LEGO Builder's Journey cover
LEGO Builder's Journey screenshot
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Genre: Puzzle, Adventure, Indie

LEGO Builder's Journey

LEGO® Builder's Journey Community Spotlight #1

Welcome to the first LEGO Builder's Journey Community Spotlight on Steam!



We would like to express our gratitude for your creations and take this opportunity to share some of them with everyone here.

If your creation isn't featured today, don't worry, this won't be the last spotlight.


Lego Builder's Journey: An Unsung Visual Masterpiece by Writing on Games


In this review/analysis of Lego Builder's Journey (recently ported to PC and Nintendo Switch from Apple Arcade and perhaps the best looking game I've ever played) I discuss how it captures the joy of creativity and imagination I so closely associate with the toy from my youth, in a way that no other game bearing the brand name has been able to achieve... even if it does have its share of problems.


“Writing on Games” on YouTube



What's better than re-creating the exact level from LEGO Builder's Journey? That's exactly what the player “Doffe” has done using Stud.io!

LEGO® Builder's Journey beach sandcastle recreated and rendered entirely using stud.io

Made in stud.io


“Sandcastle” by Doffe



Legoss

I just have to do it.


“Legoss” by Azfar90



I challenged myself to play all the games that I have accumulated over the years and never touched.
And for each game completed, a small illustration.

Game n°104 — LEGO Builder's Journey


“LEGO Builder's Journey” by byobyoman



Inspired by LEGO Builder's Journey, the new LEGOgame on Apple Arcade; lots of potential for the microscale builders out there


By Ian Cockayne



Re-creating the Daily Bugle from Spider-Man in LEGO Builder's Journey's Creative Mode.

“Daily Bugle” by Yagame


That's all for now!



The wonderful work created by our community that we have shared has been posted to the LEGO Builder's Journey Community Hub - make sure you check it out and even share your own creations. You can also share your best creations on social media using the hashtag #LEGOBuildersJourney. We look forward to seeing you next time!

Click here to view the Community Hub

Save 75% on LEGO® Builder's Journey!
Get LEGO Builder's Journey at a discount during this Steam Weeklong Deal and embark on Light Brick Studio's award-winning journey.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1544360/LEGO_Builders_Journey/

Take your time to experiment with free-form puzzle solving while immersing yourself in a poetic world of LEGO® bricks. Throughout the narrative, there will be ups and downs, challenges, and celebrations. Figuring out who we are and what we become is the Builder’s Journey.


Save 75% on LEGO Builder's Journey for a limited time through May 6, 2024.

Creator Spotlight – LEGO® Builder's Journey
Original Air Date: February 28, 2024.

“As long as Unity supports a platform, we can make it run here.”

On Unity's Creator Spotlight, we discussed Light Brick Studio's history and our experience with Unity. We shared some never-before-seen content and insights into the development of LEGO Builder's Journey, from prototype to the finish game and how we ported the game to iOS, PC, consoles and lately to Apple Vision Pro.



Creator Spotlight | Bringing LEGO Builder's Journey to Apple Vision Pro with Unity (February 28, 2024 · 1: 50:10)
YouTube
Twitch

How a team of six ported LEGO® Builder’s Journey to Apple Vision Pro in just three months

Explore more...


LEGO Builder's Journey – Official website
LEGO Builder's Journey – Trailer Apple Vision Pro

Save 75% on LEGO® Builder's Journey!
Get LEGO Builder's Journey at a discount during the Steam Spring Sale and embark on Light Brick Studio's award-winning journey.


Take your time to experiment with free-form puzzle solving while immersing yourself in a poetic world of LEGO® bricks. Throughout the narrative, there will be ups and downs, challenges, and celebrations. Figuring out who we are and what we become is the Builder’s Journey.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1544360/LEGO_Builders_Journey/

Save 75% on LEGO Builder's Journey for a limited time through March 21, 2024.

Save 75% on LEGO® Builder's Journey!
Get LEGO Builder's Journey at a discount during this Steam Weeklong Deal and embark on Light Brick Studio's award-winning journey.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1544360/LEGO_Builders_Journey/

Take your time to experiment with free-form puzzle solving while immersing yourself in a poetic world of LEGO® bricks. Throughout the narrative, there will be ups and downs, challenges, and celebrations. Figuring out who we are and what we become is the Builder’s Journey.


Save 75% on LEGO Builder's Journey for a limited time through February 12, 2024.

How Weekly Public Playtesting is Shaping Light Brick Studio’s Next Game
Original Air Date: September 1, 2021.

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 has 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 are a lot of embedded affordances 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.”

Bit N' Bricks Season 3 | Episode 31: Prototype, Playtest, Repeat: Inside Light Brick Studio (September 1, 2021 · 42:33)
YouTube
Apple Podcast
Spotify

Explore more...


In order of appearance
LEGO Builder's Journey – Official website
LEGO Builder's Journey – Launch Trailer
Light Brick Studio – Official website
Light Brick Studio Playtest – Official website

The Builders' Journey
Original Air Date: January 13, 2021.

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.”

Bit N' Bricks Season 1 | Episode 06: LEGO® Builder's Journey
(January 13, 2021 • 1:11:38)
YouTube
Apple Podcast
Spotify

Explore more...


In order of appearance
LEGO Games – Official website
LEGO Builder’s Journey – Official website
Hitman Go (2014) – Wikipedia
LEGO Builder’s Journey soundtrack (2020) – Spotify

Happy New Year ✨
From everyone at Light Brick Studio, we hope you have a wonderful 2024 full of love and fun 🎮


Artist Credit: @Byobyoman on Instagram.

LEGO Builder's Journey is 75% off for the Steam Winter Sale!
Save 75% on LEGO Builder's Journey for the very first time during the Steam Winter Sale 2023 and embark on Light Brick Studio's award-winning journey.


Take your time to experiment with free-form puzzle solving while immersing yourself in a poetic world of LEGO® bricks. Throughout the narrative, there will be ups and downs, challenges, and celebrations. Figuring out who we are and what we become is the Builder’s Journey.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1544360/LEGO_Builders_Journey/

Save 75% on LEGO Builder's Journey for a limited time through January 04, 2024.

We love you 3000!
We're so happy to announce that LEGO Builder's Journey has recently passed 3,000 reviews on Steam!


Thank you so much everyone for supporting our debut title ❤️

Please consider leaving us a review! We read each and every one of them 💌


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