New Kickstarter project turns minifigs into giant mechas!

[Simon Beck]

A friend of mine, Ben Jarvis has just launched a Kickstarter project that you might be interested in. It's based around a new set of parts that can convert any minifig legs and torso into a fully-articulated, 3"-tall mecha. The parts will be injection-moulded in the UK, and will be 100% LEGO-compatible. You can pledge as little or as much as you want to fund the project, and at different pledge levels you will get rewards ranging from limited-edition mecha kits to full war-game sets. If the target funding is not reached by the end of the pledge period (one month) you will lose nothing, but if all goes well, you will not only receive your reward next year, but will have helped to launch this exciting new project.

Apart from having pledged £12 (for which I hope to receive two mecha kits), I am in no way associated with the Mechabrick project - I just think you might be interested in it.

http://www.kickstart...els?ref=kickspy

[tedbeard]

Not quite sure I see the point. I have seen lots of mecha built using LEGO parts in that sort of size. What is the advantage of using a minifig torso and legs as the core of a lot of custom parts?

[WaysofSorting]

I don't like that the minifig arms have to come off on the torso to get it to work - that kills it for me - and I'll be passing.

I like the basic premise - Mecha game that uses Lego, but that's about as far as I get. I'd rather just build the mechs like in Mobile Frame Zero using "regular" pieces. If the minifig is the focal point, I would change the theme to reflect that - less mechs and more Powered Exoskeleton.

Is there a way to put more points for connections in the pieces? Are the connections that the Mecha uses for the arms usable with the LEGO system? Or just the feet and torso? Will there be custom parts for the landscape, and will they be system compatible?

I want to get behind a theme like this, but not sure this is pressing the right buttons. It's a tough place to try and design for, even for the Lego Group. I remember not really liking the pieces in this set -

http://brickset.com/detail/?Set=4790-1 - The "Agents" take on a yellow power suit. The minifig sat on there, not very incorporated to the "Leg" or foot or whatever it was. And the yellow robotic "hands" seemed off as well.

Anyhow - good luck with the kickstarter and welcome to the forums. Maybe you can have your friend Ben answer some of the questions here and engage the community on the project's behalf.

[Darkblane]

Like Simon, I want to start off by saying that I'm not associated with the project in any way other than being a backer. I had the opportunity to see the Mechabrick display at the 2013 Great Weston LEGO Show (aka Steam) in Swindon (UK) and was very impressed by it.

This is my impression of it:

The Game

I think it's important to remember that at the core of this project, there's a game. Yes you can pledge for just the mecha kits, but the purpose of the kits is as the playing pieces of the game. The game essentially seems to be a tabletop skirmish wargame, in which LEGO and LEGO compatible pieces make up the 'miniatures' and scenery. From what I understand, the rules have also been kept very straightforward.

As a result, what you end up with is a game easily accessible and easily customizable by anyone with at least some LEGO kits. This isn't just aimed at AFOLs. This is so something that kids can easily pickup, customize and play. For example, the scenery is entire made out of LEGO and even few basic bricks can make effective looking buildings. For each game they can be easily moved around or completely rebuilt.

The Mecha

With regards to the mecha, it's important to realise that they aren't minifig scale. Even though they make use of minifig parts, the mecha (and scenery) are closer to microscale (they actually seem scaled to the LEGO trophies).

If you look at the project, you'll see that each mecha consists of a lot of individual custom parts, each one designed to be compatible with LEGO. For example, the shoulders are attached to the upper arms via a stud connection. The feet attached to the legs by a stud / bar connector. One of the guns has even been designs so that a set of binoculars can be attached to it (like the guns in the Galaxy Squad sets)

The minifigs parts were probably chosen to be incorporated as there's no need to design additional custom parts when these parts do the job of providing a core structure to the mecha. They also allow easy color customization (each mecha of the same color could easily be distinguished by a different colored set of legs).

The mecha can easily be customised using standard LEGO parts, so you could for example swap out the head for one of the robot heads from the Galaxy Squad sets (and again in context of the game, this makes customizing each 'army' very easy for anyone of any age).

These parts also don't have to all be used together. Just because they're designed to combine into a mecha, doesn't stop them being useful parts in their own right. Individually they can easily be incorporated into other MOCs just like any custom part from BrickForge, BrickArms etc.

Of course, all of this is just my own opinion and speculation and I understand this still may not appeal to everyone, but hopefully that's helped clarify some aspects of the project, and outlined some of the potential I think it has.

[rocketandroll]

Hi all

Well, having only joined recently I wasn't going to shout about the project yet but, seeing as someone has already mentioned it, as the creator of it, I'll try and answer the questions... though 'darkblane' seems to have kinda said most of what I was gonna say already :-)

Yes, although AFOLs form a big part of the target market for this, they are not the ONLY market for it. I'm an AFOL, have been for many years... I'm also into miniature painting (for competitions) and gaming too.... this is a cross-over product between a few hobbies that I am passionate about so, although I think we've done a fairly good job of appealing to everyone, the old addage about pleasing everyone all the time comes into play a little :-)

This is something I've been working on for about 4 years now (since the original idea). It's taken up 100% of my time for the last 18 weeks or so with a few weks of sketching and part time work before that.

