Recently, writers of Nintendo Life were able to visit TT Fusion to gain some insight on the development on the upcoming game for the Wii U, LEGO City: Undercover. The team was able to speak with four members of the development team: executive producer Loz Doyle, script writer Graham Goring, lead designer Lee Barber, and LEGO lead Stephen Bate. The interview is quite a read and quite lengthy, covering many aspects of development.

Topics mentioned in the interview include how invaluable the GamePad is for gameplay, how the game may take between 40 and 50 hours to complete 100%, and what the development team enjoyed most about creating this game for the Wii U.

Here's the full interview below:

NL: You’re best known as a studio for the LEGO movie spin-off franchises, so at what point was the decision made to go with the LEGO City branding and new storyline?

Loz Doyle: We’ve been wanting to do a LEGO City game for a while, before we started it, and the opportunity had never really come up; we’d been doing the other IP games so we didn’t have enough staff, and the technology wasn’t there to support a whole city. So, in 2010 we started doing a prototype for the City game, though we weren’t 100% sure what it was going to be at that point; there was a lot of talk about how much building there’d be in it, would it be more about the construction side, and so on.

So we started to just block-out the city, get some cars in and see how it felt to drive around, and we changed the camera and so on. It started to feel like the right sort of game, and we were finding our way with it, and then that was when Nintendo came to see us in 2011 and showed us the Wii U. They said “look, come and work on this new console, it’s got a cool new controller and you can do this and that with it”. They gave us the specs of the machine and we could just see straight away that it was going to be the perfect fit for this game; we’ve always had a good relationship with Nintendo because we’ve done a lot of games that have been really successful on their platforms. So I think we’d always wanted to work together but the right game had never come along, until LEGO City.

NL: With the new concept, how long did it take to come up with a basic outline of the overall plot?

Graham Goring: The plot was kind of already decided on by the time I got on there, because it was very much decided what order in which the abilities came. So the backbone was already laid out, as in “meet this criminal and go undercover with this gang etc”, so that was already laid down. I was just fleshing it out, I knew I had to get from A to B in this scene – a lot of the locations had already been decided on for the standalone levels, with the cutscenes at the start, end and possibly the middle – so really it was the case of “set up the scene and stuff as many jokes in there as you can”; that was pretty much my brief.

I can do that! I’m wouldn’t say I’m the kind of person that can come up with the original plot, particularly, but that had been done so I just put in as many stupid jokes as I could [laughs].

NL: Did you have pretty much free rein in terms of the various parodies and so on?

Graham Goring: Yeah. The one thing was that we wanted as much parody in there as possible, it’s a weird thing with parodies where you put lots in there and you’re sort of, um…

Loz Doyle: Spreading the risk…

Graham Goring: Yeah, spreading the risk is kind of it. In terms of writing I had very little oversight, it had to be approved by LEGO and legal, and a script editor was giving me feedback which was tremendously useful. I had an incredible amount of lee-way, so I was very lucky on this project.

NL: This was primarily shown at E3 2012 as a big upcoming game. Do you think your studio had particularly early access to Wii U, in comparison to what we sometimes hear about early games being turned around very quickly? Was that part of the relationship with Nintendo?

Loz Doyle: Yeah I think so, because they could see the potential in the game from the concept we’d developed, and they were obviously very keen to get it on Wii U. Yeah, we had a lot of dev kits from early on.

NL: Can we clarify the role of Nintendo as publisher. Did it have any oversight in terms of quality checks, scripts etc?

Loz Doyle: We were sharing information with them, the script and everything went to them to look at, and they were always keen to have a look at the game and let us know what they thought. They pretty much left us to it to develop the game, and only flagged things up if they thought there was a major problem, but on the whole they acknowledged the fact that we know how to make a LEGO game better than they do. So they were quite happy for us to make it. Nintendo cameo ideas came from them, as they suggested getting some of those references in there; which we obviously lapped up. Overall they were not that intrusive, but hands on in terms of getting the game to its finished state.

NL: Still on the early days. Earlier on you showed us various ideas for the GamePad that weren’t adopted, so what made you opt for the approach you’ve taken? Were you trying to minimalize the reliance on it, or were you aiming to make it intuitive? What made some ideas more suitable for the final game?

Graham Goring: When your character Chase gets what essentially looks like a GamePad in the game, that clarified what you’d do with it; it’s a police tool.

