LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens Writers Explain Difficulty in Adapting Film to Game

When you're adapting a film like Star Wars: The Force Awakens into a video game, the pressure is on. There's a $2 billion reason for that, of course, with the film being a massive hit. There has also already been one video game adaptation within Disney Infinity 3.0. The writers behind LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens have an additional challenge, adding the signature LEGO humor into the film's often intense storyline.

Graham Goring and Phil Gray work on the game, writing the gameplay and cutscene bits of the game, but work closely together to "try for a seamless" connection between the two, they told GameInformer in an interview.

"I like writing idiots because I'm an idiot," Goring said. Gray loves writing the foot soldiers of the enemies the most for that reason. "Stormtroopers make spectacular idiots," he explained.

In the cutscenes, they try to stick to the lines in the film, but add sight gags in the background to make them funny. Gray said the scene between Kylo Ren and Rey on Takodana is especially "hard to adapt in terms of getting the tone right." The scene at the Resistance base trying to come up with the Starkiller attack sequence was difficult as well - doing short sequences based on those long expository scenes is tough.

"This particular film is actually very funny," Goring said, making it a bit easier - but major death scenes are tough to handle.

"Generally what we fall back on is that LEGO characters fall to pieces, and the pieces can sort of act on their own," Gray intimated. "We don't know that Han won't come back. So he'll look like he's died, but you might see him in the background spinning off into space Darth Vader style, so that just in case he comes back in Episode IX as a head in a bucket, we're okay," he said with a laugh.

The hardest part of all, though? Finding things out about Star Wars before the movie came out.

LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes from TT Games June 28, 2016. Check out GameInformer all month for new information about the game.