Lego The Mandalorian
I love the Lego game series, but I was left feeling a bit disappointed when the latest Lego game (Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga) released character DLCs instead of doing DLC story campaigns. This desire for some Lego Mandalorian content inspired me to create this mod.
For this project I kept a development journal which I would use to log my progress. This included what my ideation process was like, how I would substitute models and characters, create my own assets, and deal with unforeseen problems.
You can read the full journal using the gallery to the left.
I began by watching the episode of The Mandalorian that I was going to base the level on, which was episode 1. This allowed me to plot out how I would convert the episode into the Lego game format. After taking a lot of notes, I began to set up the community made modding tool Brickbench. This would be the tool that I modify the existing levels in to better fit the episode. I also used Maya to produce 3D Models for the level that were based on the environments from the show, helping me bring the idea to life even more.
Creating this mod was far from easy. There were many hiccups caused due to limitations within Brickbench due to it being in development, and my own skillset limiting what was possible. I learnt how to produce basic models in Maya due to building assets being irreplicable in Brickbench.
Altering the existing levels by changing some specific details like characters, loading zone order, or messing with the assets contained within the game were all fairly easy to get a grasp of. This is easily where Brickbench shone as it could do these things with relative ease. But when wanting to change how an area would function (such as the cameras or adding a new model), the tool quickly became inefficient and incredibly frustrating.
While proven to be far more difficult than I anticipated, creating this mod was fun and challenging, and I feel as though I accomplished a lot with what I produced. Implementing my own environment into the level was hard to archive, but I managed to get the main pieces put into the game, which really help to bring the idea to life.
I used a taskboard when creating this project as it helped me breakdown the game into smaller completion goals that would form the complete experience. This allowed me to keep track of what I had done and what I was yet to do in order to complete the game.
