As a studying game developer, this kind of challenge is important,
and I'm glad somebody asked me to do it. Being able to identify weak
areas and have solutions to try resolve the issues is important.
Therefore, let me make a few suggestions that I think would improve the
game, and maybe even turn it into a classic.
- Completely overhaul the gameplay and make it unique: What separates the old school classics from the TT
Games? Why do we find more enjoyment in the older titles? Because the
gameplay wasn't completely focused on the well-trodden, bland and
boring combat mechanics. In LEGOLAND, what do you do? Place buildings,
manage resources and swear at the inspector. What do you in the TT
Games? Smash bricks and...smash other bricks. There's minor variations,
but ultimately it all comes down to destruction. What the game needs is
a complete rehash to focus on the construction and exploration
mechanics. I mean, YOU'RE PLAYING WITH LEGO!
I would definitely focus a lot of development time on nailing some
brand new, fun and interesting mechanics that are a lot more emergent
and encourage players to experiment and be who they want to be, not who
the game designers want them to be.
- Make the only links to the movie as the locations: If
I had my crazy ways, I would be doing what Jamesster suggested, which
is to explore the various areas present in the movie. What I wouldn't do
is make you stick with the already established characters. You're in a
whole interactive LEGO world! You should be able to be yourself, and
project the character you want to be onto the characters in front of
you. Which leads me to...
- Build an entirely new story that supports the movie, not copies and ruins it: The
story should change so that this is a LEGO world in another boy/girl's
basement, with similarly controlling parents, but focusing on different
aspects of what it means to be "special". There has to be an alternative
conflict to order/chaos that applies to LEGO than can be explored, and
if not, the same conflict can be interpreted in different ways. What if
this story was about two kids who kept ruining each others sets because
they both felt they were playing "the right way"?
- Make the gameplay challenges teach the player, not hints: The
gameplay should naturally teach the player what to do, not character
dialogue or tooltips. The player should progressively learn new skills
by simply interacting with the world, finding interesting combinations
and applying those combinations of logic to other areas. It's okay if
the game gives subtle hints, such as limited coin paths and glowing
objects, but if it's too obvious, players won't learn for themselves,
and they'll get bored easy.
- Remove as much screen clutter as possible:
One big problem both origamiguy and I both had is that, at almost every
point in the game, the screen is WAY too busy. By that, there's just so
much activity, it can be highly distracting. it's a natural problem
with LEGO due to the bright colours, and TT
attempted to adjust this by making specific colour palettes for
different levels, but they ruined this by throwing in a huge amount of
objects, studs, particle effects and all other manner of distractions.
You don't need to have a full screen to have fun.
- Make 5 amazing open world levels, as opposed to 15 terrible linear levels: Less
is more. The quality of your product suffers when you focus on
quantity. Based on the reviews of LEGO City Undercover, it's clear they
can do open-world fairly okay, and so I feel as thought this would be a
better path to travel.
- QA Test the hell out of the game: This
is pretty self-explanatory. The gameplay is extremely buggy, and the
graphics are also ruined by a significant amount of visual bugs.
Obviously, they didn't care much about their QA team who probably worked
extremely hard to try and convince the devs to bring the game upto
playable state.
I'm sure there's more, but these are the main
areas I'd address. As for budget and time constraints? Unfortunately,
probably not feasible. What I'd be asking for is an insane amount of
work.
