Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing collection with the aim of shedding mild on particular design, artwork, or technical options inside a online game in an effort to present how seemingly easy, elementary design choices aren’t actually that straightforward in any respect.

Earlier installments cowl subjects reminiscent of designing fight to match the beat of music in Metal: Hellsinger, gamifying the method of studying to code with One Dreamer, and curating significant selections in multiplayer narrative video games in Doomsday Paradise. In this version, the builders on LEGO Bricktales share with us among the technical particulars that went into creating an artwork type that might precisely recreate the creativity and marvel of constructing with LEGO bricks as a toddler.

Hello, we’re Nathalie Schuster-Gieb and Stephan Sossau of ClockStone Studio. Based in Tyrol, Austria, ClockStone Studio is a small impartial recreation developer which was primarily identified for its Bridge Constructor
collection earlier than we got down to work on LEGO Bricktales, which we had the pleasure to contribute to as artists. Indeed, the earliest iterations of our recreation have been meant to suit proper into our personal franchise as a Bridge Constructor spinoff! However, it rapidly turned clear that there was extra potential to be unlocked. Why construct solely bridges when LEGO bricks are so versatile a cloth? 

What we ended up with strives to seize extra of that wild, inventive spark all of us skilled as kids, when a playmat and a pile of bricks turned a complete world. LEGO Bricktales is a puzzle-adventure recreation with a heavy give attention to constructing, using digital renditions of a wide range of bricks from the famend Danish toy manufacturing firm. In the sport, the participant units out along with a useful robotic companion to assist out folks scattered throughout numerous worlds following 5 completely different themes. Each world takes the form of a number of dioramas crafted totally from LEGO bricks and comes with its personal puzzles to resolve, hidden treasures to find via exploring, and powers to unlock in an effort to progress. Once solved, a puzzle might be revisited in a sandbox mode to maintain on constructing. And as an additional incentive to discover the worlds in full, the participant can use the treasure they discover to purchase new clothes objects for his or her character to put on in addition to new units of bricks to be accessed in sandbox mode.

Everything is LEGO bricks

As quickly as we found out that we wished to discover extra of what it means to play with LEGO components, we needed to severely take into consideration what that even meant. Pretty early on we dedicated to the concept of making dioramas made solely of LEGO bricks. Our imaginative and prescient as artists was one thing you possibly can feasibly construct IRL in your lounge desk after which play with, similar to an elaborate LEGO set. Make it digital whereas respecting the sheer physicality of the unique. This meant we needed to work inside established guidelines and tips.

At first look, there are a number of limitations in the case of working with LEGO bricks. The quantity of brick shapes and colours offered is finite, as is the vary of Minifigure motion. When your expertise with the toys is proscribed, like ours was originally, you would possibly assume the constructing course of is proscribed, too. Take a brick, stack it on prime of one other brick, rinse, and repeat. Thankfully, we have been supplied with a beneficiant quantity of LEGO units to attempt our fingers at. The expertise gained from finishing huge units just like the Haunted House, in addition to taking a look at dozens of gorgeous creations from hobbyists throughout analysis, taught us that this needn’t hinder our creativeness. Quite on the contrary! There is a magnificence to those easy geometric shapes and the way, snapped collectively, they gas the creativeness and tackle any form you need.

Something we purposefully wished to depart untouched was the long-lasting form of Minifigures, the little yellow people that are likely to inhabit LEGO units. Other LEGO video games have taken liberties in animating them, turning them flexible and versatile to nice impact. We, nevertheless, wished to remain as true to the true deal as attainable. An precise Minifigure’s arms are stiff and may solely rotate alongside one axis on the shoulder. But they will rotate the total 360 levels. Can your arms do this? We suppose not! Now allow us to incorporate that side into our character animations to make them specific themselves in a manner wholly distinctive to Minifigures. A serious inspiration was the animation of the LEGO film franchise, which in flip was impressed by the stop-motion animation of fanmade brief movies utilizing actual Minifigures.

The Big Building Blocks

The very first diorama mockup consisted of hundreds of bricks and was painstakingly assembled in BrickLink Studio, a digital LEGO constructing device. Master builders we weren’t; the constructing strategies have been unrefined, and the method got here with a number of caveats, largely referring to efficiency and the pace at which we have been in a position to iterate. The LEGO Games had offered us with an importer bundle to get these bricks into Unity, which was an amazing begin. But it wasn’t sufficient. Imagine constructing a automobile with out having found out the right way to construct an engine–many of the core mechanics weren’t but found out.

After some testing, we arrived on the conclusion that we must depend on splitting up the topology of a diorama into tiles fabricated from LEGO elements–a quite common method in recreation improvement. To be extra particular, we constructed the topology of every tile primarily based on an algorithm known as “Marching Cubes”, which is usually used for floor reconstruction from scalar fields. The primary concept behind it’s that you just construct up a 3D grid of factors with materials IDs. In its easiest kind, we solely have 2 IDs: Terrain and Air. Each dice is shaped by 8 factors which correspond to every of its corners. A primary ground tile for a personality to stroll on would have the Terrain ID for its decrease 4 factors and the Air ID for the higher ones. Say you need to insert a ledge into your diorama as an alternative. Then you’d place a Cube the place two of its decrease factors have the Terrain ID, whereas all others are Air. Voilà, we will translate each conceivable grid of factors into volumes fabricated from tiles so long as we put together all the attainable tiles which are wanted.

