Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits:<p>> One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete.<p>My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces.<p>This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.
I came to say the same thing. The "build together" mode is super fun. Everybody can go at their own speed (without me dying inside watching my 7-year-old trying to figure out things). If you are faster, you build more subassemblies, that's it. Everybody is busy.<p>The kids particularly enjoyed the moments where you have to exchange subassemblies: "I need this from 'popcorn'!" "I need this from 'astronaut'".<p>When the kids got tired, subsequent steps were assigned to me as if nothing had happened. I am guessing there's a DAG of tasks (to build subassemblies), and the tasks just get picked up by individual participants.<p>10/10
Had no idea this was a thing, sounds like it’d be fun with the kids. Who gets the next piece has been a problem as long as there’s been lego
On the contrary, this would ruin Legos for me and my girlfriend. We play it that one person is building, and the other person is taking the instructions and trying to speak them to the builder, who isn't allowed to look at the instructions. It's very fun and a great way for us to keep our communication going well in the relationship.
This reminded me of coming across LeoCAD (<a href="https://www.leocad.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.leocad.org/</a> - first release in 1997!) as a kid and playing around with it for endless nights, wondering how close it was to whatever tool Lego was using in-house.<p>Looking at screenshots of older versions gave a burst of nostalgia.
If you've ever made a digital model of Lego it can be quite surprising just <i>how hard</i> it is to make good instructions at the quality of Lego's - because you have to not only consider how the model goes together (can't place a brick after the bricks on top of it) but also how you can even SEE what the piece is and where it's going.
It's a skill, but it's not too hard to get decently good at it. It's mostly a matter of actually building your model in the real world and iteratively improving your digital model and instructions from there, and changing the camera angle for steps that need it.<p>Most of the time is spent fighting with Stud.io (the software) and dealing with its bugs (it runs OK in Bottles (i.e., managed Wine environments), but stupid rendering bugs mean you may have to do the final export step on a device with a different GPU).<p>When you also want to print a booklet of instructions, getting the generated steps neatly out of Stud.io's instruction maker and into a sane pipeline for making the print-ready PDFs takes some work (as well as CMYK conversions), but that is mostly a matter of setting up some scripts to wire up pdftk and ImageMagick and friends.
Indeed, it's hard to find a balance between what's too verbose and what's too hard. For relatively complex models it's also almost impossible to do "quality control" without actually building it.<p>However, I agree with the other poster that you can get good at it. And you really have to do it anyway, since creating instructions will find bugs in anything but the simplest models and you want to solve those before paying for the pieces.
It’s incredible some of the little details in LEGO instructions.<p>My son and I were assembling a set, and one of the corner pieces was strangely absent. My son asked, “why can’t we put this piece in yet?”<p>The answer came when we turned the page and saw the model had to be flipped. That missing corner piece was the only thing we could use to guide our placement of pieces on the underside of the model.<p>Similar things in more complex sets include using different, bright colours for bricks on the left/right sides of the internal parts of models. It makes it easy to keep your place as the model rotates through the steps.
I learned this when trying to put together a Lego Baneblade, there was a BrickLink Studio file which contained the fully built BaneBlade, but the instructions were not put together for it. I did the automatically generated instructions for each part of the Baneblade, but they were all over the place, including instructions to place a brick after bricks on top of it. Still got it built though.
Very interesting article, but not very well written. A handful of examples from the first half:<p>1. Suddenly in the 7th paragraph: “We know for a fact that from 1967 and until 2003 the main supplier of drawing building steps for the LEGO Group was a company called Palle…”. That’s a super odd thing to preface with “We know for a fact” - are all other claims/items in the article actually not known if they aren't similarly prefaced?<p>2. They jump around a little in time, such as mentioning the 60s but then going back to the 50s in the next section.<p>3. Some photos don't show what year or decade the set or instructions are from.<p>4. They start by mentioning the 50s, but it would be helpful to also mention how long the bricks were made before then to quickly understand the length of the pre-instruction era - it appears 49, or 39 for wood versions, per some quick googling.
> mention how long the bricks were made before then to quickly understand the length of the pre-instruction era<p>Worth mentioning that Lego lifted the idea from Kiddicraft. Hilary Page patented Self-Locking Building Bricks in 1939 but had committed suicide by the time Lego brought their product to the UK.<p><a href="https://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Home/Products/39/0" rel="nofollow">https://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Home/Products/39/0</a>
There's a bunch of lines before the 7th paragraph that say stuff like "suggests" and immediately before the line you quoted, "Although the material is scarce on the subject,".
That's just the nature of history, sometimes you just don't have the full documentation even when you're talking about your own company.
I would love simpler (harder) instructions! It's too easy tbh brick by brick as it is today. 1964 looks lovely. I also have a gripe with the complexity of modern bricks (besides "basic bricks" sets). It's getting harder to build something else than what the model is.
In the 80s you would get the harder instructions through the "alternative builds" on the back on the cardboard box. Just an image without instructions.
Agree one hundred percent.
The build together option seems only required because ik modern instructions there are only like a few parts per step. Back in the day it was like 10-15, which meant every step took longer. It seems too automated today, too verbose.
And yes cross building is difficult because of a lot of very small parts.
This 1980 style was also lovely. I rebuilt this model a few years ago - these instructions strike the balance just right. They make you think.<p><a href="https://lego.brickinstructions.com/lego_instructions/set/8860/Car_Chassis" rel="nofollow">https://lego.brickinstructions.com/lego_instructions/set/886...</a>
There is other good stuff on that site.<p>Eg that tractor.<p><a href="https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-the-lego-ferguson-tractor" rel="nofollow">https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-the-lego-fergu...</a>
Might as well mention a couple of lego projects I've been working on, a parts browser TUI and a 3D model (eg .stl or .obj) to lego model (ldraw) converter:<p><a href="https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/hbmartin/legolization/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hbmartin/legolization/</a><p>I'm actively trying to get good instructions out of the legolization project now
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