Heya fellow builders!
"What is LEGO® Bricktales?" - At face value the question seems straightforward to answer, no? LEGO Bricktales is a puzzle-adventure game based on LEGO bricks. The player has to help their grandfather restore his theme park, and imbued with the power of building and a trusty robot sidekick at their side they travel into different worlds and get what they need by helping people along the way.
But that doesn't quite paint the whole picture! It doesn't describe how the question felt when we tried to answer it at the beginning of this project. The weeks and months of deliberating and prototyping, the attempt to figure out the strengths of both ClockStone and LEGO and where the meeting point between those two would be. After all we needed to figure out the right pieces to lay the foundation of what this game would become. So let's try this again.
I'd say it's a heartfelt attempt by us to capture some of the LEGO magic that we felt in a physical realm and to give it life in a digital world.
In a nutshell, I'd describe our vision of it like this:
- Puzzles that involve brick by brick building with LEGO elements
- Embedded in dioramas, fully built out of LEGO bricks
- Wrapped in exploration and story
This has been our guiding light. Three X's scrawled into the parchment of a treasure map in bright red, but the road to not only unearth all three aspects but to bring them into balance has certainly been winding. I will talk at length about how we got there in the future, but let's look at how we decided on them in the first place.
Building Brick By Brick
LEGO bricks and building is an association like peanut butter and jelly, it just goes together. If not more so, I dare say the very foundation of the LEGO universe is the act of building. And would you look at that? With a series of Bridge Constructor titles under our wing, gameplay revolving around building is something we are certainly familiar with. But going from 2D to 3D, from uniform wooden and metal struts to the incredible variety of LEGO bricks wouldn't be easy. What is it about building with LEGO elements that would make us dare that transition?
Early mockup. Our Bridge Constructor past clearly evident.
It is intuitive. People of all ages do it and can learn it within seconds. Easy to learn, hard to master. From small sets you built as a little kid, to the sprawling and intricate builds made by enthusiasts and professionals, the potential for refinement is seemingly endless.
And especially for us puzzle designers, LEGO dances in this wonderful space between restriction and creativity. I best describe it like this: I hand a hundred people a small bag of bricks each and tell them to build me a car, I'm feeling good about betting that I will get a hundred different cars back. They are cars all the same, but they are your specific version of a car. And at the same time that restricted selection of bricks was enough to nudge your creativity into a specific direction, to give you something tangible and solid rather than having you stare at the proverbial blank canvas. We wanted to leverage that energy.
Well, as obvious as the focus on building seemed, the execution wouldn't be quite as simple and certainly is part of why this space has been fairly unexplored in LEGO games. Going from physical LEGO shapes that can be observed in all its three-dimensionality and can be manipulated with 10 fingers, to the interface of a 2D screen and controller or mouse is a tricky transition. But in the end, the appeal was clear as day, and we wanted to take the challenge.
LEGO Dioramas
We knew into which direction we wanted to take the building puzzles, but then we also needed to present them in the right way. Rather than a string of disconnected challenges they needed a proverbial three-dimensional LEGO bed to lie in. Or at least that was an early thought. It was a brief statement in early design docs, somewhere between innocence and confidence, that of course it would make sense to embed the puzzles in a full LEGO environment. We were inspired by the breathtaking real LEGO dioramas that enthusiasts have built, and we wanted to follow suit in a digital space.
The very first diorama prototype, with real bricks at a smaller scale.
But first prototypes made us realize – we'd have to manipulate tens of thousands of bricks for any given diorama. Doubt creeped in. It's one thing to build it as a display piece, but to have something that is going to be filled with gameplay, and as developers know, will change drastically with each iteration of the gameplay, it seemed like too daunting of a task. But the buzz never went away. Whenever we would even hint at the idea of having full LEGO dioramas, whenever we would show pictures around of our crude first attempts, the reaction was wholly positive. So, after a long while we decided to take the plunge. Let's go full LEGO. Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Exploration And Story
And lastly, launching off the idea of dioramas, since they would take so much effort to produce, we wanted to make it worthwhile to spend your time there, rather than having them just be a visual backdrop as you rush through from puzzle to puzzle. We wanted to wrap them in story, so everywhere you go there's interesting characters to meet, funny bits to see that showcase the trademark irreverent, yet wholesome LEGO humor, narrative motivations to find why you would go and build the things that you build.
Early story progression mockup.
We wanted to add mechanics on top that encourage you to zoom out and look at every nook and cranny of the diorama, and while you take in its beauty you might find a secret or two that you won't get to just yet, but with a little patience and progress you will get to soon. Dive in, stay there, look around, enjoy.
So there it is, like bricks clicking into place, a vision that coalesced by looking at LEGO elements with open eyes and being honest about what appealed to us about it, reservations be damned. Well, not wholly damned as we would find out, but we'll learn about this another day, and in the meantime I'll leave you with the very first mockup we produced for the game. We've come a long way:
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/