EBSCOhost: More information on classic LEGO video games and more

[emily]

There are too many interesting articles on EBSCOhost to list. Unfortunately, I can't give out a link as it is only possible to access the articles through a library card, and I've just realized that this means any link I could give would be connected to the library card I used.

 

I've copied two articles below, the first on the development of Rock Raiders and the second on the development of LEGO Island. Of course, there is plenty more to be found.

 

Designing a set of the popular building blocks for both the real and virtual world

The Lego Group used the best of two worlds when it designed the new Lego Rock Raiders game as both a physical toy and a 3D game for the PC and Sony PlayStation. "For the first time in Lego history, children can play with the toy and then hop on the computer and play within the same Lego universe there," says Tomas Gillo, head of concept development at Lego Media International, the company's software division. "We hope that what they see and experience in the CG version will inspire them to go off and build and play with the toy, and vice versa."

While this project was not the company's initial foray into the CG realm, it marks the first time that a Lego play set and computer game were developed concurrently. As a result, the project represents a landmark in Lego's 60-year history in that the development of the play materials was affected by digital-content development.

A team of 12 animators at Artworld UK, a Birmingham, UK, animation facility, created the majority of the 3D game elements using NewTek's (San Antonio, TX) LightWave 3D and a variety of third-party plugins running on high-end Windows NT workstations. The models were then loaded directly from LightWave into a proprietary game engine from Lego.

For texturing the objects, the group used Adobe Systems' (San Jose, CA) Photoshop and MetaCreations' (Carpinteria, CA) Kai's Power Tools. According to Gillo, the artists had to translate the highly familiar physical Lego blocks, with their recognizable nubs and indentations, into CG while maintaining their look and feel. "Lego is extremely particular about how its bricks are rendered in a computer game," he notes.

To ensure that the colors of the pieces were the same in both the physical and virtual versions, the animators preprogrammed all the correct Rock Raiders colors into a database, which a set of Artworld proprietary plug-ins accessed to automatically paint material values onto blank bricks as they were imported into the program. When completed, a plug-in then generated a scene file with all the correct pieces, allowing the artists to assemble the models as they would if the bricks were physically in their hands. "Not only was this fast, but it was extremely accurate," says Rob Dorney, head of art at Artworld.

But creating each play piece as a highly detailed model containing thousands of polygons that would still run on Lego's real-time game posed some problems, "requiring the artists to be extremely clever in their use of textures." This meant making lower polygonal renditions of the characters and objects appear more detailed and textured than they sometimes were by adding reflections, shadows, and other lighting effects. Even so, the PC game still requires a 3D accelerator card.

Building Challenges

One of the biggest challenges to creating the digital content, according to Dorney, was giving life to what are typically inanimate objects. "Children like to make up little stories whenever they use the toy set, but in the PC game, the story and the characters come alive," he says. Animating the blocks was no easy feat, however, considering that the artists had to simulate the stiff tactile Lego mini figures. But with Lego Media's blessing, the animators achieved their goal by deviating from a few basic but well-established Lego toy design rules.

First they were permitted to make characters whose knee and elbow joints would bend, and whose torsos would twist. "Imagine having to produce an animation sequence where a character's torso doesn't move; it would have to turn and face everything it looked at," notes Dorney. "Although Lego didn't want us to make these infractions, the company realized they were essential for realistic character movement in the game."

The group also animated the characters' facial textures, "to give each a distinctive personality, even though they are, in effect, plastic figures," Dorney adds. For instance, Sparks the engineer is somewhat silly and clumsy, characteristics that are carried throughout the game in the way he walks (or rather, stumbles) and in his facial expressions.

A Parallel Universe

Further design problems resulted from the parallel game development. "During the early part of the design process, we'd get storyboards and test models from Lego, and we'd see if they were appropriate for what we wanted to do in the game. If they didn't seem to be working out, we'd make suggestions, and they'd try again," explains Dorney. But often both groups would not receive a finalized model design until late in the cycle. "The overall design process took longer than usual [about 18 months] because we had to change and rejig things on our end to fit the model range, as did [the toy designers]," Dorney adds.

To alleviate some of those pressures, Artworld programmers wrote a plug-in for LightWave that simplified scenes containing all the elements needed to make a particular model by providing the artists with a visual reference whenever they assembled the final scenes. The group physically broke up the plastic models and built every component in LightWave, inserting each piece into the database plug-in as they were completed. When the artists needed to construct a scene file containing the component bricks, all they had to do was locate the pre-built piece from the database and choose the desired color. Once all the pieces were selected, the plug-in automatically generated the scene containing those pieces.

Big Differences

While the design intent of Rock Raiders was to develop a single environment for two different media, logistically, the play is not seamless.

The tactile toy was limited by the number of blocks (and hence, vehicles and the like) that could be used in constructing objects, while the CG version had the luxury of going beyond the play materials in terms of the number of characters, buildings, environments, and vehicles, in addition to character development. "The toy provided a strong starting point for us, but there weren't enough buildings and such to enable an interesting gaming experience," says Gillo. "We had to create a much larger universe for the digital characters."

This was especially crucial in a strategy game such as Rock Raiders, where the success of a character depends on choices made during game play. In Rock Raiders, which is targeted at young children, players must accumulate resources-such as ore and rock crystals--from the alien planet on which they have crash-landed, so they can eventually get back home. While digging, they must ward off alien monsters, which rely on the crystals as their food source.

