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Lego Island Rebuilder

legoisland.org

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Oh man, Lego Island... there's a childhood memory from the 90's.

I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn't a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story.

I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000's someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and then Minecraft came along and I was addicted to that in the early days before it became a big smash hit and was sold to Microsoft.

Edit: Also the multiplayer aspects of Blockland and Minecraft put anything LEGO ever created to shame... they just couldn't grasp the online/community thing and I'm not sure they wanted to handle the moderation for it either.

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration.

Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.

> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.

The Lego video game series by Traveller’s Tales may be weirdly un-Lego-like, but they are also quite good. So I wouldn’t discount their taste too much.

Also Templar Studios did the original Bionicle Myst-like and it was superb.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmHmFmPM5Hk

Minecraft itself was developed surprisingly late - there’s nothing really preventing it from happening ten years earlier.

While the graphics are/were crude, the sheer number of polys and the dynamics of the world and layers of drawing wasn't possible in the early 2000s. Not in first person at any rate.

Look up Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine from the early 2000s. It was most famously used for the game Ace of Spades 0.75 from 2011. It had very basic graphics and I remember even at the time it was advertised as being able to run on anything. I can imagine a game resembling Minecraft being feasible on high end machines in the early 2000s

> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.

I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here.

My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released through. And the team at LEGO Interactive, the video game publishing arm of the company, later merged with Traveller's Tales to form TT Games that created the LEGO Star Wars games. While they weren't developed by LEGO there was a close relationship.

On the more technical software side I'm personally very fond of LEGO Mindstorm and its ability to make programming more intuitive and tangible while still facilitating "playing with LEGO".

My son wants your job!

I like my job very much, but the day-to-day is the same as in any other big corporation with all the "agile coaches" and office politics that come with it. What we also get is an amazing workplace (look up LEGO Campus) with a huge amount of tool freedom and flexibility. I've done projects in Rust for internal tooling because that's what I'm excited about right now, and one of my more TDD and CI/CD-interested colleagues is allowed to spend time really fleshing that part of his work out.

And of course, when I first got the job I (as a Dane with Danish family) wasn't told "congratulations with the job". I was, however, told "congratulations with the job at LEGO" with a very big emphasis on the last at LEGO. It's a point of pride when extended family asks because it's so revered.

Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything.

But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can't. Its all strangely siloed by "theme". Despite using the same plug, you can't even use all of the poweredup / train / mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego's microcontrollers.

On the software side lego maintains two separate & mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.

Try PyBricks which allows to control any Powered Up/Boost/Mindstorms hub.

https://pybricks.com/

You guys should have invented Minecraft. Even LEGO Digital Designer was crap and got outcompeted by Bricklink Studio, which was a company like 1/1000 the size.

There was a statement by LEGO's CEO a few years ago making the same point - that they wished they invented minecraft, and talking about how they totally missed the ball on that.

You can listen to that testimony on the Bits n' Bricks podcast published by The LEGO Group. This is in episode "A Fabled History" (April 7th).

https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-g...

Free Bricks are anathema to a company selling bricks.

They massively missed the boat there - Minecraft became a multi-billion dollar industry.

There are a few programs out there that let you build sets using the ldraw spec.

A good place to start is https://www.ldraw.org/ https://www.ldraw.org/downloads-2/third-party-software.html

They had plugins for awhile that exported to 3d programs (blender, pov, etc) for awhile if I remember correctly. There are also links to semi reasonable CAD style programs. There is another editor someone recently came out with (the name escapes me at the moment) that looks very promising.

I would combine the ldraw programs with sites like brickset and others to get the exact pieces in the sets I knew I owned. That way I could build things in 3d then build them for real. I think one of the programs I used had a instruction builder too that you could print out.

Has you heard about *"Datsville RPG" project — a free 3D game based on LDraw?

[0] https://isometricland.net/blog/2021/03/datsville-rpg-synopsi...

Lego 'lost the plot' for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them. Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as well: you have to sell far fewer sets to people with much deeper pockets to make money that way.

