The world of Lego Star Wars: Castaways comprises many wonders — wonderful animation, pleasant storylines, and pitch-perfect bodily comedy. Maybe probably the most spectacular amongst them, nevertheless, is that this: In case you had a large enough pile of bricks (and a large enough basement), you could possibly construct the entire sport your self.
Every thing within the sport — the large array of ships, the mixed-and-matched characters, the expansive alien backgrounds, the planets floating within the distance, the docking bays, the outskirts of Jabba’s palace, and even new character Bossig the Hutt — is designed to be structurally sound and “Lego legit.”
“Each single brick you see, each Lego plate, connects the way in which it’s supposed to attach in the actual world,” says Jacques Durand, the sport’s artistic director. Accuracy wasn’t sufficient for the Montreal-based sport design studio Gameloft — this sport needed to be reproducible.
Every thing in Lego Star Wars: Castaways, from military-gray Imperial ships to fiery background planets, is what Gameloft calls ‘Lego legit.’
The problem of bodily recreating your entire sport is perhaps solely somewhat extra imposing than the one posed to the Gameloft group once they launched the event course of: Design a console-worthy Apple Arcade sport set within the Star Wars galaxy, evoke the boundless free-play spirit of Lego, merge sci-fi motion with exploratory gameplay, and make the entire thing really feel like enjoying with little items of plastic in your playroom ground.
“We needed to make a sport that allow you to combine and match as a lot as you need,” says Durand, who’s additionally a lifelong Star Wars fan and self-professed AFOL (grownup fan of Lego). “If you wish to customise your character with a Tusken Raider head on high of X-wing pilot fits with Boba Fett’s pants, it’s best to be capable to try this.”
‘An unbelievable freedom’
Consistent with the improvisational spirit of Lego play, the action-adventure sport is powered by an absence of boundaries. It’s all about exploring and battling by (generally unreliable) simulations set within the Star Wars galaxy; one minute you’re combating off waves of stormtroopers with buddies to guard Hoth’s Echo Base, the subsequent you’re wielding the Pressure to not-so-gently nudge opponents off ledges in PvP arenas. The sport’s place within the Star Wars timeline is unestablished, and its enjoyable island-planet setting is new to the Star Wars galaxy. “It’s extra [Gilligan’s Island] than Misplaced,” laughs Durand.
Lego Star Wars: Castaways is ready on a tropical world that is not as enjoyable as it would look.
The island is designed as a type of repository of Star Wars historical past, a sublime assemble that enables the sport to sporadically cross paths with the prevailing films and reveals — if it desires to. When the sport does intersect with acquainted scenes, they’re both a simulation introduced on by a droid information named TU-T0R, or leisure for the pleasure of Bossig the Hutt, a Roman emperor-type kingpin who calls for diversion.
“It gave us an unbelievable freedom to place content material into the sport with out having to observe the timeline,” says Durand, “and it allow us to add extra content material, like a rancor pit or a Tatooine hangar.”
An early sketch of the sport’s island market (which incorporates Easter eggs just like the toppled AT-AT within the decrease proper nook).
To create this galactic playground, Gameloft — in partnership with Lego and Lucasfilm Video games — constructed the sport round just a few core ideas. The primary: The sport ought to prioritize self-expression. In spite of everything, what higher option to begin off an all-new story than by creating an all-new character? “From the beginning, the message is, ‘You’re not enjoying as Luke or Leia,” says Durand. “You’re in a unique location and in a unique timeline. The expertise of making a personality was on the core.”
You are not enjoying as Luke or Leia. You are in a unique location and in a unique timeline.
Jacques Durand, artistic director
This included totally customizable in-game minifigs, which Durand likens to the build-your-own tables at IRL Lego shops, the place you’ll be able to rifle by drawers filled with heads, torsos, and legs to assemble the correct avatar. “We regularly mentioned to the group, ‘I wish to really feel like I can bodily attain into the sport and really feel the plastic below my finger,’” says Durand.
Durand needed the sport’s character customization screens to really feel like constructing real-life minifigs.
The second and most essential thought was that all the things within the sport — from the scorching sands of Tatooine to the craterlike floor of the Dying Star — wanted to really feel simply as actual as its bodily counterpart. From their Lego-littered workplaces, Gameloft ensured each atmosphere regarded hand-built. They usually solely wanted two big items of cutting-edge software program to do it.
‘How can we technically try this?’
