LEGO Skylines devs weighed brick-by-brick building but cut it for being too fiddly

LEGO Skylines – the upcoming city-builder from Iceflake Studios, published by Paradox Interactive – won't let you place individual bricks when constructing your city. The developers considered it, but ultimately decided the freeform approach was too much friction for players trying to run a city at the same time.

Producer Joanna Ronkanen explained the decision to RPS at Gamescom, pointing to a small LEGO park bench from the demo booth as her example. "Even just this little thing has like probably 50 bricks," she said. "We wanted to make sure that we're on the correct level of customisation." The result is a template-based system where you place prefab buildings and then personalise them with extras – hot tubs, flowerbeds, letterboxes and the like. Ronkanen called it "a quite beautiful compromise" that still gives players plenty of room to express themselves.

LEGO Skylines is built on the foundation Iceflake laid with Cities: Skylines 2 and Surviving the Aftermath, blending familiar city-builder loops – residences, businesses, utilities, roads, citizen happiness – with LEGO's visual identity. The tension between deep construction and accessible city management is a real design challenge: brick-by-brick building works brilliantly with physical pieces in your hands, but translating that to mouse and keyboard while also managing traffic and power grids is a different proposition entirely.

Game director Lasse Liljedahl hinted that the game's relationship with bricks gets more interesting as you progress, teasing features the studio isn't ready to discuss yet. "What you can do yourself with LEGO bricks in the game is something that will come a little bit later," he said. Modding support is also on the table in some form, though Ronkanen noted the team isn't talking specifics on that front yet either.