How TT Games is striving to make Lego Worlds as funny and as family-friendly as possible

Familiar though it is for its rich variety of block-shaped adventures across multiple movie tie-ins over the past decade, TT Games has spent the last couple of years working on building something new, something considerably different from its past creations.

As introduced by associate producer Chris Rose last year, Lego Worlds opens up the block box to homegrown creators, letting players conceptualise, craft and share anything from cool items to whole game modes, even worlds, all made out of (digital) Lego bricks.

It’s an impressive concept, laced throughout with the typical humour the British studio’s known for, and importantly designed with families in mind, as Rose outlines below.

The game’s built with split-screen, family couch co-op in mind

“That’s probably never going to change. We are massive advocates for couch co-op. It’s an unusual trend that people have suddenly leaned away from it as much as they have. We’re always big proponents of couch co-op. So it’s important to us that it remains a staple of our games were possible.”

TT Games knows the pain of another family member destroying your Lego build…

“We added ‘Little Brother’ mode – as we call it internally – as a direct result of a designer doing a test with his nephew. He came in the next day and went “yea, we need a little brother mode” because his nephew wiped out about 300 hours worth of building! There was no way to stop that, but now there is. That’s why we have these tests!”

…and so have safeguarded you and your digital Lego creations

“We disable auto-save basically. Say you’ve made a game mode, like Capture the Flag, or destroy a castle, or paintball arenas (we’ve noticed they’ve been really popular). If you’ve made those sort of arenas, it won’t save the state, so if something gets utterly annihilated by a younger brother, you can revert back to save. So you know you’ve not lost all that work. Or you can save it.”

You won’t be pushed into pre-defined game modes

“We didn’t want to force online modes as such. We didn’t want to say “this is the race mode, this is the online mode” for a few reasons. One is why would you have unlimited creativity and then cycle people into modes? The second thing is people are far more creative than we give them credit for.

“If we shoehorn them and say ‘this is the race mode, you can’t do that’ you’d be effectively channeled off this entire massive element of the game.”

The community upload system will be moderated to ensure there’s only family-friendly content

“It’ll be heavily moderated, so someone will have to check them and make sure everything is fine and we’re not getting inappropriate stuff in there as well, which is important to us.”

The PS4 exclusive Agents DLC Pack includes a personal favourite creation

“We’ve also got this glowing octopus – a blue, glow in the dark, octopus. We already have one in the game, but we had this really interesting translucent one, which is part of the Agents Pack. So we’ve Agents, vehicles… and we got this funky, blue octopus in there as well.”

The studio has a rigorous vetting process to make sure the comedic high ground is upheld…

“We assign a creature to an animator and say “go nuts”. For example, here’s an ostrich, do what you want. Make it work, make it funny. So they’ll come back, show us something and we go “well, if you just shifted that animation to a bit more of this or this”, then you end up with what we’ve got.

“If everyone starts chuckling, you’ve nailed it. When it’s stone-cold silence, you’ve got a problem.”

… but occasionally the team will be as surprised as you are by the animators’ creations

“I get caught out all the time. So the dancing animations; they keep making new ones all the time. Like the breakdancing, I didn’t know that existed until I did a demo once for a company. All of a sudden I had this minotaur breakdancing on the spot. I had no idea it was there! They always sneak in a funny animation. They’re so talented at it, it’s unbelievable.”