There had by no means been a sport designed fairly like Lego Star Wars: Castaways — however there had been just a few films. The Gameloft group drew closely from the rapid-fire richly textured imagery of The Lego Film and its equally effervescent sequel. “Every thing is Lego in these films, all the way down to the backgrounds,” says Lee Kaburis, sport supervisor for Lego Star Wars: Castaways. “We investigated the matter somewhat additional, determined it was possible, and mentioned, ‘OK, we’re going all in.’ We needed that full immersion of being in a Lego world.”
The catch: “Bricks are advanced objects!” says Kaburis. “It takes a variety of processing energy. So we had to determine a option to be as environment friendly as doable so we might run not solely on a tool as large as an Apple TV, but additionally one thing as small because the older era iPhone.”
Stage Lego battles by land, sea, and air.
To construct the sport components, the group relied closely on an tailored model of Lego Digital Designer. It’s very conveniently the very same software program Lego makes use of to create its personal bodily bricks — from single Lego Dots to this 12 months’s ginormous Titanic — and the group employed it to think about Lego variations of X-wings, brand-new Hutts, and one notably difficult Corellian freighter.
The sport’s model of the Millennium Falcon is predicated on the bodily Final Collector’s Collection set — one of many largest Lego units in historical past, with simply over 7,500 items. “We actually needed gamers to have the ability to go beneath the Falcon and see not solely the items however the Lego studs — and even the Lego emblem on high of the person studs,” says Durand.
However the extra advanced the form, the extra polygons you need to draw — and the Falcon’s polygons numbered within the thousands and thousands. “Once we first put the Falcon in, it instantly crashed the sport,” laughs Durand. However the group persevered, and Gameloft’s efficiency engineers got here on board for a tune up, making a course of to optimize the advanced mannequin with out shedding its visible element.
Once we first put the Falcon in, it instantly crashed the sport.
Jacques Durand, artistic director
Engineers used lighting to assist establish the mannequin items that have been essential to the sport’s visible appear and feel. As quickly as one thing acquired preliminary construct approval, the group ran it again by the machine to forged lights on it. Any floor that rebalanced that gentle was saved; every bit of the mannequin that didn’t was faraway from its geometry. Durand estimates that call saved 90 % of the work — and polygons.
Whereas this course of was good for man-made environments and objects, the group bumped into challenges rendering scenes just like the docking bay or the tough cliffs surrounding Jabba’s palace. “It simply would have been [impossible] with hundreds — or thousands and thousands — of bricks,” says Kaburis.
Seems the Gameloft group likes sand: Exteriors, together with the sandy wastes surrounding Jabba’s palace, have been rendered by software program dubbed ‘the Lego-Lyzer’.
As a substitute, something too unwieldy for Lego Digital Designer went to a second piece of software program — the ‘Lego-Lyzer’ — that learn the scene, ship, constructing, or background and speedily produced a game-ready Lego reproduction. Durand and the group discovered it the proper answer for the sport’s backgrounds and extra distant objects: “At that distance, you’re perhaps not seeing Lego studs, however you’ll undoubtedly see the perimeters of every brick.”
As soon as ranges have been constructed, the Gameloft group embraced fixed playtesting of their weekly conferences. “The primary quarter-hour have been updates about progress, what everyone’s doing,” Kaburis laughs. “The final 45 minutes have been playtime.”
Kaburis says playtime — which concerned practically everybody on the group — was a very powerful a part of improvement. However the sport’s most precious playtesters have been additionally its smallest: Child playtesters helped the group refine the sport’s perspective from an preliminary top-down perspective to a behind-the-ship standpoint, and helped them develop and refine the onboarding course of.
“The primary time you play, you see a pop-up display that claims ‘Maintain your pill or telephone with two palms,’” says Kaburis. “That’s as a result of in a variety of the play checks, we noticed youngsters placing the telephone down and enjoying with one finger.”
The result’s a sport that balances the adventurous spirit of Star Wars with the tactile pleasure of a Lego set. “These days, video games have the flexibility to immerse you with story and audio and visuals which are akin to watching a film,” says Kaburis. “I’ve all the time liked video games that may try this.”
With Lego Star Wars: Castaways, he and his group made one — and introduced steadiness to the Pressure.
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Behind the Design is a weekly sequence that explores design practices and philosophies from every of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In every story, we go behind the screens with the builders and designers of those award-winning apps and video games to find how they introduced their exceptional creations to life.
