The Builders’ Journeys

January 13, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

A personal journey of discovery and family values underlies the power and poignancy of LEGO® Builder’s Journey.

Released on Apple Arcade in 2019 to near-uniform praise, mobile game LEGO Builder’s Journey breathes life into LEGO play without the use of minifigs. Instead, it uses the LEGO Group’s dense palette of bricks to create everything from the landscape and challenges to the title’s key figures. The game also tells an evocative story of a father and son, their relationship, and the importance of play.

Underneath the title, and in some ways empowering it alongside the deft work of a team of creatives, is studio co-founder Karsten Lund’s own story. The result was a brilliant game, a new studio, and – for the LEGO Group – an experiment in game creation.

A Calling

Before working at the LEGO Group, Lund spent time at major game studios, including IO Interactive and Square Enix. It was at Square that he helped oversee the creation of Hitman Go. The pocket-sized mobile game managed to deconstruct the massive settings, intricate strategy, and lush graphics of the Hitman video game series. Boiling away the fat, it delivered a slimmed-down version of the franchise based on the game’s core conceits and presented as table-top vignettes for gamers to solve. It quickly won fans and critics over.

In 2014, Lund joined the LEGO Group as a creative director and spent the next three years immersing himself in the LEGO brand. But he had this idea sort of ticking away in the back of his head the whole time.

Then in 2017, Lund and his family decided it was time to go back home, to return to Copenhagen from Billund, where he was currently working. It was a time when he was also starting to miss the feeling of hands-on development. Fortunately, LEGO Games had something they called an innovation funnel, which hunted for unique gaming experiences. So Lund pitched several ideas, and one of them stuck: Path of Creation, which would eventually grow into LEGO Builder’s Journey.

Lund was given the opportunity to move to Copenhagen and open a satellite LEGO Games studio. The initial idea was that he would commute the two to three hours each way between his new home and the studio, and LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark. But he quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, so he asked if he could work remotely, alongside his growing team.

Mistakes

LEGO Games approved the idea, and with a small budget, Lund started to set up Light Brick Studio with the help of a small staff and a lot of freelancers. The group prototyped constantly, creating a new prototype a month in the hopes of discovering important facets of what would eventually become a cohesive game. As the game slowly came together, they received a lot of positive feedback from the team back at LEGO Games.

Unfortunately, they also chased some bad ideas. One, Lund said, had the team working on a prototype for a month before realizing it was a bad design and having to start over.

Once they realized their mistake, they retooled the game and narrowed the levels from these massive, traditional maps to small, focused dioramas made from LEGO bricks.

The next big stumbling block came as the studio worked to inject a meaningful story into the game.

The game was broken into chapters and was meant to tell a sort of story built around the relationship between a father and his son. They decided to write an “epic” overarching narrative that would unpack over the course of four to five hours of gameplay.

The problem, though, was that players not only didn’t seem to understand the story, some of them didn’t even realize there was a story.

Frustrated, and frankly more than a little worried about this surprising hurdle hitting less than six months from the game’s launch, the team decided to take a summer break. During the break, the team seemed to have an epiphany and realized that maybe the game wasn’t really telling a traditional story and that it should be viewed more as poetry than prose.

They loosened their grip on the story-telling, and it wasn’t long before playtesters started to connect with the experience.

New Game, New Studio

The talented team at the studio managed to get the game done in time to launch alongside Apple Arcade, and people seemed to get what it was saying. But that wasn’t the end of the journey of LEGO Builder’s Journey and the team that made it.

Light Brick Studio was created as a sort of experimental off-shoot of LEGO Games, but it was still very much a part of the LEGO Group. That changed in late 2020 when LEGO Ventures – the venture capital arm for the LEGO brand – invested in the studio, and it was spun out as its own entity.

That investment from LEGO Ventures means that Light Brick Studio has the funding and the freedom to do whatever it wants in the realm of exploring the concept of LEGO play.

Currently, that means expanding LEGO Builder’s Journey into a bigger game and releasing it to platforms outside of both Apple Arcade and smartphones.

And while the studio doesn’t have to work on LEGO brick video games, it sounds likely that the next project will still fall in that realm. They have a lot of ideas for future LEGO video games, Lund said.

“I think this is very important,” said documentarian and co-host of Bits N’ Bricks Ethan Vincent. “This game being developed with this kind of philosophical, art house, boutique game approach, all with the blessing of the LEGO Group. It highlights the importance of bringing the LEGO play experience to the digital in such a charming and wonderful way.”

Timing has not always been a friend to the LEGO Group, but this time it was, said journalist and Bits N’ Bricks co-host Brian Crecente.

“It happens that in the case of Light Brick Studio and LEGO Builder’s Journey, it was,” he said. “This is a case where not just timing but funding, the right game, the right group of people all seem to come together to create something sort of magical and open the path that would lead to not just the formation of Light Brick Studio, but that studio then spinning away from the LEGO Group to become its own unique thing.”

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.