To start off, with I asked him the general question about what he could remember of the game's development history:
Ooo, now you are pushing the old memory bank, Our team had just finished a game called ‘Dogs of War’ on PC and I believe the PC/PS1 version of LI2 had already been started by another team.Some of our team members moved on so the team size dropped and our bosses turned round to us and said “do you reckon you could make a GBA version of LI2?” I think reading between the lines they asked Lego if they wanted that version doing as we had a team spare (us) to do it. They said yes and off we went. We had never made a GBA game before so it was bit of a learning curve and with that in mind we were relatively left to our own devices. Obviously Tim (Green) and Scott ( Mackintosh) were kept in the loop of what we were doing and had their input. We had some really good programmers who got the game up and running quite quickly so it was down to us as designers and artists to get in the content.As far as I remember we had the initial design stuff from the other project (PC/PS1) in terms of the Island and things that were meant to be on it but as the GBA version by default worked differently in terms of moving around the map, we had quite a lot of freedom to ‘fill in the gaps’. Also we were big Pokemon fans ( Malcolm Grant/ Dean Roskell - the designers and myself) at the time so we introduced similar gameplay from that for leading the player round and exploring the map fully. Most characters you met had something you could find or do for them to get more info or rewards.Like I said we had quite a lot of freedom so I don’t know whether they weren’t expecting us to get it done or for it sell well and we were restricted by how we could recreate some of the mini games that were in the other versions so we just cracked on with it.
When I asked him if he could remember any cut or removed content, this was his response:
Not specifically, although it was a long time ago! Again we got the main elements of the overall design in and were then left to fill in all the gaps. We wanted to get as much content in as we could and we had a laugh doing it hence all the little jokes and quips in the character dialogue (which were all tongue in cheek), luckily Tim and Scott went along with it.
According to Andy, these are some of the specfic roles and contribution of the team's:
As the Lead artist I had to oversee the rest of the artists but as it was a small team and we had all worked together previously it wasn’t difficult. I knew I could rely on them to get their stuff done. So my main task was creating/designing the in game Island map along with other design elements of the game with Malcolm, Dean and Phil Harris (lead programmer). Once the programming team had set up an editor for laying down the tiles I was off making 8x8’s in specific ‘lego’ colours and laying them down for the map, scenery and buildings. I created the splash screen sequence at the start and stuff like that. It was my job to check all the sprite stuff that went into the game. The characters were 3D from the other versions which were animated for our directional needs by Sophie Mobbs, our animator, then rendered out and turned into the necessary sprite sheets. I seem to remember having a hand in a some of the mini games, especially ‘Brick Dive’ and ‘Ogel Sneak’ as they were built using the tile editor, but they were mainly created by John Moss, our other artist.
Lastly, when asked if he had any materials to share from the development of the game he said this:
Not specifically dev files but I have found some images of the game, tucked away, which must have been taken from our editor. I’ve zipped them up for you to have a look at.
To see the screenshots Andy shared check out this artifact.