LEGO has always been about infinite variety, so it’s appropriate that the brand has come to take so many different forms.
It’s not just a wholesome, colorful, bare foot-punishing toy any more. It’s also a series of films, a theme park, and — most significantly of all — a growing library of video games spanning multiple genres.
The latest new addition to that library is LEGOⓇ Hill Climb Adventures, a single-player exploration game that mashes together the world of LEGO with the gameplay of the hugely popular Hill Climb Racing.
Out now, LEGOⓇ Hill Climb Adventures is a characteristically canny mashup that sees you unlocking and upgrading a range of vehicles, all with their own gadgets, and combining elements to build the perfect ride.
There are hidden paths and secrets to discover, characters to meet, storylines to experience, and missions to complete, all handed out by the Minifigure residents of the game’s knobbly world.
And, of course, there are hills to climb.
The Hill Climb Racing series is founded on gameplay that’s easy to learn and difficult to master, thanks to a robust physics engine and simple, responsive controls. We’re expecting more of the same with this latest release.
With LEGOⓇ Hill Climb Adventures’s now fully launched, we sat down (figuratively, not really) with two of Fingersoft’s greatest minds, producer Juho Wallen and lead designer Visa Smolander, to get the lowdown on the latest LEGO collab.
“We wanted to replicate the familiar physics and gameplay of Hill Climb Racing”, they explain, “but introduce the creativity and fun that LEGO products are known for.”
“What if the car could break down into LEGO pieces? What if the player could crash into LEGO-build objects, and build them? These questions resonated with both LEGO and us, and eventually we agreed to build a prototype to test if the “fun” exists.”
Guess what.
“It did”.
But game development is never as easy as that. What challenges did the team encounter in bringing together these two popular brands?
“Performance on a wide variety of devices was a big concern for us, “ they explain. “From the start, we knew we wanted dynamic gameplay and large, complex levels with a lot going on. Making the game run ultra smooth like any other Hill Climb Racing game provided a significant challenge for us, but we knew it was critical for the gameplay”.
Fortunately, they seem to have nailed the landing. “I think in the end, we managed to really push the envelope on the amount of dynamic objects and scale of the levels while still maintaining smooth gameplay on a range of devices”.
Like a budding architect gazing with trepidation at a box of random LEGO pieces, the team was also at risk of being overwhelmed by the possibilities. “There were so many directions to take initially, and so many things we wanted to do, and a lot ended up on the cutting room floor throughout the project.
“You could say we had too many good ideas to fit into one game”.
Fortunately, Hill Climb Racing’s massive monthly user base of 50 million players was on-hand with feedback and beta testing from the early stages of development all the way through to the soft-launch.
This army of fans helped Fingersoft to find the right level of difficulty and the most satisfying pace of progress, along with other more intangible factors.
“Even with a new direction, we wanted to bring the core, the essence of Hill Climb Racing, to this game, and the testers were essential in that process. Without them, the game would not be what it is today”.
In terms of the game’s new, open-world, story-driven direction, Fingersoft found inspiration in a variety of places.
“A big part of our inspiration comes from console and PC, especially the adventure and Metroidvania genres” they reveal. “We wanted to embrace that kind of exploration feeling you rarely see in mobile games”.
LEGOⓇ Hill Climb Adventures will be available to download for free by the end of this month, with plenty more to follow.
“Along with new seasons every two months, we have a ton of new content already in the works, with new regions, vehicles, gameplay and storylines”.
To download LEGOⓇ Hill Climb Adventures, head to the Google Play Store or the App Store right now.