The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego management, and that's why they couldn't have invented Minecraft. If they had it would have been buried deep. The obvious next step was to allow anything created in such an environment to be immediately orderable, Lego experimented with that for a bit, shipping 'MOC's, but ended up having to withdraw it due to overwhelming success. Obviously that is something you should then fix but instead the idea was - as far as I know - abandoned.

> The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego managemen

It seems that 'free bricks' in general horrifies them. I went to visit one of the biggest sellers of Lego in Norway and they had been told that Lego no longer wants stores to sell plain lego bricks, but only Lego sets. Which for me seems rather strange.

My step-mum ran a small toyshop a few years ago. She could only order limited numbers of plain lego bricks and the amount was dictated by the number of expensive fancy sets she bought.

It's not strange. Sets have high margins and their logistics can be optimized to hell and back. Loose pieces are low-margin and awkward to deal with. It's the same reason you cannot buy Coca-Cola, or milk, on tap from a supermarket.

Capitalism gonna capital.

Given that the Lego patent has expired and there's plenty of "off-brand" sets out there now, the market is free to fill this gap; it just needs a quality producer, because most of the knockoff stuff is just crap in comparison. A big one could be Minecraft, if they were to produce bricks and brick sets. They'd have to stop charging the merchandise premium though.

I'm sure the Minecraft licensing deal that already exists with Lego forbids that for some extended period of time.

For mindstorms, I always found NXC more intuitive than using the blocks. And that was even before I properly learned how to program.

There was Lego creator, though building part was 3rd person so probably closer to KidCAD than Minecraft.

I actually really wanted to like that game as a kid, but either my computer wasn't beefy enough to run it, or it was a buggy crashy mess (not totally sure which).

It was a buggy crashy mess. Also there wasn't much to do because there was no adversity. Sure there is also no adversity in creative mode MC but don't underestimate how important the first experience you get of having to mine your resources is in slowly introducing the game loop. Creator you just make a few cars, drive them to nowhere, spawn an army of NPCs, watch them fight, that's about it. The Knight's Kingdom version might have been better in that regard.

I got Lego Island 2 for my kid in 2008 which was old at the time. He loved it! It had a nice story line and easy things to do for a 4 year old. When he finished it I found the original Lego Island game second hand and thinking how sequels mostly suck had high expectations. It was a disappointment. Island 2 had :just enough: free roam and 1 not as much, I guess.

I don’t think someone with lego in mind could have come up with minecraft.

The problem is that there really isn’t an interface for building with Lego freeform that doesn’t suck for new users. Not many people are willing to get good at something like that for purely creative reasons.

Minecraft works because it’s limited to 1x1x1 bricks. The interface you can make with such a restriction is significantly better.

But I don’t think anyone thinking about lego would have seen that as an acceptable trade off before minecraft.

Minecraft of course was heavily influenced by Slaves to Armok God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. I could totally see making a Lego version of that.

There are few Lego games that actually embrace free building or engineering. I've heard it is because Lego doesn't want a digital app to cannibalize their physical sales, which always seemed silly to me.

Nowadays there are even few LEGO physical products that actually embrace free building.

Most LEGO products are directed building toward one (or a few) models. Even the yellow boxes in the Classic theme (many different bricks).

Free building is just frightening to most customers.

Isn't there "Lego Worlds" game which might be similar to Minecraft.

Could it be like Warhammer where they're unable to make a decent digital game since they're worried about it cannibalizing their physical good sales?

My limited understanding is that the Total War take on Warhammer has been quite popular.

Or are you referring to a tabletop replacement style game?

The Total War situation is a bit of an odd one, it emulated Warhammer Fantasy Battles, which was discontinued in 2015, Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016. Whether this is a coincidence or GW intentionally not letting well-established Devs work on their active IPs is debatable however.

There are like a hundred Warhammer 40k games now. I haven't played tabletop myself, but Sanctus Reach looks like a pretty direct copy of the rules to PC, similar to the Battletech and Blood Bowl games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/502370/Warhammer_40000_Sa...

> The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”.

The core fantasy of Google is supposed to be "collect the world's information to put it at your fingertips", when in reality it's more like "...to sell it to big advertisers".

