Lego wants you to make fan games – and it may even publish them

The Lego Group – the company responsible the colourful plastic bricks that have been old to build everything from Portal test chambers to a GTX 1660-battery-powered gaming PC – recently unveiled a partnership with Unity, allowing fans to build Lego set-settled games in the process of encyclopedism back existence. At once, the company is look potentially publishing the outdo fan games that emerge from that partnership.

The Lego Microgame is a learning tool for Unity that introduces the basics of the Unity engine through and through pleasantly familiar Lego bricks. It's downloadable from the One store, and you can use information technology to snap in collaboration your own Lego game with easy-to-use, ready-made assets.

In a recent episode of the Bits N' Bricks podcast, cobalt-hosts Ethan Vincent and Brian Crecente spoke with Lego Group older technical lead Anders Holm, who said the fellowship is examining the feasibility of publication fan-made games exploitation Integrity's Lego Microgame, similar to the way fan creations can be revolved into official physical Lego sets through the Lego Ideas platform.

You can listen in to the laden episode here – the discussion all but publishing winnow-made games begins at around 35:00.

"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," Holm says. "We privation to involve the same types of community that you can relegate your game idea that you have built in the Microgame, and potentially, if it's an awesome game, [it could] be really published American Samoa a prim Lego title. Information technology's of course very tingling."

Holm says a goal would be for the creators to share in the net income from the sale of the games they make up, similar to how the designers of Lego set Ideas concepts that are ready-made into official sets are compensated with a percentage of gross revenue revenues.

"That is a model we roll in the hay deeds in the physical space," Holm says. "We have not proven it in the appendage space, so that is of course very engrossing for us to look into."

It's still early days for the Unity Lego Microgame, and Holm says much will count on the creators the instrument attracts and what they make with the tool – that will determine how their creations wind up existence shared and marketed.

In any case, it's an exciting prospect, and it's one you can start victimisation right away – a unlimited bucket of Lego bricks that you rear bring to biography while encyclopaedism Unity. Course, there are plenty of other construction games along PC, if you'd kind of have individual else plow the game design part of the puzzle.