Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lego Island Rebuilder

legoisland.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#31

Post by _carbyau_ »

rendaw wrote: post #28
josephg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compet…

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?

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#32

Post by jacquesm »

herbstein wrote: post #10
josephg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compet…

> 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 th…

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.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#33

Post by jacquesm »

spoonjim wrote: post #22
herbstein wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

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.

Free Bricks are anathema to a company selling bricks.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#34

Post by Varriount »

voidfunc wrote: post #4

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 th…

"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.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#35

Post by roywashere »

missblit wrote: post #18
josephg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compet…

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).

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.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#36

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

josephg wrote: post #5
voidfunc wrote: post #4

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 th…

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 compet…

> 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.)

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#37

Post by grp000 »

xwdv wrote: post #16
Scaevolus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#38

Post by _Donny »

voidfunc wrote: post #4

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 th…

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.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#39

Post by stnikolauswagne »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #31
rendaw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#40

Post by tjungblut »

voidfunc wrote: post #4

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 th…

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)

Post reply on HN