Producer on LEGO City: Undercover’s SimCity-esque origins, cut ideas
LEGO City: Undercover wasn’t always the game we know of today. Well before Nintendo stepped into the picture, developer TT Fusion was throwing around different ideas and prototypes. One such example includes SimCity.
Producer Loz Doyle commented on LEGO City’s SimCity-like start in an interview with MTV Multiplayer:
“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.”
And regarding cut ideas for the game, Doyle said:
“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.”
