Project Overview

To celebrate the tenth series of LEGO Minifigures, LEGO decided to do something special for their fans by creating a special edition minifigure: the elusive Mr Gold. Only 5,000 Mr Golds were made, before being hidden in packs and distributed across the world.

Client

LEGO

Brief

To celebrate this release, LEGO asked us to make a game to promote Mr Gold and the sixteen other new minifigures. They wanted to ensure that we included an element of hide-and-seek, or searching, for Mr Gold and we also had to make sure that although he was often visible throughout the game, the players would have to work hard to find him.

Concept

One of our first ideas was to go for a Where’s Wally style game, where we’d hide Mr Gold amongst groups of other minifigures; but we eventually decided that the best way to showcase each of the minifigures would be to create a multi-level platform game, where each of the characters had their own level. In order to play as the next character, the player would have to collect the parts to construct them. As you’d imagine, with collectability playing a huge role in LEGO’s appeal, the client was very enthusiastic about this.

Style-wise, we decided to keep it incredibly simple, so that the focus could be on the minifigures themselves. This enabled us to focus on level design. Each level was more difficult than the last and as the game progressed, different obstacles were introduced. We tested and tweaked each level to perfection and ensured that the degree of difficulty was right. The aim was to make each level completable, but to ensure it wasn’t too easy. Who doesn’t like a good challenge?

Result

Mr Gold proved to be a hugely popular game and was featured on the LEGO homepage for over a month.