LEGO Minifigures Online Interview .

Life as a LEGO Minifig is never easy. There’s always another plot to thwart, item to build or companion to meet. Recently LEGO Minifigures Online added in the Series 12 Minifigs from LEGO. We took the time to sit down and ask a few questions about all things brick related.

 

Hello and thanks for taking this time to sit down and talk to us about LEGO Minifigures Online. For the new or uninitiated in Funcom and LEGO, can you just tell us what it is you do?

Hello! I’m Oscar López Lacalle and I am the Lead Designer of LEGO Minifigures Online. I overview the design team and help drive the overall vision of the game.

It’s been said that there’ll be around 100 minifigs at launch with more to come… though it has to be asked, which one is your favourite?

That’s a tough one, because I like too many of them! Also, they work so much better as a team that I tend to think on them in groups of three, rather than individually. I guess if I had to choose my favorite team, it would be Fortune Teller, Viking Woman and Mr. Good and Evil. Or wait!

The age range aimed at for LEGO Minifigures Online is around about 7-12 years of age. LEGO Universe had a clever chat system and verification to protect what they expected to be a very young audience, what can you tell us about the measures Funcom is taking?

We are determined to create a safe and friendly environment for our players and part of that comes from our chat management technology. To that end we have partnered with Crisp Thinking to utilize their industry leading chat filtering and moderation service. This same service has been used in previous LEGO Online games.

Space World, Pirate World, Medieval World, these should all be familiar to LEGO fans. What can you tell us about the worlds being created from scratch by yourselves?

I can talk about Mythology World, which is a brand new in-game setting we are very excited about. We wanted a world of epic adventures and fantastic enemies and lore and we thought that an ancient Greek mythology setting would complement the other existing worlds very well. The minifigure toy-line itself already contained some characters from that setting such as Medusa, the Minotaur and the Cyclops, so we just embraced that theme and created a whole World around it.

 

Giving parents and kids a place to play together is a great idea and hopefully will help bring new fans into the MMO genre. Are there many Funcom staffers trying to sneak their kids in to playtest LEGO?

Of course! They became our first testers! In addition to our own kids we have enlisted local school classes to help us play test the game throughout our various stages of Beta. Just this week, we had a large group at the office helping us fine-tune the controls for the tablet version of the game.

I like the idea of trying to remove some of the more competitive aspects of MMOs in an attempt to get people to play together. Was that difficult to balance though with giving the game a sense of challenge?

Of course, the line between challenging and too difficult tends to be a very fine one. We are constantly tweaking the game’s difficulty to find that elusive sweet spot between “empowering” and “patronizing”. The game’s target audience is pretty broad and we have to make sure that the game can be played by the younger kids while still offering a degree of challenge to those looking for it.

Will there be microtransactions in the game and given the young audience focus, how do you balance an in game store against kids … being kids.

This is something we take very seriously and we have built in a set of different measures to ensure that the parents are involved in every step of the purchase process. Parents are required to approve every individual transaction that involves real money.

What does the post launch life of LEGO Minifigures look like? Will there be regular updates? New zones planned?

LEGO will continue to release minifigure series that we will continue to put into the game. We have a number of new Worlds in the pipeline that we will realize over time as well as new gameplay altering features and mechanics, including mini-games, endgame challenges and PvP game modes.

 

Are there any plans for real life LEGO tie ins to the game that you can tell us about?

The game will launch alongside the minifigures Series 12. Those bags will include a code that players can redeem in the game to unlock their virtual counterpart. We believe that this will open up the game to even more LEGO fans (and the Series 12 minifigures are awesome!).

Finally, what has been the most exciting part of creating LEGO Minifigures Online for you personally?

My favorite part is bringing all these minifigures to life with their own personality traits and heroic fantasies and bringing them out on adventures in these quirky worlds made with LEGO bricks that I dreamt about when I was a kid. It’s like my own virtual playground! LEGO Minifigures Online puts the stuff of fantasy that made me enjoy playing with LEGO into a computer game.
So which is your favourite minifig? If you had to have a trio of dungeon crawling, brick smashing, LEGO heroes, what would you choose?

Galaxy Patrol, Battle Mech and Space Miner for me. I always was a LEGO Space fan at heart. Some things never change.