According to Gillo, the original game design contained more emphasis on problem solving, including one scenario where the player strategically breaks through rock and uses water for curbing lava flow. However, the computational memory needed to accurately calculate the water volume for dispersion throughout the game levels slowed the game play drastically. "If we used this bit, we wanted the dispersion to be accurate, but it just ate up too much CPU time," he notes.

With the success of this parallel physical and digital project, Gillo expects that Lego will continue along this dual-offering course. But does this mean that digital versions will soon replace the standard Lego toys? It's not likely. "Children still enjoy playing with the tactile toy," he explains. "We're just providing a greater depth-of-play experience."

 

For 65 years kids have played with Lego building bricks and characters. Now kids can play with actual walking, talking Lego characters in the CD-ROM game Lego Island from The Lego Group (Denmark) and Mindscape (Novato, CA). In this totally immersive 3D game, kids interact with Lego characters as they tackle "dangerous missions" and other adventures that take place on an island made of--what else--Legos.

The island is real-time 3D and is completely nonlinear, so players can roam freely. There is no predetermined order of events; kids may encounter different experiences with each play. And the island is "self-leveling," which means it adapts to the player's actions during the game. Lego wanted more than building from the game, says Mari Collings, a producer at Mindscape. "Lego didn't want a program that just replicated or mimicked what its toys could do. It wanted something more exploratory, with more life and more character."

Of course, the game wouldn't truly be a Lego game if players couldn't build something--and they can using 3D Lego building blocks including a race car, water jet, dune buggy, and helicopter.

The game was in development for almost three years, says Collings. Mindscape and its contractors created the game under close direction from Lego. "Lego was very clear about what they wanted," she says. "They wanted everything on the island to be built out of Legos, and it had to be possible to actually build everything with Legos. In fact, we had to prove it to them in this one instance. We had this piano, and Lego didn't think we could actually build it out of Legos, so we had to produce the piano." And they did.

Overall, Mindscape had about 24 3D artists on the project (four in-house, the rest contractors with whom Mindscape worked closely). To build the Legos, artists used 3D Studio R4, although toward the end of the project many of the artists wanted to use Max, says Collings. The use of Max was limited, though, because of the difficulties associated with switching programs during development.

Before creating a 3D version of a building, Mindscape artists first would make the building out of Legos to use as a reference as they modeled, says Collings. "Lego was very strong about wanting everything to be accurate. People are very faithful to the Lego brand. Lego wanted to make sure that even the studs were created correctly. We had to get everything approved by them."

Even so, the artists had a great time building all the models and characters, says Collings "The guys had such a blast developing this game. The creative director, Wes Jenkins, had an actual Logo island that he built-it was something like 8 by 16 feet. It was huge! But it was really useful because that was the island. It had all these different neighborhoods, the pizzeria--everything that's in the CD existed in real life."

To make the game run in real time, artists had to watch the polygons. Overall, more than 50,000 polygons (a cautious estimate, says Collings) went into building the island. Naturally, not all are displayed at once. And to help with the frame rate, there were three LODs of everything in the final game. But the actual 3D engine and playback was in the hands of the programmers. Programmers and artists worked closely together, says Collings, because as the programmers would push what they could do with the 3D engine, the art would often need adjusting. "The spec changed so quickly as the programmers found better ways to do things--it would give us more more options, but that would change the art spec," she says.

Modeling and animating the Lego characters introduced another set of challenges. There are more than 35 characters and 800 animations in the final CD, says Collings, adding that it's the first time the Lego characters have been brought to life. "The characters are based on the mini-figures, and we created a couple of characters that didn't exist," she says.

The figures were modeled with 3D Studio, and the texture maps were done by 2D artists using mostly Photoshop but also Illustrator. "We had a very limited color palette," says Collings. "We needed to make sure they were Logo colors, and Logo came out and looked at the colors and approve them."

Animating the characters was an interesting task and quite an artistic challenge, says Collings. "It's hard to animate characters that don't have knees! The mini-figures aren't excessively jointed. So to bring a character like that to life and maintain the Lego brand of how they would move was tough. The guys did a great job."

Mindscape artists did the animation using keyframes, frame by frame, tweaking as they went.

All that work has paid off, though; more than 300,000 copies had shipped as of press time, and who knows what the holiday season will bring? "It was a really wonderful project to work on," says Collings, "so much creativity."

Isn't that what Logo is all about?

[lol username]

Great finds, hoping for more! Really interesting to hear about how LEGO and DDI/Artworld worked together, and what their pipeline was like.

 

... says Tomas Gillo, head of concept development at Lego Media International, the company's software division.

Hello Dash.

 

One of the biggest challenges to creating the digital content, according to Dorney, was giving life to what are typically inanimate objects. "Children like to make up little stories whenever they use the toy set, but in the PC game, the story and the characters come alive," he says.

Yeeeeeeeup.

 

According to Gillo, the original game design contained more emphasis on problem solving, including one scenario where the player strategically breaks through rock and uses water for curbing lava flow. However, the computational memory needed to accurately calculate the water volume for dispersion throughout the game levels slowed the game play drastically. "If we used this bit, we wanted the dispersion to be accurate, but it just ate up too much CPU time," he notes.

Interesting. I wonder how much of this was actually prototyped and functional (or maybe not really functional). Isn't there some unused and very unfinished flood/water stuff in the game?

Edit: '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>

 

Overall, more than 50,000 polygons (a cautious estimate, says Collings) went into building the island.

Oh how times have changed...