Loz Doyle: We had so many ideas and uses for it, it was confusing in terms of “what is it in the game”, how do you come to use it in the game? That’s why it made sense to make it a police device, so you wouldn’t use it for activities that weren’t police based; so you wouldn’t use it crack safes, put out fires etc. That made it more focused, and we could really polish those features better than if we’d used it for everything.

NL: Do you think that’s a distinction from GamePad to Wii Remote? A lot of games tried to make the Wii Remote do everything, does the GamePad feel more focused, or is it easier to work with in that sense?

Lee Barber: I don’t think for LEGO City we could do it without the GamePad, it’s pretty much central and a core element of the game. This is for both the character in the game and the player; what you see the character doing, the player can do as well, so they’re linked by the same device. As the character in the game upgrades, so do the player’s abilities to do the same. It’s not just limited to a map of a city, the player can feel like a detective or like they’re locating a robber, or locating a hidden item. We feel that’s pretty unique.

Loz Doyle: The GamePad is a very versatile thing, it can do a lot, but we didn’t necessarily want to use it for everything. We could have used it for steering the car, but it didn’t seem like the right thing to do, and it wouldn’t be any better than using the left stick.

Steve Bate: I think, while you’re playing the game, as the character is looking at the GamePad it gives you the opportunity to look down. To be always playing while looking down, it’s really hard work, whereas we’re pausing it and “oh, Chase is looking down”, so you look down, and when you’re finished with the GamePad you’re back to playing. It’s much easier to play a game like that rather than constantly bobbing up and down.

Lee Barber: It’s important to know that looking up and down, while it might be needed now and again, once the player gets to grips with the map and where everything is, they won’t need to do it as much. I know there’s a concern for all Wii U games, in terms of the amount of looking down that’s needed, in LEGO City it’s not essential. Even if someone’s communicating with you, such as police HQ, you can hear the device speaking back to you. You can answer a call or ignore it, you don’t have to look down at the GamePad; if you do want to you can see the character speaking to you.

NL: Is that why you have the green studs to guide players on the road towards their next objective, for example?

Loz Doyle: Yeah, it can be a nightmare if you’re looking at the map to try and see where to go next. With the green studs you can just follow it.

NL: In terms of Wii U as hardware, was its structure and architecture quite intuitive to use in the early days, or was it something that took time?

Graham Goring: We got up and running really fast, didn’t we? It was a joy to work with; obviously there are challenges within the new hardware, but we had stuff up and running really fast.

Loz Doyle: We have a tech team over at the other office, and they’re just whizzes with new hardware, they were all over it and loved doing it, such as writing a new engine for how a new system is setup. We appreciated having so much memory, way more than we’re used to having on a console, and we couldn’t have done a city game without that, in the same way.

Graham Goring: Not as densely populated as this one is. In terms of peripheral gameplay, there’s not a street you can go down where there isn’t something new to do. Which isn’t true of other open-world games, I’d say, quite often they have a city block that may as well be an empty shell. We generally sprinkle gameplay all over.

Lee Barber: There is a balance, though, with the amount of stuff that we did put in on every street corner, with LEGO City there really is something to do around every street corner. The balance came from the amount of content versus questions of whether it was too much – as the Wii U could handle it – and I think we got the balance right.

NL: One description we’ve used is LEGO GTA, is that accurate – in terms of side-quests and so on – or is that a bit off?

Graham Goring: I think it’s just because they (Rockstar) got there first, so a lot of people go to that. The feel of the game, the moral tone etc is completely opposite. It might be a handy reference to get people up to speed with this, but when they actually play it they’ll appreciate the differences. As I said, in a lot of open world games you don’t tend to go on top of buildings because there’s nothing there, whereas with this there’s platforming all over the game. It’s very different.

Lee Barber: With all of the previews we’ve had of LEGO City, everyone tends to say that it’s evidently very far away from GTA, but it doesn’t need to be. It has its own style.

NL: Are there side-quests, in the typical sense, or is it more about collectables and locked areas?

Loz Doyle: Probably not in the same way.

Graham Goring: There won’t be story side-quests, in that sense, but sometimes there’ll be something like an extended parkour trail which gets you to a point where you can listen in and find where a gang’s operating so you can go and arrest them. But there won’t be a dude saying “oh, my cat is up here” for you to rescue them. We do have a rescue cat “thing”, where when you’re dressed as a fireman you can do just that, but it’s more defined by the abilities of the character classes rather than prompts from NPCs.

Loz Doyle: Once you’ve unlocked some character classes and decide to go off the story and look around, you’ll find a lot to do. I’m still finding stuff I hadn’t seen before, even last week.

