How Weekly Playtesting is Shaping the Next Game from Builder’s Journey Dev

September 1, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

While work continues on expanding its award-winning game LEGO® Builder’s Journey, developer Light Brick Studio is also deep into production on its next mysterious creation.

The studio folks won’t say much about their new game, including its codename, which they say would likely reveal too much about the title.

What the studio can talk about is how rigorous and frequent playtesting helped pluck a game-worthy idea from a Cambrian stew of prototypes and concepts.

“We test every week, and that’s a lot. It also takes a lot of effort to make that happen,” said Karsten Lund, CEO and creative director at Light Brick. “It’s something we insist on: That we sort of have the audience as a member of the group and see what they do with the game. We try and understand what they think it is they’re getting, what they would expect from a thing like this, and how they interact with it. In general, it is very valuable to us.”

That frequent testing schedule means that the studio spends a lot less time discussing whether something will work – they’re going to find out in less than a week, so why bother? – and a lot more time discussing what it is the studio wants players to experience and feel.

“It’s great,” Lund said. “We’re guided by it.”

The playtesting process is hardcoded into the studio’s schedule, which is currently built around a playtest every Friday, run by Simone Okholm, the studio’s test manager. Each week, Okholm invites a small group of players who have applied to playtest on the studio’s website to the studio to check out new creations under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

That includes not just playtesting LEGO Builder’s Journey’s upcoming additions, but also on those early prototypes.

“For the last few months, we’ve been kind of in this experimental phase,” Okholm said. “So we were giving the testers four different prototypes. Sometimes, we will give them 20 minutes on each little prototype.

“We’re hoping for the testers to surprise us, actually – to make us see some stuff we didn’t see ourselves. In this experimental phase, it’s always about trying to see the reactions of the players.“

Simone faces some challenges when chatting with the playtesters after their experience. Among them: ensuring that they’re not just telling her what they think she wants to hear. She and the rest of the team also have to be aware of what the studio refers to as the faster horses problem. That’s referring to a famous quote often attributed (most likely falsely attributed) to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

“When we see someone being frustrated by a particular mechanic, we don’t necessarily listen to their suggestions,” said Light Brick Studio developer Jonas Haugeson. “We try to figure out why are they frustrated, and what is the reason for the frustration, and how we can turn that into to something that’s a bit more enjoyable, or get rid of it. So it’s about really just finding out not what they’re saying, but what they feel.”

Clearly, the process worked for the studio on LEGO Builder’s Journey, but it seems just as instrumental in the prototyping phase, Okholm said.

“We learn a lot from them by observing them playing, and we also listen a lot to what they’re saying: how they feel about the games that we give them,” she said. “So we listen and we observe and we learn a lot from that. From there, we kind of merge that with our own values and our own ideas, and that’s what makes a game in the end.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge the studio runs into with its weekly playtests is ensuring that playtesters have something stable enough to test. Lund thinks the process is a healthy one for the studio to engage in, but he has been weighing the possibility of changing things up a bit, essentially running two streams of testing on alternating weeks to give developers a bit more time between creating builds.

While the first game for a new studio is incredibly important, the second can be – in many ways – more stressful for the team to lock-in. Haugeson says that’s because each new game can have a deep impact in identifying the studio’s focus and approach to development.

“The second game is how you really define yourself as a studio,” he said. “There’s the original game that, if successful, is coloring your studio in a certain color. But if you don’t want to be stuck in that kind of space, then you have to kind of extrapolate from what went before and say, ‘We are actually also this thing.’ Being able to have these two points makes it easier in the future to say, ‘Yeah, we expanded in this space. So we can actually also go this other place, and just constantly be elastic about what is it that we, as a studio, find meaningful.’”

While the team has settled on the core concept for their next game, Haugeson said he still feels very much like they remain in an experimental part of creation.

“I think the phase we’re at right now is trying to not make decisions that will shape the future too much,” he said. “To try and still be experimental and trying to figure out what is the essence of this thing that we’re trying to get on its feet and being as agile as possible with the process.”

While Light Brick Studio’s core conceit is to explore the creative nature of the LEGO brick brand and its DNA, that doesn’t mean all of its games will actually include LEGO bricks. But, Lund said, this next one will.

“It’s a huge inspiration to us, and we believe it’s a very, very strong medium and a beautiful design icon that has stood the test of time,” he said. “There’s a lot of embedded affordance in a brick. Everybody knows what it looks like and what they want to do with it. So, in that sense, we believe it’s still a very strong language, but we’re going to use it in a very new way.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.