and making sure that everything is really saying what we should be saying.”
For Lund and his team, it’s about celebrating a more grown-up side of the toy: the puzzle elements and creativity that comes from playing with a limited set of studs, bricks and colours; the tactile pleasure of clicking bricks into place that Apple’s haptic feedback engine affords. For him, Lego’s enduring appeal to older players goes beyond mere nostalgia, to timeless design that he and his team are learning from as they make their game. “The brick sizes and shapes are very appealing, and they communicate sort of without words: they tell you, ‘This is how I’m used, this is where I fit’,” he says. “And they always fit. It pokes a certain area in your brain that’s satisfied by snapping things together, and it’s very flow-inducing. You lose track of time, and it’s relaxing.
“So we play around with that feeling of models that need to be completed, where there’s a certain brick missing here, and you need to reuse one of the ones that you already have in your model – take something apart to build it up again.” That last thought speaks volumes about the kind of subject matter Lego games have yet to explore, and that Builder’s Journey may well do: Light Brick Studios’ potential is starting to click into place.
“It pokes a certain area in your brain that’s satisfied by snapping things together, and it’s very flow-inducing”