Hey there friends!
The release of LEGO® Bricktales is right around the corner: there are only 20 days left until October 12th. Exciting times ahead! You can already try out how LEGO Bricktales works with a demo here on Steam, but we'd like to tell you a bit more about the game and behind the scenes with our little making-of update series "Brick by Brick" until release.
I would say that the first update pretty much speaks for itself. We - that is the Austrian dev team ClockStone Software - would like to introduce ourselves briefly with profiles so that you know who created LEGO Bricktales:
Name: Tri (pronounced Chi)
Position: Game Director
My first LEGO experience: A big yellow canvas bag with orange-brownish flower prints that was filled with an absolute hodgepodge mix of LEGO bricks and essentially called out to me to be creative at the tender age of 5 or so. I got a headstart with DUPLO® bricks though.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Just about anything from design, to animation to audio, but mostly wrangling the project as a whole. Having experience in all production disciplines really helped because Bricktales required an incredible amount of interdisciplinary work, probably the most of all the projects we've ever done.
My favorite diorama: Probably the dragon vale. It's really pretty, but maybe it's just my inner D&D nerd shining through.
Collected bananas: I'm fructose intolerant, so none 😄
Name: Stephan
Position: Art Director
My first LEGO experience: A carefully handed down cardboard box filled with bits and pieces of bricks from various sets from the 80s, with bite marks and all you need for a good story.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Searching for various answers to the question: "How to make a world of digital LEGO bricks look exciting". Well, first we had to make them appear at all - and then very many of them. I focused primarily on the diorama environments and how to create them ... while also taking care of how all the other elements fit together visually.
My favorite diorama: Being the first diorama we made, I have a love-hate relationship with the first Jungle diorama
Collected bananas: Yes
Name: Matthias
Position: Designer
My first LEGO experience: A set with two cowboys in my school cone! Those were actually brick-built with huge heads, not the typical minifigures yet that everybody knows today. After this, it was houses, vehicles and people from the Town theme, still love this stuff today.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Designing "construction spots" together with a talented team. These spots are the places where players build stuff with LEGO bricks. Also organizing everything around the little stories and dialogues in the worlds and having all of this localized to ten other languages. And finally organizing internal and external playtesting and QA. The backlog is empty. (Don't look into the backlog... it is empty I said.)
My favorite diorama: The Desert town bazaar. It totally smiles at you all over the place with its shiny, sandy cheerfulness and the bustling market scenery.
Collected bananas: Up to now only 60 or 70. There are still so many chests waiting to be found and opened in the Jungle world!
Name: Dominic
Position: Programmer
My first LEGO experience: Good question. Dunno. Maybe stepped on one or two bricks when my older brother started playing with them. I bet I have stolen some from time to time. :)
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Everything from adapting our existing systems to designing, prototyping, iterating, redesigning and - oh we have to get back to the drawing board - and re-iterating new project specific systems and ideas, for example the build controls or the whole storytelling and game progress stuff.
My favorite diorama: I think it's the Desert Skill-Cave. It was a pain to come up with the logic and rough layout for the diorama but now there is this nice little brain teaser as a refresher between all the building. After the designers laid their hands on it, it became even better. ;)
Collected bananas: There is no bananas!
Name: Helmut
Position: Programmer
My first LEGO experience: I remember green gardens with flowers, houses, spaceships, tracked vehicles, steam locomotives, helicopters and people everywhere, tiny brave Minifigure people... Oh, and that LEGO brick up my nose! Probably should've started with DUPLO bricks.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Lots of coding, more coding and coding. And also a bit of designing. And more coding and a bit more designing. And then more coding and testing afterwards, and then more coding. Did I mention annoying the designers?
My favorite diorama: Is that a trick question? Probably the one with the kraken. Octopi are such intelligent animals. And the way they move! And it has pirate stuff. If it is not a trick question that is.
Collected bananas: Right between not-sweet-enough and too-sweet.
Name: Nathalie/Nate
Position: General Artist
My first LEGO experience: I got the Black Knight's Castle set as a kid. The glow-in-the-dark ghost was my favorite Minifigure to play with. They featured in a lot of adventures, as well as in some mixed-media ones!
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Minifigure assets and character animations, as well as building props for the various environments.
My favorite diorama: Desert pyramid. No wait, wherever the Pirate ship happens to be at. No wait, the Medieval castle exterior. No wait...
