Rise of the LEGO Digital Creator

January 6, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

While you’ve always been able to build your own physical creations with a bucket of LEGO® bricks, the route to the same level of digital LEGO freedom for fans has taken a bit longer.

The latest step in that effort sees the LEGO Group teaming up with Unity Technologies to create a system that doesn’t just allow anyone to make a LEGO video game, it teaches them the process.

The Unity LEGO Microgame is the most recent microgame created by Unity with the purpose of getting people to design their own video game. But in this case, the interactive tutorial turns the act of creation into a sort of game in and of itself, allowing players to simply drag and drop LEGO bricks into a rendered scene and use them to populate their vision. Designers can even give their LEGO brick creations life with intelligent bricks that breathe functionality into any model to which they’re attached. Users can even create LEGO models outside of the Unity platform using BrickLink Studio, and then simply drop them into their blossoming game.

While this is just the beginning of this new Unity-powered toolset for LEGO fans, it’s destined to continue to grow.

The biggest idea that could come to the Unity project is the potential ability for a fan to share their LEGO video game creations with one another and vote on which is the best, with an eye toward the LEGO Group officially adopting them and potentially releasing them with some of the profit going back to the creator.

If that happened, it would essentially be following in the footsteps of the LEGO Ideas platform, which allows any LEGO fan to create a model with the hopes of having it turned into an official release by the LEGO Group.

“On the physical side, we have our LEGO Ideas platform where we involve the wider community to help design LEGO sets and they can become official LEGO sets,” said Anders Holm, senior technical lead at the LEGO Group. “We want to involve the same types of community that you can submit your game idea that, you have built in a microgame and potentially, if it’s an awesome game, could it be actually published as a proper LEGO title.

“That is at least a goal we are investigating because that is a model we know works in the physical space.”

The LEGO Group’s efforts to empower fans interested in digital LEGO building has been around since the mid-‘90s, when a relatively secretive division at the LEGO Group known as Strategic Product Unit Darwin started its efforts to digitize the LEGO brick. Efforts to create one-to-one realistic versions of the complete LEGO library have continued on and off since then, both through fan and official efforts.

Those efforts included games, like LEGO Creator and its sequels; software, like LEGO Universe; and even LEGO Digital Designer and LEGO Design byME which enabled fans to build models with digital LEGO bricks and then have the physical pieces and building instructions shipped to them. That notion, in turn, lead to the concept that created LEGO Ideas.

An important subtextual theme of all of this work, especially the efforts most recently made with Unity, is an abiding sense of trust, said documentarian and co-host of Bits N’ Bricks Ethan Vincent.

“The LEGO Group allowing and trusting their fans to just create, build and enjoy tools like LDD and BrickLink Studio. And now to kind of take this idea even further into game creation with Unity, to me represents this whole new level of trust,” he said.

The long history the LEGO Group has with empowering fans predates video games, said journalist and Bits N’ Bricks co-host Brian Crecente, but it continues today with these new efforts.

“It’s neat enough that you’re leaning into the metaphor of the LEGO system to teach what it is to build a game, but to do that, and then empower fans in a way that would allow them to perhaps not only make their own games, but perhaps make their own LEGO games and make them official,” he said. “I think it is simply incredible, and it speaks a lot to, not only the power of Unity and the creative approaches that the LEGO Group has, but also to the interest both companies have in empowering fans and making sure that fans aren’t just heard, but can have a direct relationship with some of the things that they love and create.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.