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TT Games - LEGO City Undercover originally a SimCity-style game, talks cut content
A portion of an MTV Multiplayer interview with TT Games' Loz Doyle...
Multiplayer: In those first twelve months of prototyping did you know you were going to stick with the LEGO City brand or were you just building a LEGO game that morphed into the City brand?
Doyle: Well no, for a few years beforehand we'd been talking to LEGO about doing a LEGO City game, and we didn’t really know what that game was going to be. We were sort of going down the road of it being a construction game, where it was more about building, like a "SimCity" style game. We weren't really sure what it was going to be, but we knew we wanted to make a game based on the LEGO City franchise from the beginning; it was definitely always about LEGO City. It was only really as we started to prototype it that it turned into a full, open world game.
Multiplayer: What were some of the ideas that you had to scale back?
Doyle: Well in the game you have lots of different character abilities, so not only do you play as a policeman, but you go, as the title suggests, undercover, as different characters, such as a robber, a farmer, and a fireman. We had different gameplay for each one. For example, if there was a safe to crack in the game, you'd hold the Wii U GamePad up towards the screen, and you'd get an x-ray of the safe, and there would be cogs displayed on the screen that you could turn them until you cracked the safe. We had lots of different ideas for the different characters to use the GamePad, but in the end we decided to make it into a police device, because it was getting a bit confusing as to what it was. It was sort of an all-encompassing device that sort of did everything, but we felt that it was getting to be too much. So, we scaled that back to be purely a police communicator that gets given to you in the game. So when Chase goes to the police station for the first time, one of the other characters says, "here is your new police communicator." So you really feel tied into it.
Full interview here
Multiplayer: In those first twelve months of prototyping did you know you were going to stick with the LEGO City brand or were you just building a LEGO game that morphed into the City brand?
Doyle: Well no, for a few years beforehand we'd been talking to LEGO about doing a LEGO City game, and we didn’t really know what that game was going to be. We were sort of going down the road of it being a construction game, where it was more about building, like a "SimCity" style game. We weren't really sure what it was going to be, but we knew we wanted to make a game based on the LEGO City franchise from the beginning; it was definitely always about LEGO City. It was only really as we started to prototype it that it turned into a full, open world game.
Multiplayer: What were some of the ideas that you had to scale back?
Doyle: Well in the game you have lots of different character abilities, so not only do you play as a policeman, but you go, as the title suggests, undercover, as different characters, such as a robber, a farmer, and a fireman. We had different gameplay for each one. For example, if there was a safe to crack in the game, you'd hold the Wii U GamePad up towards the screen, and you'd get an x-ray of the safe, and there would be cogs displayed on the screen that you could turn them until you cracked the safe. We had lots of different ideas for the different characters to use the GamePad, but in the end we decided to make it into a police device, because it was getting a bit confusing as to what it was. It was sort of an all-encompassing device that sort of did everything, but we felt that it was getting to be too much. So, we scaled that back to be purely a police communicator that gets given to you in the game. So when Chase goes to the police station for the first time, one of the other characters says, "here is your new police communicator." So you really feel tied into it.