Lee Barber: We hear the same thing from the QA department, when they’re testing the game.

NL: Would you say you’re trying to hit both adult and young audiences with this game? There seem to be a lot of “in-jokes”, while those features you’re mentioning seem to target the obsessive-compulsive collector in anyone.

Loz Doyle: It is for everyone, because LEGO’s for everyone. We want to make a game that we want to play, we want everybody to enjoy it. That’s where we started with LEGO Star Wars; we were making a children’s game but it was for young gamers in general, and we were enjoying playing it. That’s the formula we’ve stuck with.

NL: In terms of the GamePad, are there features that could conceivably be adapted for a standard controller?

Graham Goring: It’s one of the weird things. We’re developing on PC and there’d be things you’d do if you didn’t have a dev kit, but it wouldn’t have the life. For example with the audio scanning you’d just be using a thumbstick, but you’d do it on the GamePad and it’d feel great, like a revelation. That complete feedback, a window into the world, feels different and fresh. You could do some of the features on a standard controller, but it’d be a shadow of itself.

It’s just the fact that you’ve got a screen in your hand that responds to your positioning, it’s wonderful.

NL: We understand that this is single-player. Was that an early decision, as co-op is a big feature in the licensed games?

Loz Doyle: Well, the thing is it’s just too hard (laughs) with this sort of game, if you’re always considering two players. We did actually consider two players for a long time: we had to think about how one player would start a story mission if the other player was at the other end of the city, would all of the vehicles have to have two seats? So, how do we re-design all of the vehicles so they still look cool? You’d have to have non-GamePad versions and a Wii Remote version, it didn’t seem like a natural fit for two player.

Lee Barber: Very messy.

Loz Doyle: Yeah. And we’ve got one strong lead character. If we had a second playable character who would they be? Player two would never want to play as a non-Chase character. It didn’t work on a lot of levels.

NL: Is DLC on the table as a potential idea, or do you consider the content on the disc to be the final product?

Loz Doyle: There are so many vehicles, characters and missions. There’s so much content in the game already – you’re talking 40-50 hours to get 100%, it’s difficult to imagine what we could put in. We wouldn’t rule it out, but it’d have to be the right thing to fit with the rest of the game.

NL: You mentioned 40-50 hours. Do you think gamers will naturally be diverted towards extras, or do you think they’ll blitz the story and then come back?

Graham Goring: It’s a bit like Fallout 3, you just get distracted.

Loz Doyle: Initially in the San Francisco area at the start of the game you’re really focused on the story, but as you get more abilities you’ll see things that had locked icons before that you couldn’t use, and now you can. That’ll encourage you to explore and use those different game mechanics and abilities.

Graham Goring: I was terrible for testing, very unproductive. Just because I’d think “no-one’s watching I’ll play this bit instead”! Getting distracted is very easy.

Lee Barber: There are so many different variables like that through the game. Whether it’s a side-mission or part of the main mission, you may get distracted and start smashing or building something, something that takes you away from the main point of what you were doing originally.

Loz Doyle: Once you start unlocking the red bricks, as well, it makes you want to get them all as there are some really good red brick “cheats”.

Lee Barber: It just gets silly and you just smile through it, it’s silly and funny.

NL: So red bricks are variable cheats? We haven’t had the fortune of finding any!

Loz Doyle: Yeah they’re just cheats. And we knew that kids and everyone loves having cheats.

NL: Is this the game that perhaps uses LEGO in its most literal sense, more so than the movie games?

Loz Doyle: It’s more about building than the other games, with things like Super Builds. With all of the vehicles and the fact that you get studs for building, rather than breaking, which is neat and a different take for this game.

NL: Maybe one more for fans of actual LEGO than fans of a given movie, then?

Lee Barber: It stands on its own, it doesn’t need to be tied to a movie or franchise. It is a franchise, really, it’s LEGO’s biggest selling franchise.

Loz Doyle: It should appeal to both. As you’ve said there’s a lot more LEGO in there, and it’s that core LEGO franchise. But it also has the characters that should appeal to people.

Steve Bate: It’s also a game where no-one knows the story. The other ones, the IPs, you already know what Lord of the Rings is about, nobody knows in this; that adds another dimension, and that’s great having something to find out. It’s like watching a movie.

Lee Barber: The characters all have their own charm as well. With Chase, he isn’t Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark; he’s an ordinary cop, just like the player is an ordinary person, but they can now do extraordinary things, and they can save LEGO City. That’s something we can give to the player towards the end of the game.