I agonised for weeks and weeks about the design and overall plan for the project I can tell you... yes, I considered just making body-armour/exo-suits for minifigs as I knew that would appeal to the AFOL market even more, however, from a gaming point of view, that made bulkier, more costly models and made the core idea of the game-play taking place around LEGO scenery harder to achieve due to the larger scale. I also looked at the idea of becoming a clone-brick producer and making the mechs from compatible bricks, but I don't want to be the next Megabloks (shudder). Yes, we could write rules and just sell those and allow people to make mechs from existing LEGO but... that's not much of a product, and it's been done. This needed mechs of a standard size with standardised weapons options using our custom gaming base that allowed you to track the robot's shield level. If this is successful we have plans for two follow-on games to this that take it to a macro and micro level from the 1/144 scale (yes, scaled to the trophy figures as has been mentioned) that Mechabrick is set at.... specifically one at minifig scale with troopers, robots and Minifigs in Exo-suits fighting in a more role-play like game... we also have 'Supermassive' which is essentially a micro-scale space battle game that also ties in to the Mechabrick universe. That's only happening though if this gets fairly well over-funded.

This game however, we wanted Gundam scale mechs in a nano-scale city, so that's what we did :-)

As for assembly of the robots... yes, the arm issue we knew would freak out some AFOL's and this was the bit we agonised about the most. We went through over 20 designs that used different methods to clip on to Minifig arms and make them larger but nothing worked and it always looked and was mechanically the weakest point in the design... we also wanted to create additional attachment points for weapons/upgrades and add the extra joint in the arms which was even harder using existing Minifig arms. Again, it was just a decision we had to make to make this viable according to our vision for the robots and the game.

The robots (in their current design) have 25 parts which you add to the Minifig torso and legs to create each mech. Every single component has been designed with LEGO dimensions and interconnectivity in mind. Every joint, be it the joints between two mechabrick parts, the mechabrick parts and the Minifig, or external attachment points (of which there are a LOT), every one uses standard LEGO part dimensions (either rod diameters or stud diameters) and everything will be very carefully tolleranced so that fit and finish (we are even matching the plastic mix used and colours exactly) will be as good as LEGO.

I won't clog the boards here up with explanatory images etc, there's a whole load of extra info about it and pics of every part (I actually just took some more today to show the leg assembly better following this discussion) on our Flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mechabrick/

I'm here and happy to answer any questions anybody has, and take suggestions. Ultimately we want this to be an open-source and creative poroject and we are encouraging people to take it where they want to... if people want to buy our game and play it with mechs they've built out of LEGO then, cool! Likewise if they want to only use parts of our mechs and use LEGO for other parts, or for the weapons/upgrades, then cool! If people want to glue the mechs together and paint them up and enter them in miniature painting competitions... awesome, do that! (I know i will :-)

We want people to have fun with it, if it's not your cup of tea, that's cool too!

Cheers folks

Ben

[Simon Beck]

Great photos, Ben (I especially like the vehicles and... is that a fried chicken restaurant?)

Edited October 16, 2013 by Simon Beck

[rocketandroll]

Great photos, Ben (I especially like the vehicles and... is that a fried chicken restaurant?)

Yep, although I considered sailing closer to the wind with the name, it does just say 'Fried Chicken' in Japanese :-)

Gonna put up some pics of the 'Mr Sushi' restaurant later too :-)

All anyone seems to do in Neon City is eat fast food and visit dubious nightclubs :-)

Ben

[WaysofSorting]

Ben,

Thanks for giving some insight to the project - it clearly is a labor you've put a lot of work into and I'm glad you're here to answer questions. There's still time to win over old curmudgeons like myself and your explanation and the Flickr page go a long way in doing so. Especially in illustrating how the parts interact, and some of the images of the "Gangs of Neon City" landscape really help sell the vision. I do love mecha games and will yet back this, even if only for the rules. Will you be updating the site with a "playthrough video?" Please link it here if you do.

Have you thought about just making the base pieces (The shield level indicator) available on their own? It seems like, from a "purist" builder point of view, that this is the piece that would be the only barrier to getting into the rules with my own parts.

Also - you may have already sent it to this site, but http://www.tabletopgamingnews.com is always posting kickstarter projects and they have a "submit news" tab. Further, they are owned by the coolminiornot site, and get lots of web-traffic.

Best!

[tedbeard]

Thanks for the response Ben. It makes more sense to me now. Good luck.

[Simon Beck]

Mechabrick is now over 80% of the way to its £13,000 Kickstarter goal - any pledges over this amount will enable Ben and his team to fund additional Mechabrick products as shown on the Kickstarter page. I'm very excited about this.