Lego Racers (video Game) - Development

Development

High Voltage Software founder Kerry Ganofsky originally came up with the basic idea of a game in which the player build cars with Lego bricks and race with them. After more than a year spent on preliminary design and prototyping, Lego Media agreed to begin production. Creative expertise from Lego Media and other facilities within The Lego Group collaborated with High Voltage during the production of the game.

Character models, documents and pictures of nearly every Lego System character were sent to High Voltage, who chose to go with four Lego System themes: Castle, Adventurers and Pirates. After reviewing all the characters and choosing the ones they like best, character studies were drawn up in order to further capture the essence of each character and persona. After again reviewing the list of character, the team chose the strongest characters focused on as "Champs" in the race, while other characters would also race, but not the as the central figure, meaning that the "Champ" is the one the player must beat. The team felt this would "bring a level of focus and stronger character development to the game." While the cast of characters included existing characters in the Lego Universe, the team created two original characters, the Rocket Racer, the best among the Lego racers and the main antagonist of the series, and Veronica Voltage, Rocket Racer's genius sidekick who is also an expert racer, but with other talents in the scientific field.

For character building, to help add sense of creativity, special attention was paid to the elements that were chosen for character pieces. To further add to this, special animations were created to breathe life into the character the player created. The team aimed to make car building easy to learn, allow as much freedom as possible to build with a variety of bricks to build from rather than just standard square bricks, that brick placement effects the cars handling or physics, and to encourage building when new sets are unlocked. With a number of ideas for the power-ups, the team settled that the power-up system should be unique, use Lego elements and "construction values" as much as possible, and that it would "fun and awarding to use."

Lead programmer Dwight Luetscher designed around platforms' capabilities. During the design, he assumed that the artists could optimize the artificial intelligence-controlled cars in the game by hand, and therefore the only variables would be custom built cars by the players. From there, he backwards engineered the numbers to get what was required for custom built cars, and still have freedom in car building. He created formula that the artists could work with to construct the elements within the formula. The pieces for the car sets were then chosen first by aesthetics, and then analyzed to see if they could fit into the formula. Those that didn't were cut, while those that passed both criteria were used in the final product. The formula came after months of testing and prototyping hundreds of Lego elements, and the elements were built and finalized for the game only a few months before its completion. After several designs for car building were made and tested, the team settled on a design they believed was most easy to use and understand. The car building mode took over a year's work of several people to finish the. To reduce confusion with trying to balance out numbers ("we were shooting for a low age demographic 6 and up") the decision was made to rely only on the visual appearance of the car.

Due to a high number of sets and pieces they contain, a custom mesh code was created to weld the geometry in place and to optimize the cars polygon count. The code and the pieces were continually optimized during development. This meant that no matter what configuration the player built, it would weld it right to the chassis, using as few polygons as possible, to become one solid mesh. Other levels of detail were created for use in situations other than cars in-game, like the menu screens and cinemas, which had to be more detailed since the player would see them up close. In the end, many different levels of detail were made for every Lego element, which the team believed successfully upheld "the suspension of disbelief and completes the feeling of continuity between the race, cinemas, and menu screens."