Collected bananas: Ask me about donuts instead.
Name: Christoffer
Position: Artist
My first LEGO experience: I built Scandinavian looking houses using all kinds of colored bricks. It also had the dragon in the garden.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: In the Clockstone office I have seen tables with nothing but tea mugs and computers become replaced. Now, what I once thought were impossible LEGO constructions have come to take their place. So take a seat and hear my tale, for I have seen how LEGO Bricktales became molded into the virtual plane. I have seen a transmutation of the office's reality-grounded LEGO bricks, for within the virtuality-grounded world of Bricktales they have reappeared with the same dimension, color and weight. And yes, I have seen wide into the depths of Bricktales, of which you can only see a small part as you stare into your rectangular screens. I have seen the entirety of its world, all the ends of its dimensions, and all that exists in between. I've seen how it has shifted and morphed its geometry, forming its beautiful rivers and caves beneath. Within its borders I've seen construction spots come to be and be replaced, changed and finally set into place. This was the doing of my hands. But I wash my hands of responsibilities regarding the cat problem.
My favorite diorama: The cave that is in the Medieval world. It is so cool.
Collected bananas: No but I've collected many of the apes in Ape Escape which DO collect bananas!
Name: Kevin
Position: Level Designer / Programmer
My first LEGO experience: Probably the LEGO train set I got from my parents. Every room was cramped with train tracks making it hardly possible to walk in them ;P.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Setting up all the worlds, ranging from quests, secrets and puzzles. There is definitely no part in this game I don't know like the back of my hand. In addition I was involved with coding some tools and bug-fixing.
My favorite diorama: I don't know if a specific diorama pops into my mind that stands out, since they are all beautiful. But I definitely like the catnip storage room. Who doesn't like a big room with dozens of cats in it?!
Collected bananas: Too many to count!
Name: Michael
Position: Programmer
My first LEGO experience: I can't actually remember my very first encounter with LEGO bricks (and I built a lot!). But what comes first to my mind is the incredibly versatile way of using them. I loved to combine them with other toys to make complex machines even with hydraulic and electric components. It definitely got my career as a physicist started.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: I programmed the physics that compute the forces and torques acting on the LEGO bricks when you run the simulation on your own constructions. So I'm the one to blame if you build something and it breaks ;) Also I helped out on tricky shader programming issues including rewriting the render pipeline to improve performance.
My favorite diorama: I love the desert with it's Egyptian style tombs.
Collected bananas: No time to collect bananas, needed to hunt (coding) bugs instead.
Name: Rainer
Position: Senior Technical Artist
My first LEGO experience: Building giant Spaceships that could reach galaxies far far away.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Making things look pretty that needed sparkly effects.
My favorite diorama: Ohhh... that's a tough one. Can't decide. They all look REAL nice
Collected bananas: Mostly bacon. Bananas are for monkeys.
Name: Andreas
Position: Programmer / QA
My first LEGO experience: I don't really remember my first experience with LEGO bricks, but I do remember playing with the metroliner and freight rail runner a lot (which my siblings had already built).
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: Testing the game, trying to break stuff, reporting bugs and other issues and making sure those things were actually fixed once they got fixed.
My favorite diorama: If I had to choose a single one... probably random ("dragon vale", "Desert bazaar", "wizard lab");
Collected bananas: Well, first I collected 10, then 50, then 9999999, then -1 and then kjdlfjaksdhf.
Name: Nicolas
Position: Intern/Designer
First LEGO experience: Back when i was 3 years old, my family and I already had a huge collection of LEGO bricks and when I saw the pile of bricks I just grabbed some of them and built something that just came to my mind at the moment.
What I worked on for LEGO Bricktales: I got involved midway into the project and worked on designing and prototyping Bricktales' building puzzles, the so called construction spots.
My favorite diorama: I don’t know why, but the Medieval castle diorama always spoke to me.
Collected bananas: When I was working on the project, they weren’t implemented yet. ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ
And suddenly you know us as well as we do. 😄 In the coming updates, we'll talk about how the idea for LEGO Bricktales came about, which different LEGO worlds are included in the game and how the brick by brick building at the construction spots works.
See you all in the next update! Until then, friends - stay safe and keep building!
Tri Do Dinh & the ClockStone Team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1898290/LEGO_Bricktales/