LEGO Skylines devs chose prefab customization over brick-by-brick building to avoid overwhelming players

LEGO Skylines developer Iceflake Studios explored brick-by-brick building during development but ultimately rejected the idea as impractical for players managing a city.

Producer Joanna Ronkanen explained the reasoning during a Gamescom demo. "We did discuss brick by brick building and things like that, but we realised that it is quite a lot of work for even just players to place brick by brick," she said. To illustrate the challenge, Ronkanen held up a small LEGO park bench model. "Even just this little thing has like probably 50 bricks. We wanted to make sure that we're on the correct level of customisation."

Instead, LEGO Skylines uses prefab buildings that players can extensively customize with decorative and functional elements like hot tubs, flowerbeds, and letterboxes. Ronkanen described this approach as "a quite beautiful compromise, in my opinion. You get to do a lot of stuff, you get to customise a lot."

The customization experience won't stop at prefab tweaks. Game director Lasse Liljedahl hinted at deeper brick-building features arriving later. "There's more things we will show a little bit later, and talk about other features that we're not yet ready to talk about," he said. "This is a Paradox game and this is a LEGO game, so the customisability is one of the core pillars in this game, what you can do yourself with LEGO bricks in the game is something that will come a little bit later."

Iceflake is also exploring official mod support, though details remain sparse. "We're not really talking about any modding solutions at this point yet," Ronkanen added.

LEGO Skylines is a city-builder from Iceflake Studios, the team behind Cities: Skylines 2 and Surviving the Aftermath. It's published by Paradox Interactive.