Hey Folks! My name is Toby and I’m a Designer on LEGO Worlds. I wanted to give you a taste of some of the early design development process on this exciting project.
One area that has been a large focus thus far on Worlds is the Tools; Terraforming, Brick by Brick, Brick build placement, prop placement, painting etc. The development of the tools you see today in the game has gone through a number of iterations and will likely go through a few more before we exit the ‘early access’ period.
The humble beginnings or our first ever “tool” consisted of a volume that tracked a little way in front of where the player character was facing. There were a few live debug settings that could be altered such as co-ordinate value offsets and volume size as well as a small selection of colour types. We were also able to generate single tiles underneath the player’s feet so you could jump and make a stack of bricks.
Suffice to say, it was pretty clunky to use and difficult to make tangible things, but I was able to build a few things with it. Here’s a look back at, what are probably, the first things ever built in LEGO Worlds - can you feel that sense of history ;)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522518689
Rain Clouds
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522520601
Surfing the waves (notice the tool box volume in front of the character). It’s also fun to note that at this stage of the project water was completely solid.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522521957
'Epic' sand castle
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522524292
Sea monster attacking a sub!
A pretty cool thing about the debug options, at the time, was that we’d not yet imposed any sensible restrictions on the size of edits. So I was able to do things like the image below, provided the game didn’t crash (it usually froze for quite a while, and keep in mind we use pretty high end systems for development)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522525962
That's no green Moon!
While those all may look like astonishing feats of LEGO art, at its finest… It was clear that huge development had to be made on improving the tools ease of use and intuitiveness, as the creation tools were one of the key pillars of the project.
What came next was the concept of a “Multi-tool”. A device that would enable the player to pick from a plethora of fun ‘terraforming’ modes, with the device morphing to match whatever the player decided to do. So for example, when adding chunks of landscape, the device would be a large funnel shaped object for throwing out bricks. Then for altering the colour of existing bricks it would reform into some kind of paint gun device.
The aim was to make the use of the tools feel powerful, allowing large sweeping changes while keeping the visceral LEGO feel of the character using, adding, and removing actual bricks from the world.
Here are some early concepts I knocked up for the multi-tool and its intended actions:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522526883
The concept of physical bricks travelling from the player characters device to the manipulated area of the world was an important one. We wanted the player to feel like they were actively causing the changes to the landscape with a visual connection, rather than them simply occurring on a button press.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522527993
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522528683
Initial 'Brick by Brick' tool visualisation
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522529959
visualisation of terrforming - adding a terrain arch.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522531089
visualisation of the cursor, initially planned to be made up of physical bricks on top of the landscape. It turned out that this would be impractical on underlating terrain surfaces. We currently use a highlight, but it retains the brick shape, showing exactly which bricks will be manipulated.
It's brought us to our current set of tools, built by our model team, which you’ll find in the game right now. (steam doesn't appear to allow me to embed any more pics, but the links are below)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522532454
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522536081
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522536702
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522537221
The eventual goal, on the visuals side, is to have a single brick element where all other parts of the tool item animate and construct out of. With the current tools, you may have noticed that they all have the glowing orange ‘1x1 4 Knobs’ brick with the two grey handles and the green and red glowing flat round tiles on as a common element. This is the ‘core’ of the tool and will act as the consistent part from where all other tool bits will construct/de-construct out of (or into). If we alter existing tools or add new tools, they will all be based around this concept.
The eventual goal, on the mechanics side, is to allow the player to have a full complement of useful tools giving the ability to do things from large sweeping motions (for example, raise an entire mountain from the ground) to minute details (for example, adding 1x1 plate mosaics) all in an easy to use, intuitive manner. While we’ve partially achieved this, there is still much to be done with fine tuning various aspects of the tools and you will continue to see changes and tweaks through the course of the early access period (with the ongoing greatly appreciated thoughts and feedback of you all in our dedicated community ːsteamhappyː).
I hope that’s been a nice little insight into the conception and development of tools so far, we may delve into the technical side of the tools in a future diary. Is there a tool that you’re itching to use but we’ve not included yet? Always thought something should work differently? Got a burning question that wasn’t touched on above? Let us know!