North Kingdom

The weather may have been cold and dark in February for us Swedes, but our Creative Director, David Eriksson, woke us up with a lively email that contained just one message embodied in it.

“We f#&£ing got it! Feels so great!”

From that moment on, the weather didn’t matter anymore in Sweden and we began building and recreating everything we could imagine with LEGO® bricks. As you can see, it wasn’t difficult to excite or challenge our team to begin imagining what worlds we could create with LEGO bricks together with Google Maps because it felt so natural once we heard about the idea. Technically, we have been creating imaginative places with LEGO bricks for years in our own bedrooms, living rooms, parent’s offices, and even classrooms to say the least; which is why the idea of integrating LEGO with Google Maps felt too good to be true.

So we were more then happy to take on the challenge of integrating the two when M&C Saatchi/Mark from Sydney Australia approached us with an idea that one can build with LEGO bricks on Google Maps.

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BUILDING BLOCKS

Before we kicked off the project, we knew we wanted to capture the enthusiasm and physical joy of building with LEGO bricks in a digital experience with Chrome. This challenge was especially important to us because it felt imperative to respect the LEGO building experience in order to exemplify that “the web is what you make of it”.

Through the Discovery Phase we split up to explore the various options, paths, and representations that we felt would capture the essence of the LEGO experience. Additionally, we spent a lot of this time visualizing how these builds would be represented onto Google Maps.
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Then time came for us to come together to evaluate what we had discovered and where we could go. The array of ideas that we returned was mind-boggling towards the end of this discovery phase. We had discussions that ranged from the laws of physics, to the sound of LEGO bricks being snapped together, to the topography of the 3D world map itself. We didn’t even breach onto the topic of what type of bricks we should include because we didn’t want it to put limitations on our technical discoveries.
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In return, our Technical Director, Klas Kroon, began exploring a particle approach with the idea on how each single brick (1×1) could extend infinitely, while Mikael Emtinger began exploring how we could adopt a more classical real 3D approach but with an optimized code that could render a variety of geometry shapes. If you’re more keen on the technical details and the lessons behind rgb-channel mixing, how sprites equal vertexes, and camera mapping, then you should definitely read Klas’ technical process on OOS.Moxiecode.

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CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

Now as we began to move into Definition, We always believe it’s vital to continue our open collaborating with our partners, M&C Saatchi/Mark and Google. In doing so, we hung out twice a week and sometimes more in the run up to the launch of the project. Every Hangout involved us discussing the overall projects progress, learnings, and current tasks.

Like all projects at North Kingdom, we often collaborate with different stakeholders from any geographic location and we have become quite comfortable in doing so because of tools such as Google Hangouts. Surprisingly, as some may believe, the ability to visually see all members and talk with them has proven to increase our team’s productivity and collaboration… we have even taken to wearing masks during these sessions, a North Kingdom internal requirement! Today, we see it as one our key tools that support our “One Big Brain” methodology.

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Internally, we held daily 15-minute meetings with the core team to ensure that our development learnings follow the overall creative direction. These meetings acted as “nice” reminders that Build was technically demanding; they raised a number of questions when we began getting into details with the Google Maps API, scale, WebGL “polygon count”, and hardware latency. Fortunately, some of these items began to come together when we decided to pursue the real 3D approach with an optimized render-pipeline that would primary be representing one item, a LEGO brick.
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As for the Google Maps API, we learned a lot of things about what you cannot do. So sad too because we had many ideas about the potential data we could extract and apply to the 3D world for Build. For example, we literally began defining “Build Rules” that would distinguish land plots, roads, parks, and water. However, all those thoughts could not be achieved due to logistic framework. Our partners Agigen, who helped us out immensely, even tried to hack the Google API and color extract the underlying vector data. In the end, we learned that these methods became too taxing for the overall experience that resulted with us defining one universal baseplate. However, this may even had been a blessing in disguise because the universal baseplate allowed us to build a consistent experience for all states of Build.

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LEVELS OF INTERACTION

Now, as you know from the beginning, our goal for Build was to capture the enthusiasm and physical joy of building with LEGO bricks in a digital experience with Chrome. This was definitely easier said then done, which is why we spent just as much time exploring multiple different ways one could digitally interact and build with LEGO bricks as we did exploring the technical side of Build.

