Greetings, fellow VE members,
I started development on a free-to-play Lego-themed MMO recently, with the working title "Build-A-Brick Universe". It's not going to be a little kid MMO like the official Lego Universe game, though; target age group is 12+ year olds (12 year olds are a lot smarter/mature than most people give them credit for). I don't have a development team yet, but I've made a bit of progress with a lot of help from my younger brother.

So far I've decided on a Spore-like setting, with space colonies being established around the galaxy. Each player starts out with his/her own small planetoid and a handful of bricks to build buildings and vehicles with. Main focuses are quests, mining/crafting, and PvE combat. Buildings, vehicles, and even scenery will be fully customizable using lego bricks. Bricks and energy are the game's limiting factor, currency, and level. The amount of batteries you have determines the size of your ship and the strength of your parts. Regular bricks are obtained through PvP kills and mining, while "special" bricks like batteries, lasers, and shields are obtained through quests and PvE.

My brother has been kind enough to setup a Facebook page for the game, and let me host the game on his site.

I have a couple things I would really like your opinions on.
1. What kind of things should I do to avoid cliches like "kill x of y"?
2. What type of gameplay should the ground-based parts be: FPS, or third-person platforming?
3. How much would the lego-building elements effect your opinions on this kind of game?
4. What is a good, underused story I could use? Normal faction fighting stories are way overused.
5. What other opinions and suggestions do you have?

Well, I do this stuff every moment I'm not tutoring, swimming, or sleeping. So, luck may or may not be an issue The game should run on any decent setup, but we haven't done a lot of testing yet. Would anyone mind testing? I'm only releasing the vehicle designer currently, but I'm working on the rest of the game in a separate "scene". All graphics are WIP or placeholders.

You will need the Unity Webplayer to run this. Don't worry, it's just a plugin, like Flash.

Build-A-Brick Universe

It should be easy enough to figure out. Controls are:
right-click+drag - rotate camera
drag+delete - removes brick
left control+drag - moves brick up/down
drag+left/right keys - rotate brick

The bar above "Creation Name" is the energy bar. Batteries increase the available energy, while other bricks reduce it.

When you want to save, Fill in the Creation Name and Author spots, and then click "Save Creation". The game then sends the creation to the server and re-loads the "Brickshelf". Clicking a creation in the Brickshelf will load it.

Copyright permissions from Lego?

Well, it's not infringing on any of Lego's copyrights, I've double-checked. They only have copyrights to the name "Lego" and the brick molds. And by CoC you mean Code of Conduct?

The same way Megabloks got away with it; slightly change the brick's design. In my case, they aren't hollow. That evades all the design copyrights right there.