duane Thankyou m8 I removed them and merged and everything seems fine!

    Unfortunately, we don't all have the luxury of owning rights to use LEGOS... I wonder what other marketing tricks would be useful?

      Well yes. But if you are willing to take some heat, controversy or lawsuits can be free marketing.

      Okay, this is odd. I was working on a VR project called OpenXR. When I try to download and install the assets for it, the game crashes every time. Unsure what is going on, but this issue is not unfamiliar to me. I still don't know how to fix it, however.

      Nerdzmasterz
      Roblox got away with it way back in the 2000's. Simply don't call it a lego. You could even invent your own discount lego brand and plead it as a parody when they eventually sue you. That actually works in the US. You could call it:

      • ClickyBricks
      • Build A Block
      • Caltrops I mean Calblocks

        Efectivamente. There are actually quite a few brands who sell bricks that work in a similar way to Lego under a different name.

        This is because the purely functional aspects can not be protected. That would be like protecting physics, which of course is ridiculous. The design aspects or course can. Now, don't ask me to explain the differences. I have no idea, and I believe many companies, not only Lego, ran into that.

        In some context, you can't protect the concept of a car with 4 wheels and an engine of sorts. But the design and the branding, that you can protect.

        If you just make the bricks look like... bricks... there won't be any legal issues. It's a computer, they don't have to actually interlock.

        Lego's original patent covered the design of how the bricks connect (the bumps on top, hollow cylinders below, etc), as well as several alternatives they didn't intend to use but were worried competitors might use.
        But that patent expired in 1978.
        https://patents.google.com/patent/US3005282A

        Oh man. I have a few really good ideas/stories for a game, and I'm kind of stumped with the visual design. I know how to do art, but I want to work on the thing solo, so I have to manage my time. One of my main ideas is an urban FPS parkour type of thing. Like a mix of Mirror's Edge and F.E.A.R. The problem is, I have to keep the game small to do the assets.

        Question for you all, would you rather play a small game with AAA graphics, or a larger city with lo-end indie graphics? I was thinking either doing flat shaded polygons (like Out of this World / Another World) or having pixel art in 3D. I think I could do a small city like that. But I'm not sure it would be compelling visually. Or do AAA graphics (from a few years ago) but make it a smaller game. Something like Dredd or The Raid, where the whole game is inside one building. What do you think?

          I prefer larger games to high-end graphics, but maybe I'm weird. 😉

          No, honestly I say game play > graphics, and I gather I'm not alone. I mean, Sims 4 graphics is better than 3 graphics, but everyone on those forums is begging for more game play from 4 and is often saying 3 was better despite looking worse. Just an example.

            cybereality I believe that you probably could make a large game with realistic graphics in relatively short period of time, though my standards of what constitutes large is quite low. I think you could come up with a prototype in an incredibly short period of time but, I assume that the artstyle will be the hardest thing to execute. The only advice I can give you, where the art is consider, is to just find the easiest way to get things done. If there is a shortcut, take it; nobody will know or even care. Some ideas that I have for my own game would include making some sort of character creation system for enemies/NPC so I can make a whole bunch of them look diference with just a few models while reducing draw call (though I'm far from reaching there yet). I don't think I have to give you any advice on level design; just remember that you're just one person and find the easiest way to get things down as fast as possible.

              cybereality

              I hope you're not depending on feedback from here -- it's kind of a specialized crowd. 🙂

              Who's your target audience?

                  Oh wait. I didn't mean reduce draw call; I might file size. XD

                  Yeah, that makes sense @Audiobellum . I have no problem with coding, I could probably code the basics of an open world game in a few months. The issue is just the scope. Like I can do art, say one character or one car. But not 30 realistic characters or 100 cars. I know I could procedurally generate a city, I did some research years ago, and it's actually not that difficult. Especially if it similar to Manhattan, where the streets are on a grid. But there are a lot of little pieces, just like the garbage in a can, fake movie posters, every bottle of liqueur in a bar. It's not that any one thing is difficult, it's just the scope of it all. I'm also considering some AI-generated art, but I haven't seen anyone pull it off in real-time yet, so it would be a big gamble. And I still have a lot to learn in terms of machine learning. But that would be something else to explore.

                  cybereality Just me.

                  Then ask yourself these following questions:

                  Which would you rather play?
                  If you were browsing through steam right now which of them would you click on to see it more closely?
                  What would be most likely to entice you to actually buy it/pay for it?