Naturally the first step of course is to begin building with LEGO bricks, and this time we invited everyone to spend ten minutes building with them because we were curious to see how people began building, what they created, and how much could they accomplish in that time. The results definitely varied, yet we did find some behavior patterns on how they organize their bricks.

Then we even did a small, quick test with some already created builds in a scene and invited people to check it out. Again, it was interesting to see how everyone had a similar approach of adjusting his or her stance to get a better perspective.

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In the end, these findings helped shape and define the two types of modes of experience that Build would contain; explore and build. Additionally, it helped us to understand how we could replicate these characteristics within the current Google Maps because we wanted to take advantage of some familiar design cues, which would help strengthen Google’s position in the projects relationship.

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EXPLORE MODE

One aspect that made Build so exciting was Google Maps. It literally gave us a world and a platform that everyone has grown to be familiar with since it was launched in 2005.

Additionally, we learned that what made Google Maps feel “Googley” wasn’t any single aspect or combination of design features. It was its general experience of feeling friendly, clear, and intuitive while maintaining a simple focus.

Which is why the Explore Mode was setup as the initial visual experience that would introduce all types of users to the Build world, where the user will be able to pan, zoom, search, and view items just as they do in the real Google Maps.

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BUILDER MODE

The other aspect of Build that we of course were excited about was the builder tool, even if others referred to it as impossible. Some people even laughed at us when we described it as,

“Its going to be a 3D tool for all types of users and age groups.”

Fortunately, we had a little experience building a 3D tool in the past with the Google Rome project, which we re-evaluated before we began Build because we knew that the Builder tool would elevate the overall experience and dictate the rate of completion. We even evaluated many bad examples of 3D tools that have been launched to ensure that we did not repeat any previous failures.

After a rigorous definition phase, we concluded that the Builder had to focus on some primary and expected features that will allow the user to select LEGO bricks, add bricks on top of each other, remove bricks, paint bricks, rotate, zoom, and publish their personal creation.
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Additionally, in an attempt to simplify the building process for all types of users, we believed the builder had to borrow characteristics from LEGO to enhance the interactive experience because it universally represents a fundamental understanding of how bricks can be assembled and connected due to its rich history and international appeal.
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HERE COMES EVERYBODY

As we moved closer to launch, we were beginning to wonder what everyone would create in Build. We spent a lot of time debating if the whole experience should be pre-moderated or post-moderated, and we are not going to lie… we were advocates of the post-moderated approach.

From our experience, we recommended post-moderation because it helped exemplify the power of the web and the web can very much be what you make of it. However, there were a few members that continued to push for pre-moderation because they were concerns that anyone and everyone could literally publish anything* at anytime.

In result, we prepared for the worse by setting up an intensive test period that would help settle this debate. Our test structure for Build was evolved to follow our “F.U.C.K. Rule”. We first began with a round of test that focused only on functional features (the ‘F’ in F.U.C.K.) and then we moved forward more into usability test (‘U’). Once our usability test was complete, we began to tighten the user flows with cosmetic touches (‘C’) and animation tweaks which help test the systems responsiveness and overall feedback.

Then we moved into our Kärlek test (‘K’, käklek means ‘love’ in Swedish), which actually produced some great builds from our internal team. In fact, an unofficial build competition emerged among some of our designers and LEGO’s Master Builders. It felt like things were going well until the designated “problem child” tester began building one afternoon. Our “problem child” found a way to produce builds at an incredible rate that outpaced our moderators.

To make an even longer story short, pre-moderation was the final decision on how moderation was going to be handled for Build. Even though we were sad about the decision, we did some extra work to propose multiple new options on how we can ensure the user can immediately see their creation within Build’s Explore Mode while still awaiting the moderator’s decision.

As you can understand now, we are very proud to have been given the opportunity to work with M&C Saatchi/Mark, Google Australia, and LEGO. Build became an amazing project through an incredible amount of teamwork, open collaboration and passion from all members. Yet the best part has been the overwhelming enthusiasm that everyone has been producing and sharing in Build today.

It is simply proof that the web is truly what you make it!

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*When we say anything in context with open public submissions, we are referring to penises, Swastikas, etc.