General Fish Adventure and Brickizens

[Neal]

So, uh, you know how Funcom worked with LEGO to make LMO? Before this, they pitched two apps to LEGO;

Brickizen and Fish Adventure (technically Fishtank)

http://i.imgur.com/Ay1uq3m.png

 

And, you know, the logical thing to do when you're pitching apps to a company is to put them on a public github.

https://github.com/epsilone/LEGO-Funcom

https://github.com/epsilone/FishAdventure

https://github.com/GordieRoss/BrickizensDemo

Brickizens is essentially that LEGO Fusion Town Manager app in a really really early state. (also oh lord the animations are bad)

I'll try to take some pictures of them soon, haven't had much time to mess with it yet.

(quick edit: thanks to someone on Skype for telling me about these!)

[McJobless]

NEAL YOU BLOODY HERO, THIS IS FANTASTIC.

[lol username]

I can't stop laughing

 

EDIT: Ok most discussion of this is taking place on Discord, will probably make some more posts once this has all been looked through. But it should be noted that the videos in LEGO-Funcom show what appears to be a prototype of LEGO Worlds, with LEGO Fusion style scanning mechanics mixed in. It seems the whole Fusion and Worlds thing might have started/been prototyped at Funcom then brought over to TT? There's over 46 minutes of video footage here not to mention the builds/project folders of Brickizens and the fish thingy, so yeah, this is gonna take some time to dissect and make sense of completely... 

 

ALSO, just to be safe, I'm gonna ask that we not upload screenshots or whatever of this stuff to the RRU gallery or anything. Hell, I'm not sure it's a good idea to even embed screenshots and stuff in posts, just in case LEGO finds this and doesn't want it public - we aren't hosting this stuff, we're just fans discussing it, and let's keep it that way.

[Ayliffe]

this is "FishAnim2"

 

I am very, very confused

[lol username]

Here's some snips from somebody's LinkedIn page that says a bit about Funcom's work on LEGO Fusion games:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorobretin

http://i.imgur.com/HQstWcQ.png

http://i.imgur.com/prqQoF9.png

 

https://github.com/epsilone/Race2Mars

Also... This project doesn't scream "LEGO" but it seems it might actually be LEGO-related too. One of the progress report videos sent from Funcom to LEGO shows a folder on an iPad for Funcom LEGO projects, and it's in there, along with LEGO Fishtank and LEGO Elements (which seems to be the origins of LEGO Worlds?). I opened the project in Unity, and while it's pretty rough/incomplete, it had a bit of a resemblance to LEGO Portal Racers... Moving a spaceship left/right to dodge things, and stopping at shop along the way to apparently do stuff to your ship. Also, we already knew that LEGO Portal Racers was intended to be a LEGO Fusion game at one point. So... Huh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

I'm not sure about if discussing the nitty gritty specifics of everything here would be a good idea... It's seriously baffling that the devs made these projects public; there's source code and compiled builds for both LEGO Fishtank (a canceled LEGO Fusion game) and Brickizens (later developed into LEGO Fusion Town Master by TT). Fishtank is by far the most complete of the two, while Brickizens has pretty next to no functionality besides walking around. There's also video footage of "LEGO Elements", which seems to be a relatively basic LEGO Worlds for mobile devices with LEGO Fusion-style scanning mixed in. All of them are/were made with Unity.

 

In regards to Brickizens/Town Master, it's interesting to note that this super early prototype has some of the same building/path designs seen in the final version of the game created by TT (which runs on TT's own engine instead of Unity). That, plus what was said on that guy's LinkedIn profile, and what happened to Portal Racers, all seems to suggest the LEGO Fusion games were first imagined and outlined by LEGO Future Labs, and then given to developers to actually make (rather than the devs coming with and pitching the game concepts themselves). So, at some point, LEGO must have decided to take LEGO Fusion away from Funcom and give it to TT instead.

[lol username]

LEGO Fishtank lives on, unexpectedly, as part of the LEGO House, under the name Fish Designer: https://www.lego.com/en-gb/legohouse/explore/yellow-zone The footage in the video looks very similar to the early builds posted by Funcom, unlike Brickizens/Town Master and Elements/Worlds, which were rebuilt by TT on their own engine. So did Funcom finish up the project themselves, or did LEGO take their work and finish it internally, or did they give it to someone else?

 

Edit - I just glanced at Funcom's latest investors presentation and saw no mentions of LEGO anything except a note that LMO had closed. I don't know for sure but I think it's likely they haven't been involved with the project for quite a while, which leaves the question of who has been...

[Shay]

A Lego town sim would've been cool. I think Legos are very suited to that genre of game.

Honestly, I'm surprised that an official Lego version of The Sims doesn't exist yet.

[lol username]

2 minutes ago, Mahoroa said:

A Lego town sim would've been cool. I think Legos are very suited to that genre of game.

Honestly, I'm surprised that an official Lego version of The Sims doesn't exist yet.

 

You might find this interesting... From an interview with a LEGO City Undercover developer:

 

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013/03/07/lego-city-undercover-executive-producer-talks-development-voice-actors-and-chicken-guns/

 

Quote

Multiplayer: In those first twelve months of prototyping did you know you were going to stick with the LEGO City brand or were you just building a LEGO game that morphed into the City brand?

 

Doyle: Well no, for a few years beforehand we'd been talking to LEGO about doing a LEGO City game, and we didn’t really know what that game was going to be. We were sort of going down the road of it being a construction game, where it was more about building, like a "SimCity" style game. We weren't really sure what it was going to be, but we knew we wanted to make a game based on the LEGO City franchise from the beginning; it was definitely always about LEGO City. It was only really as we started to prototype it that it turned into a full, open world game.

 

[Shay]

Wow, neat! The game has changed so much since that early concept, huh? Who knows, maybe Lego will touch upon that idea again. Thanks, Terrev.

[lol username]

Just looked at your post again and noticed the wording - maybe you already know, but Brickizens/Town Master was fully developed, but by TT Games rather than Funcom. This is the final product. There's also the old 2D game LEGO Loco to check into.

[Shay]

Oh wow, that Fusion game is even cooler than a regular sim game. Guess I just hadn't heard of it during the brief period when I wasn't really into Lego. Thanks again!

I have Loco; used to play it when I was younger, though it never intrigued me as much as LRR. Looking back, it reminds me a lot of SimCity.

 

[lol username]

Since this hasn't been posted here yet:

 

http://bricksfanz.com/lego-house-gains-sxsw-innovation-award/

 

http://www.triggerglobal.com/work/lego-house-fish-designer

 

We now know who took over the fish designer project, and it looks like people are liking it.

[Luxaritas]

Apologies for the necro, but tripped across this and wanted to officially take credit for digging these up. I was doing a dive around GitHub at the time for  what I assume must’ve been a) random LEGO stuff and b) anything tied to LMO or Funcom in general as I was trying to dig up existing info on the file/net protocols. Suffice to say, I was greatly amused when I found these and shared with a couple people I knew were into such things (in a time before I joined RRU, as little as I’ve been active here anyways). Glad to see people got a kick out of these!