Same deal with Lego. I doubt they could transition to freeform creativity when their entire business process is oriented towards a diametrically opposite goal.

(This is speaking as a person with three kids and a whole storage rack dedicated to Lego.)

From what I’ve read, they couldn’t work out how to make a free play game that would work online and stop people from making giant penises.

https://splinternews.com/lego-universe-had-a-huge-dong-detec...

> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.

The LEGO Bits n' Bricks podcast is very insightful about LEGO story in the digital world.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-g...

I particularly recommend episode "A Fabled Story" which features 2 LEGO top executives. The LEGO CEO in the 90's was himself a computer programmer.

online interaction back then was kind of a big no no. Nintendo took a long time to implement it.

Anything targeted towards children was basically not a good candidate for online collaboration because of the fear of predators.

I think we have a good model now of how to do it correctly and what sort of safe guards are expected in the software to protect end users so it's less of an issue now.

Minecraft also did a good job of separating public/private server (or at least it did back in the day).

Look up LEGO Worlds. It’s almost a great building game. Fun with kids.

Well, they tried to build something like it but it turned out hard to keep people from building things that were inappropriate for kids: https://za.ign.com/lego-universe/91181/news/cancelled-lego-m...

I consider that a server problem. Why make it an MMO instead of copying for example Minecraft. Let anyone host a server and then people can join what/where they want.

LEGO wants so much to control its brand image that it doesn't want to risk to allow content inappropriate for kids.

So self hosting LEGO-branded games open to the world will never happen.

I was disappointed at first by the lack of building too. After a while I still enjoyed it a bit for what it was; it was a fun game.

"Lego Creator: Harry Potter" had something like this. If there is more than one piece of software with that title, the one I'm talking about was published... early 2000's? A little bit after the first movie, at least.

One of my very first PC games was the Lego Racer 2. Although the racing was not as good as in the first game, it still had some interesting elements.

I was completely blown away that I could build my own car and race in it. Furthermore, you could free-roam the world with your car, exploring the tracks, finding shortcuts, discovering secrets, and completing missions.

I felt very disappointed that I could not build my own house, but I was still amazed by the (limited) creativity that the game provided.

Funny how just a bit of freedom to create and explore in a game kicks off the fantasies in a child.

I vividly remember Legoland[1] the video game, where you can manage a park and build it from the ground up. It's very similar to the rollercoaster tycoon games from back then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legoland_(video_game)

There is a free-build multiplayer sandbox lego game called Lego Worlds - since 2017

Classic Space trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTpW4wQznQ

I'm unsure if MattKC (the last person to edit that file) is the main person behind this tool. But he is a youtuber and Lego Island fan. He has some great videos on changes he's made to the game such as this one: https://youtu.be/2CmqbccCqI0

As soon as I saw the title I came here to recommend that video of his, as well as the HD Music[0] one. There's also lots of other great gems on the channel not related to Lego Island.

[0]: https://youtu.be/uP328LYl8eo

Well, the screenshot does say "by MattKC" :-)

What they should do is create a ray tracing mod for this game.

A recent Lego puzzle game just released with RTX support and it looks incredible: https://youtu.be/1hq2kFIfaCM

Holy crap that looks FANTASTIC!

Yeah, I thought the same thing but steam users are saying it's "like a 2 hours demo", so not much content.

A 2 hours long game, at a descent price, is a plus to me. I abandon a lot of games because they get boring after a few hours.

> https://www.legoisland.org/wiki/index.php/LEGO_Island#Histor...

> Infamously, Mindscape fired the developers of LEGO Island the day before release to avoid paying bonuses and continued salaries.

Holy crap that is disgusting.

I haven't heard the words "Lego Island" since I was very small. I dimly recall playing it as a kid (though I played much, much more of Lego Racers [1].) I'm glad to know there is something of a mod scene for the game.

[1] For a first-grade "write a book" project, I presented a Lego Racers strategy guide. Marked for geekiness from a young age...

I have a completely vague memory of a (classic) MacOS lego game that came on a CD and featured an underwater submarine base. Does anyone have any idea what it might be?

You should be careful about using the LEGO® name in any "official" capacity. They're notoriously litigious about naming and designs.

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