To help Unity beginners get their bearings inside a tremendously complex and powerful tool, Unity published small tutorials called microgames. Each of them represent a particular game genre, with the recently released LEGO microgame as the default option. Since I love LEGO, I saw no reason to deviate from this default. These microgame tutorials are implemented as Unity project templates that we can launch from Unity's Hub launcher, they're just filled out with far more content than the typical Unity empty project template.

Once a Unity project was created with the LEGO microgame template (and after we accepted all the legal conditions of using these LEGO digital assets) we see the complex Unity interface. Well aware of how intimidating it may look to a beginner, the tutorial darkened majority of options and highlighted just the one we need for that step in the tutorial. Which got me wondering: the presence of these tutorial microgames imply the Unity Editor UI itself can be scripted and controlled, how is that done? But that's not my goal today so I set that observation aside.

The LEGO microgame starts with the basics: how to save our progress and how to play test the game in its current state. The very first change is adjusting a single variable, our character's movement speed, and test its results. We are completely on rails at this point: the Unity Editor is locked off so I couldn't change any other character variable, and I couldn't even proceed unless I changed the character speed to exactly the prescribed value. This is a good way to make sure beginners don't inadvertently change something, since we'd have no idea how to fix it yet!

Following chapters of the tutorial gradually open up the editor, allowing us to use more and more editor options and giving us gradually more latitude to change the microgame as we liked. We are introduced to the concept of "assets" which are pieces we use to assemble our game. In an ideal world they snap together like LEGO pieces, and in the case of building this microgame occasionally they actually do represent LEGO pieces.

Aside from in-game objects, the LEGO minigame also allows us to define and change in-game behavior using "Behaviour Bricks": Assets that look just like another LEGO block in game, except they are linked to Unity code behind the scenes giving them more functionality than just a static plastic brick. I appreciated how it makes game development super easy, as the most literal implementation of "object-oriented programming" I have ever seen. However, I was conscious of the fact these behavior bricks are limited to the LEGO microgame environment. Anyone who wishes to venture beyond would have to learn entirely different ways to implement Unity behavior and these training wheels will be of limited help.

The final chapter of this LEGO microgame tutorial ended with walking us through how to build and publish our project to Unity Play, their hosting service for people to upload their Unity projects. I followed those steps to publish my own LEGO microgame, but what's online now isn't just the tutorial. It also included what they called "Creative Mods" for a microgame.