NL: You’ve mentioned a camera in the game that allows you to take pictures and post them to Miiverse; is that auto-connected in the game or do you need to manually go to Miiverse?

Loz Doyle: If you’re online and signed in, you can just post onto Miiverse from within the game.

NL: Is that something that you’ll all be watching in the game’s community?

Loz Doyle: Oh yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what people are putting up there, what bugs they’ve found (laughs). But there are no bugs!

Steve Bate: From a LEGO designer’s perspective, there’s a rivalry to see which car gets posted the most!

Loz Doyle: Yeah, you can get some nice screenshots when you do boosted jumps.

Steve Bate: Even with marketing stuff Ramon (a LEGO builder in the team) would come over and say “that’s one of yours, congratulations Ste”, which is nice as I only did about ten!

Lee Barber: That’s the thing with the free play element, going through the city in a car you’ve got jumps, like set pieces, everywhere. They’re such a joy to watch, so if you take a picture of that when it’s sailing through the air, the player can do that.

Loz Doyle: It’ll be interesting to see if player’s start posting pictures to say “this red brick is over here”, “the piranha plant is located here” and so on.

NL: Mini-walkthroughs, essentially?

Loz Doyle: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that works.

Graham Goring: I’m genuinely looking forward to playing through the game. The weird thing is that with so much side-content, I’ve seen about 25% of the game, because I’ve been buried in making the story-line part. It’s unusual to come to the end of a project and genuinely want to play the game.

NL: So how big would you say the overall map is in this game, as we’ve not seen all of it in our time so far?

Graham Goring: It’s probably the density of it that’s the main thing. It’s probably smaller than some other open-world games in terms of square-footage, but it’s got all the gameplay packed in.

Steve Bate: Top to bottom it’s about 2.5KM, but that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t sound big but it takes 10 minutes to drive from bottom to top.

Lee Barber: And clearly you’re going from island to island.

Steve Bate: The other good thing is that there are about 200 vehicles, and they all spawn in different areas. So certain ‘rich’ areas would have all the sports cars and downtown will have something else. That’s where the diversity comes in; you could be driving along supposed to do a mission and you go “I’ve not seen that, or collected it yet”, and you drive off trying to catch it.

Lee Barber: The main challenge is getting from A to B without being distracted by something. Even if it’s just smashing something, riding a pig or firing a pig out of a cannon, you’ll want to do it.

Steve Bate: The number of animations that are in there, it’s incredible how many they’ve done. The population all do all sorts of stuff; the content is immense, and I don’t think we could have done that on another console.

Graham Goring: The amount of animation we’ve got going on at one time is absurd.

NL: Are you keen on following this up on Wii U, has that been considered?

Loz Doyle: We’d consider anything! (laughs) I think the characters are so strong, that it does stand up on its own. It’s not something we’ve talked about yet.

NL: If you all had to pick one favourite moment (not at the end!), what would they be?

Graham Goring: My bit is a part where one of the characters, Frank, rides a horse later in the game. It leads to a slightly crude joke; it’s a really silly joke and I’m surprised it never got cut (laughs), because it’s a bit silly.

Steve Bate: All my favourites are around Frank Honey, he’s just a brilliant character. My favourite is where Chase gets his first undercover outfit and he turns around and a cop says “wow, that’s great”, while Frank says “is that Chase?”, even though he was standing there the whole time.

Loz Doyle: It sounds corny, but there are so many. The media circus joke is funny, quite early in the game.

Graham Goring: The performer really drew that line out, it was written really short. That was one of my favourite things, doing the voice recording sessions, they were great fun.

NL: You had some fairly big names, didn’t you?

Graham Goring: Yeah, we had Peter Serafinowicz [most famous as the voice of Darth Maul], he was great, Adam Buxton, and Josh Robert-Thomson. Though that was done in LA, and they didn’t fly me out there, I just had to do it over Skype!

Lee Barber: I like the bits with the squirrel in it, it’s really random. The squirrel’s just such an enigma, I still can’t fully understand what it’s about, why he’s a pivotal part of the story!

Graham Goring: Good for the voice recording as well… how do you do a squirrel?

Unfortunately, that was all they were able to cover at Nintendo Life. As an interviewer myself, I must say this was a rather informative interview, but it was a shame it had to end with a cliffhanger.

So with such games as this from 3rd Parties & Yarn Yoshi from 1st Party, well are you now worry free about what ultra high end graphics & high end specs will do to gaming?

I personally wish they gave an option to use the motion sensors to steer vehicles to make the game a bit more interactive overall.