Recently, writers of Nintendo Life were able to visit TT Fusion to gain some insight on the development on the upcoming game for the Wii U, LEGO City: Undercover. The team was able to speak with four members of the development team: executive producer Loz Doyle, script writer Graham Goring, lead designer Lee Barber, and LEGO lead Stephen Bate. The interview is quite a read and quite lengthy, covering many aspects of development.
You can read the interview after the break.
NL: You’re best known as a studio for the LEGO movie spin-off franchises, so at what point was the decision made to go with the LEGO City branding and new storyline?
Loz Doyle: We’ve been wanting to do a LEGO City game for a while, before we started it, and the opportunity had never really come up; we’d been doing the other IP games so we didn’t have enough staff, and the technology wasn’t there to support a whole city. So, in 2010 we started doing a prototype for the City game, though we weren’t 100% sure what it was going to be at that point; there was a lot of talk about how much building there’d be in it, would it be more about the construction side, and so on.
So we started to just block-out the city, get some cars in and see how it felt to drive around, and we changed the camera and so on. It started to feel like the right sort of game, and we were finding our way with it, and then that was when Nintendo came to see us in 2011 and showed us the Wii U. They said “look, come and work on this new console, it’s got a cool new controller and you can do this and that with it”. They gave us the specs of the machine and we could just see straight away that it was going to be the perfect fit for this game; we’ve always had a good relationship with Nintendo because we’ve done a lot of games that have been really successful on their platforms. So I think we’d always wanted to work together but the right game had never come along, until LEGO City.
NL: With the new concept, how long did it take to come up with a basic outline of the overall plot?
Graham Goring: The plot was kind of already decided on by the time I got on there, because it was very much decided what order in which the abilities came. So the backbone was already laid out, as in “meet this criminal and go undercover with this gang etc”, so that was already laid down. I was just fleshing it out, I knew I had to get from A to B in this scene – a lot of the locations had already been decided on for the standalone levels, with the cutscenes at the start, end and possibly the middle – so really it was the case of “set up the scene and stuff as many jokes in there as you can”; that was pretty much my brief.
I can do that! I’m wouldn’t say I’m the kind of person that can come up with the original plot, particularly, but that had been done so I just put in as many stupid jokes as I could [laughs].
NL: Did you have pretty much free rein in terms of the various parodies and so on?
Graham Goring: Yeah. The one thing was that we wanted as much parody in there as possible, it’s a weird thing with parodies where you put lots in there and you’re sort of, um…
Loz Doyle: Spreading the risk…
Graham Goring: Yeah, spreading the risk is kind of it. In terms of writing I had very little oversight, it had to be approved by LEGO and legal, and a script editor was giving me feedback which was tremendously useful. I had an incredible amount of lee-way, so I was very lucky on this project.
NL: This was primarily shown at E3 2012 as a big upcoming game. Do you think your studio had particularly early access to Wii U, in comparison to what we sometimes hear about early games being turned around very quickly? Was that part of the relationship with Nintendo?
Loz Doyle: Yeah I think so, because they could see the potential in the game from the concept we’d developed, and they were obviously very keen to get it on Wii U. Yeah, we had a lot of dev kits from early on.
NL: Can we clarify the role of Nintendo as publisher. Did it have any oversight in terms of quality checks, scripts etc?
Loz Doyle: We were sharing information with them, the script and everything went to them to look at, and they were always keen to have a look at the game and let us know what they thought. They pretty much left us to it to develop the game, and only flagged things up if they thought there was a major problem, but on the whole they acknowledged the fact that we know how to make a LEGO game better than they do. So they were quite happy for us to make it. Nintendo cameo ideas came from them, as they suggested getting some of those references in there; which we obviously lapped up. Overall they were not that intrusive, but hands on in terms of getting the game to its finished state.
