As pretty as Cities: Skylines is, getting a read on your city's problems can take some digging. While traffic jams are immediately visible, prompting you to start reorganising the layout of your streets and bypasses, other issues only make themselves known when you switch on overlays or bring up a stats screen. Changing that is one developer Iceflake Studios aims for colourful plastic brick-based spinoff Lego Skylines.
"If there's an issue, it should be visible in the world," game director Lasse Liljedahl tells me. "Everything that you need to worry about or manage is something you should see while zooming in and zooming out and not digging deep in statistics or information screens. That's the goal."
Liljedahl says if crime is high, you will see robberies in the world and your Lego police force chasing down the criminals. If there are fires, trucks will be dispatched from the nearest depot, or a helicopter will fly over the blaze and drench it with water. "Contrary to Cities: Skylines, [where] you can have a lot of underlying systems that are indirect with their consequences," Liljedahl explains. "In this game, we feel that it should be evident in the end."
Being Lego, though, Iceflake have to be careful about how they show all this, producer Joanna Ronkanen tells me. "Crime happens in real cities, people get sick, there's fires, and everything like that. It made sense to have these features, but with the Lego brand being a family friendly brand then we did have to have a look at how we visualise this."
The team have drawn from the recent Lego movies to find the tone. "We try to incorporate that Lego humour," Ronkanen says, giving the example of the fireman in the trailer who's not focused on putting out the flames, instead they're toasting a hotdog "This is mainly a game for adults – because of the complexity – but it should be something that your kids can watch at the same time when you play," Liljedahl adds. "So there's nothing that would be improper for them to see."
"We have to make sure that it's all family friendly," Ronkanen says. "That's the number one thing."
However, there are still societal problems the team haven't worked out how to show. While Lego Skylines has been built to be accessible, it does still feature many of the same systems you find in the original game. Residents need jobs and places to spend their earnings, white collar workplaces need an educated population to hire from, and if you don't build the infrastructure to get people into the workplace then you will see the consequences play out on your city's streets.
I asked the developers how they planned to convey rising homelessness to players. And, to their credit, they both recognise and aren't shying away from the challenge. "It's not where we want it to be yet," Ronkanen admits, "but we've been talking about it. We're trying to make sure that it is visualised so you can see what's happening without it being dark or anything because it's family friendly."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/lego-skylines-devs-want-your-citys-problems-to-be-visible-without-digging-into-a-stats-screen-which-means-finding-a-family-friendly-version-of-showing-homelessness