On to the difficulty of efficiency. The quantity of all of the collective bricks concerned was via the roof and slowing down our programs. On prime of the already current options of the importer, quite a few tweaks have been made in an effort to optimize efficiency. To offer you a greater concept, here’s a record of some however not all of the issues we modified about our static constructions, the inspiration of a diorama, to save lots of efficiency. Almost all of the bricks share the identical materials. Individual colours are saved as vertex colours within the mesh. Whenever attainable, bricks is not going to keep particular person objects, however their meshes are merged collectively. This ends in extra distinctive meshes however opens up extra potentialities for optimization. One being that the file measurement of our scenes is massively diminished, as much as an element of 100. Additionally, extra of the interior geometry of a mesh might be removed–which was attainable by coloring every face, rendering the item from completely different angles, counting the seen pixels of every face with a compute shader, and eradicating all invisible faces. Since we restricted the viewing angles of our dioramas, we may take away all polygons on the underside of the objects as effectively. Finally, bricks with dense poly counts, like vegetation, bought customized meshes, simply saving 100.000s of polys when used usually.

Many of our dioramas have areas crammed with water–some of them fairly massive. To actually promote the impact, water needs to be animated and clear. Two properties that when once more threw some challenges at us. While animating bricks in wavy patterns is technically simple, some methods should be carried out to get the correct efficiency. As additionally it is achieved in most different video games, a shader takes care of the animation. But different video games are likely to not have water that’s made out of bricks! Our answer in a nutshell was to have massive patches of water as mixed meshes that may very well be a part of a tile. For instance, as an alternative of inserting 64 1×1 tile bricks, we solely have one mesh, the place all the data we have to animate particular person elements of the mesh is baked into an unused UV channel of the vertices.

Transparency sorting points are one other frequent problem recreation builders have needed to face for many years now. Polygons of a mesh are constructed in a sure order, and this defines which surfaces are drawn in entrance of one another. On a per-object stage, this may be resolved another way however inside one mesh it is one other case totally. First, we resolve during which order polygons are drawn in a single brick. Then we resolve during which order all of the bricks are drawn. This manner we will make it possible for all particular person bricks kind appropriately when seen inside 90 levels from a top-down view. If we rotate the digicam additional, all these bricks begin to be sorted incorrectly. To repair this, we flip these patches with a script primarily based on the viewing angle.

Tying It All Together

Assembling the bottom of the diorama was now sooner and carried out effectively however in its easiest kind nonetheless didn’t look nice. Once we expanded our tiling system with extra options although, we may obtain what we aimed for. In order to enhance our diorama design, we added extra variations of tiles that have been used usually, added customized tiles that have been twice the dimensions (and extra) of standard tiles, and added extra materials IDs like “Water” and “Path”, to offer some examples. We additionally needed to settle for compromises. One of them was that we couldn’t probably help all shapes in a diorama when utilizing a number of materials sorts because the variety of tiles would explode to a whole bunch and hundreds of distinctive tiles that someone must construct brick by brick. We agreed to not lose our minds and give attention to a scalable method, including tiles to our assortment solely after we actually wanted them.

To actually carry the dioramas to life it turned out we had so as to add much more layers. With the tiles achieved we nonetheless wanted to have extra management to place in some eye-catching particulars. Some of this was achieved by strategically inserting distinctive, one-of-a-kind particular tiles, whereas customized props did the remainder. Small props like vegetation have been positioned sporadically to make all the pieces really feel extra natural (pun not meant) whereas conserving in thoughts that sure areas needed to be left free for the participant to navigate. Bigger props served as focus factors to drive dwelling the theme and narrative of a diorama. These props have been the place we actually bought to suppose exterior the field and hone our constructing abilities.

A variety of analysis on actual locations went into the visible design of LEGO Bricktales. For instance, the jungle is impressed by photos of locations in Cambodia, as are the statues discovered inside its dioramas. Sure, one may in all probability construct an honest approximation of Angkor Wat’s spectacular stone heads together with your common brick-on-brick methodology however using extra superior constructing methods permits for extra element taking on much less house, which is essential if you need to preserve your dioramas a sure scale. One such technique we realized known as SNOT, which stands for “Studs Not On Top”. This means altering the orientation of your brick placement via particular bricks. Now you’ll be able to have studs mentioning to the facet as an alternative of simply up, permitting for extra flexibility and a complete new search for a construct.

Working on LEGO Bricktales allowed us to embrace our inside youngster as soon as extra. We bought to play with bricks in an effort to advance our design. We realized greater than ever earlier than about all of the fantastic issues you’ll be able to create with them and had a blast alongside the way–mostly, however the occasional recreation design headache. Now we hope to cross this expertise on to our gamers. Not the headache, although. We’ll preserve that one.