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Interview with one of the LEGO Rock Raiders Designers


Colinou
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Hello everyone,

 

I have this very cool opportunity to be in contact with one of the designers who created/worked on the theme "LEGO RockRaiders". I planned a meeting with him to talk about the theme, as I'm a very big fan myself, and I thought I would involve you by forwarding some questions you guys could have. :)

 

When I organized the meeting with him he was very pleased to encounter someone who loves the theme and hear that there is a whole community around the game! I forwarded him the link of the forum so who knows, he might create an account! :)

 

What is this post for:

The idea of this post is to give you the opportunity to write the questions you have so I can forward then to the designer, I will update this post as we go along so you can see the list of questions I will bring to the "interview".

So this post should eventually have a list of questions and later on a list of answers for each questions. I will eventually close this topic once we received all the answers (unless he accepts to answer more questions in which case I will update this post again).

 

Please note the following:

- ⚠️I can not ensure that any of the questions will be answered as they might revolve around confidential information in which case I hope you can understand that the designer will not answer that question.⚠️

- If many of you have questions and the list of questions becomes to long, I won't be able to take them all into account (I don't think he will accept to answer to many questions so I'll have to reject some...).

- I'll do my best to get everyone involved, if you think any question should be changed or removed, we can discuss it :)

- The list of questions might change when new questions are appearing.

 

I hope we will get interesting answers and I look forward to read your questions!

 

Cheers,

 

Colinou

 

 

 

 

Questions I will bring with me and ask the designer:

 

Question 1:

How and when did development of what would become the Rock Raiders theme originate, which sets did you work on?

 

Question 2: 

How much collaboration was there, with respect to set design, between LEGO Futura and Data Design Interactive ? (A) why did some buildings/vehicles appear in the games but not as sets? B) were any of those unreleased builds planned to be released? C) how much input did you have on the game? D) aside from rock monsters, were there any other monsters designed by LEGO Futura or any of the creatures in the games that were meant to be in sets?)

 

Question 3: 

What prototype or unused builds for the theme were there, is there any conceptual artwork or general design materials you might be able to share for the sake of research and archival?

 

Question 4: 

A few sources have indicated a second wave of Rock Raiders sets was originally planned for the theme (not to be confused with the promotional Japanese Kabaya sets or the Mini Heroes Collection in 2000), is there any truth to these speculations?

 

Question 5:

There is an image from an early beta build depicting blue crystals in-game, a number of beta screenshots showed that the interface elements used blue crystals at some point as well.  And we also know the red energy crystals seen in the PS1 version of the game were blue during development. Do you know why the crystals changed from blue to yellow/green?

 

Question 6:

What made the team choose to go from grey or silver roll cages on some vehicles to brown? Like the blue crystal, there's plenty of evidence that makes me think the decision happened later in development.

 

Question 7:

How did you create the various objects and animations in the game, did you use Lightwave? Some people in the community have tried Lightwave 5 but it doesn't seem to work very well. Textures don't like to appear and the interface seems extremely primitive. Version 8 works best for what we do now.

 

Answers from the designer:

 

Answers... after almost 3 years..

 

Answer to question 1:

The Rock Raiders theme originated from the Loader Dozer and many different sketches. Even sets from the Star Wars theme provided some inspiration. 

 

Answer to question 2:

When the designers collaborated with Data Design Interactive, they mainly gave ideas and suggestions of what could be in the game. Some buildings / vehicles only appeared in the video games because there was a limited amount of sets for each production, so they couldn't make a all the buildings / vehicles into actual sets. There didn't seem to be any unreleased builds planned or other monsters supposed to become sets. It was quite difficult to answer these questions with great detail due to the time that has gone by.

 

Answer to question 3:

We were not able to find much, the only very early concept art we found could be a document, however we were unsure whether we would be allowed to share it even if it was 20 years old.

 

Answer to question 4:

Couldn't remember...

 

Answer to question 5:

The change in choice of the crystals from blue to yellow/green was based on a design decision. Originally the crystals were blue because the marketing team expressed a need for more blue-ish colors and bricks. However it did not suit the theme colours very well and was therefore changed later in the design process. Hence why we can see some blue crystals on early documents.

 

Answer to question 6:

The colour of the vehicle cages changed from grey to brown in the latest stages of development. The cages were grey because they were 3D printed elements, they used 3D printing to make prototype bricks in the early stages of the development. Also the original idea was to have the cages grey however they changed to the colour brown as it suited the theme better.

 

Answer to question 7:

Couldn't remember...

Edited by Colinou
Finally shared the answers...
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ShadowDraikana

Several questions I've had for a while have been about the blue energy crystals.

 

We have an image from an early beta build depicting blue crystals in-game.  A number of beta screenshots showed that the interface elements used blue crystals at some point as well.  We also know the red energy crystals seen in the PS1 version of the game were blue during development (screenshots of the betas can be found here).

 

In addition, there is a cutscene render of a blue crystal seen in a trailer for the PS1 version of the game: 

unknown.png

 

Lastly, the SMLC menu animation for the released PC version of the game depicts a blue energy crystal popping out of a wall.  

 

To sum this up, I'm mainly curious to know if this individual would be able to shed some light on the blue crystals.

Edited by Slimy Slug
Added SMLC reference
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You covered many of the questions I had already.

