Lego Voyagers Interview: Why Light Brick Studio Built the Switch Version First

Story Highlights

Lego Voyagers uses gameplay itself to convey story, not dialogue.
The studio’s future plans include exploring new mechanics while staying true to LEGO’s playful identity.
We interviewed Creative Director Karsten Lund via email.

Following Builder’s Journey, Light Brick Studio returns with Lego Voyagers, a quiet yet emotionally rich co-op adventure built entirely from LEGO bricks. The game carries forward the studio’s signature storytelling style, relying on visual cues and atmospheric design instead of words.

Through its tactile environments and soft visual language, the game transforms collaboration into storytelling. To better understand its development process and creative direction, we conducted an email interview with Karsten Lund, Creative Director of Lego Voyagers.

The nonverbal narrative in Lego Voyagers uses environmental storytelling and minimalistic character design. What techniques did you use to maintain emotional pacing without dialogue, and which specific moments pushed that approach to its limits?

Once we decided on the theme of the story, it was about showing the defining moments with clarity. A good way to get those moments across is to have players actually play and perform the narrative beats.

In the middle of the game, we have an island scene where time passes, the friendship grows, and the story moves into the next act. That was the hardest part to get clear enough for players to actually be able to re-tell the story. A lot of user testing and iteration went into this to get it to the state it’s in today.

During early development, did you ever experiment with dialogue or more explicit storytelling, and what ultimately convinced you that a nonverbal approach was the right fit for Voyagers?

While we like these kinds of experiences at the studio, Builder’s Journey also proved that players enjoy interpreting a story without words, so we were confident that the approach would work again. Though it proved a lot harder this time, because the theme was more subtle. We never tried actual dialogue, but the “voices” for the characters came later in development, and really added character in our opinion.

How did LEGO’s association with creativity shape your puzzle design philosophy? Did you aim for open-ended solutions, or keep puzzles more tightly scripted?

We wanted to strike a balance of building freely and understanding what to do at the same time. So some encounters are tight and some are more free. Our philosophy was to keep players in flow and not distract them with convoluted solutions. We also always had Co-op in mind so that there were things to do for both players without locking them too tightly into roles. Players can, for the most part, help each other or switch assignments if it suits their play style or skillset better. Only when it serves narrative do we assign roles in order to have players experience the story.

The game’s soundtrack has bittersweet inspirations and emotional weight. After release, which tracks or environmental motifs do you want your title to be associated with the most?

Our composer Henrik Lindstrand’s choice is “One day we will become astronauts” because it was written somewhere in the middle of the game’s development, and somehow it pointed us in a new direction with the score. The guitar-driven, slightly quirky universe, with Henrik’s childhood Casio keyboard (which came to represent friendship/childhood), is about the shared dream. It is both hopeful and melancholic, a mix he is a big fan of :-)

Visuals have been noted as soft, tactile, with sunrise/sunset haze, etc. Were there any performance trade-offs (on Switch, Switch 2, or lower-end PCs) you decided to make in lighting/shading/particle effects, and how did players react?

We had Switch as the base target platform from the beginning, so in terms of rendering that was what we kept in mind throughout the production. So we basically built everything so it would look good on the lowest settings first, and then we started work on higher-end settings afterwards.

We had to make some quite big adjustments to scene geometry to get a reasonable result on Switch, especially for handheld mode, where the GPU and CPU run at a lower clock frequency. So the Switch uses a completely different set of models from other platforms. And it also runs physics at 30Hz instead of 60Hz, which is used on other platforms.

We’re very happy with the way the game looks on Switch, and the fact that we got proper reflections (using Signed Distance Fields) is pretty nice. On most other platforms, we use higher quality settings, but it’s possible to scale the game down to run on low-end PCs as well. For Switch 2, we use very different settings depending on whether it is running in docked or handheld mode. For instance, in handheld mode, shadows are rendered in a completely different way than in docked mode, and some other effects are adjusted or disabled.

On higher-end platforms, we have volumetric fog and screen space reflections in addition to what we are doing on Switch. All in all, it’s a very flexible setup that can be adjusted to deliver great results on most platforms. So far, it seems like most players are very happy with how it looks and performs across the different platforms.

How much freedom do players have to go off the main path and explore LEGO-crafted environment details or side puzzles?

As long as we’re constantly teaching players new things, it’s important for us to get them through certain elements, so that we can set them free in other parts of the game, with their acquired skills. So we have linear paths, where mechanics are taught or reiterated, followed by pockets of freedom where players can explore and discover the solutions.

Were there any features or mechanics you intended but cut before release? If so, what were they, and what were the reasons?

There was a lot of early content that did not make the cut. Either due to quality issues or difficulty spikes, but the controls are probably the thing that changed the most. We realized that we had too many buttons in play, especially for the younger audience, so we simplified without losing any functionality. That was not an easy task, but I think we got to a good place; controls are new, but once you learn, it feels natural.

Since Voyagers builds upon Builder’s Journey, in hindsight, what feature from Builder’s Journey do you most wish you could have evolved further, and how did that inform what you added or changed in Voyagers?

Taking what players build and using that for expressive storytelling was always the mission. We wanted a bit more creative freedom than the castle-building moments we had in Builder’s Journey, and that directly led to the more elaborate creative sessions later in the Voyagers experience. This also enhanced the emotional payoff of players’ collaborative creations in the game.

Post-launch, how are you planning to support Voyagers, content updates, seasonal events, community puzzles, or creation tools?

Currently, we have no plans for DLC, but we have a lot of love for the universe, so maybe in the future?

With Builder’s Journey and Voyagers now out, how do you see Light Brick Studio’s identity evolving? Do you want to stay within experimental LEGO storytelling or expand into other genres and mechanics?

We’re excited to explore new ideas and applications of the LEGO Idea, but always with a playful learning angle. Our ambition remains to explore new frontiers with LEGO play, so you’ll probably see some new areas of exploration from Light Brick in the future.

Voyagers is a co-op puzzle-platformer developed by Light Brick Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive. It launched on September 15, 2025, for PlayStation 4 & 5, and Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Switch 2. We thank Karsten Lund for his time and Dante Rota for helping us with the interview.