 

1) What made the team choose to go from grey or silver roll cages on some vehicles (just like your avatar, Colinou) to brown? Like the blue crystal, there's plenty of evidence that makes me think the decision happened later in development.

 

2) How did you create the various objects and animations in the game with Lightwave? Some of us here have tried Lightwave 5, but it doesn't seem to work very well. Textures don't like to appear and the interface seems extremely primitive. Version 8 works best for what we do now.

 

3) Is your last name based on a color, like Karl White and Stewart Green?

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  • 1 year later...
  • 11 months later...

What has it been like... only 3 years ?...

 

Hello again, I'm incredibly sorry I did not come back to you for such a long time. To put it shortly, when trying to arrange the interview it took a lot of weeks before we were able to find an open spot in our agendas. I was still able to meet him just before I left, however we were unfortunately not able to find answers to all the questions. This hit my motivation to publish the few answers I got, and has ever since being popping in and out of my head. So sorry for the very, very delayed answer...

 

How did the interview go:

 

It went really well, the designer was very nice and really impressed that such a community existed around the theme and that people were still loving it so much. It had bee 20 years since he had worked on Rock Raiders so he couldn't remember everything. We talked about the theme and I briefly showed him some of the Game Remake projects that were going on, namely Manic Miners by @baraklava. He was very impressed and genuinely happy to see that so much effort was put into the Rock Raiders theme even today.

 

In preparation of the meeting, the designer tried to dig up some old stuff he still had around hoping to find some Rock Raiders sketches. Unfortunately we couldn't find much, some old Bionicle sketches and one early concept art for Rock Raiders. It depicted an underground theme where vehicles were able to drive on the ceiling and walls of the cavern, and mini-figures seemed to race one another. To me, that spirit can still be found in some of the Rock Raiders comic books if I am not mistaking. Some other noticeable elements were already present, the large wheels on the vehicles and the cage-like cockpits seemed to already be a strong aspect of the Rock Raiders series, even at a very early stage.

 

A little something maybe ?

 

Despite not finding many documents in the designer's old box, we did find a little something. The following pictures show a pass that designers were using within the LEGO building to show that they were the Rock Raiders designers. It was just a fun little way for designers to have "Special Access" to the development space for LEGO Rock Raiders. I know this isn't much, but it adds a little detail to the Rock Raiders history :) 

 

large.1640269044_LEGORockRaiders_MembershipCard_2_Small.jpg.d564e7c43d93d2dc87b9ce5d43c354cf.jpg       large.1622906275_LEGORockRaiders_MembershipCard_1_Small.jpg.25e7c446b87d1b4a3ff89e42b6978529.jpg

 

The Answers:

After 20 years, the designer gave his best to try and remember in order to answer the questions I had brought him.

 

Answer to question 1:

The Rock Raiders theme originated from the Loader Dozer and many different sketches. Even sets from the Star Wars theme provided some inspiration. 

 

Answer to question 2:

When the designers collaborated with Data Design Interactive, they mainly gave ideas and suggestions of what could be in the game. Some buildings / vehicles only appeared in the video games because there was a limited amount of sets for each production, so they couldn't make a all the buildings / vehicles into actual sets. There didn't seem to be any unreleased builds planned or other monsters supposed to become sets. It was quite difficult to answer these questions with great detail due to the time that has gone by.

 

Answer to question 3:

We were not able to find much, the only very early concept art we found could be a document, however we were unsure whether we would be allowed to share it even if it was 20 years old.

 

Answer to question 4:

Couldn't remember...

 

Answer to question 5:

The change in choice of the crystals from blue to yellow/green was based on a design decision. Originally the crystals were blue because the marketing team expressed a need for more blue-ish colors and bricks. However it did not suit the theme colours very well and was therefore changed later in the design process. Hence why we can see some blue crystals on early documents.

 

Answer to question 6:

The colour of the vehicle cages changed from grey to brown in the latest stages of development. The cages were grey because they were 3D printed elements, they used 3D printing to make prototype bricks in the early stages of the development. Also the original idea was to have the cages grey however they changed to the colour brown as it suited the theme better.

 

Answer to question 7:

Couldn't remember...

 

 

 

Well, this was it, I hope you were able to find some interesting information in this. I think we would have loved to know more about the Rock Raiders but I think it's up to us to continue writing the story :) 

 

Cheers,

 

Colinou

 

 

Edited by Colinou
Updated the picture links
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Cool to hear about the origins behind the blue energy crystals! I hope you were able to take some pictures of that concept art too - it would be wonderful to see it hit the internet one day.

 

It seems like the image links you posted are broken though? Might want to double check those.

 

Thanks for meeting with the developer and sharing the results here!

 

~ Slugger

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liquidelectricity

Any chance you could share images of those Bionicle sketches? Was Bionicle being developed alongside Rock Raiders? I'm very interested in concept art and the development timeline of the theme

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If I ever come in contact again with the designer I will ask him whether we could share the sketches he showed me, but right now I don't know when that would happen so I would say it is quite unlikely. But I will keep it in the back of my head.

 

Yes I would think that Bionicles were developed alongside the Rock Raiders, Bionicles came out in 2000 so it would make sense that their concepts and development has started some years prior to their release date and therefore crossing the Rock Raiders development phase.

 

The images should have been fixed, and otherwise they are available in my gallery.

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