Wow that first one was the LEAST bizarre?
Here’s a good one:
Also impressive:
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I was watching an interview on IGN and I knew the game had VR support in development but I had always imagined how this would help in creating dreams; the way it could improve your speed and perspective when creating art and sculpting models in the 3D space. What did not occur to me was that Dreams’s VR support actually meant you could make VR content. I think new genres and tech can be explored and pushed more easily by individuals and small groups just messing around with them, but VR has always been such a huge cost investment that I don’t think it can get the small little experiments to grow what that medium can be.
But if Dreams VR support actually works as well as the regular stuff right now does? VR might be about to get really wild. (Granted this is going to be restricted to what’s capable with either the DS4 or the wonky PS Move controllers).
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Been messing around trying to make a grappling hook first person character. I put a couple hours of work in it so far; it’s kind of fiddly to script in, but it mostly works. It’s pretty comparable to GameMaker drag n’ drop programming tbh, with a little more emphasis on sort of an analog circuit analogy.
I just implemented a feature where you keep momentum – that’s the first jump I show; before you would quickly slow down after getting a bunch of speed and landing.
Need to figure out how to draw a line between the character and grapple point next.
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Wow that’s cool. I like the feeling of momentum you gave it, because that’s one of the most important and fun parts of a grappling hook.
I got around to playing the Pilgrim and I was going to say that’s a great example of how the community is slowly building on itself, how you can tell the titular pilgrim character is clearly built using an existing Mario character and customized to fit the creator’s own game, and how you can go into the character’s geneology and find how the creator borrowed someone’s existing logic for a twin-stick shooter mechanic, someone who had just created and uploaded the logic for anyone to insert into whatever they wanted.
But then afterwards I found the better example was after that when the dream feed recommended the “Nostalgic” tag to me and there were three fan made Croc sequels in the first 10 results. Less jokingly, it really is a great example because they were all using the same Croc character but were completely different dream creators with their own level design sensibilities. There are lots of Crash, Spyro, and Tomb Raider games too.
I’ve started adding my favorite things I come across to this collection, so I can find them later if I want to. (I’ve already mentioned most of them in this thread, though.)
I haven’t yet created anything worth sharing because I keep getting carried away just constructing landscapes with nothing going on in them.
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I think I may have a new favorite Dreams creator. I searched for “Silent Hill,” just to see what might come up, and found this:
It’s kind of rough and I kind of wish it didn’t have direct SH references, but there’s lots of good imagery. And that led me to also discover this one:
I found it almost unplayable, but in a good way. I like how everything looks kind of wet. (@Dracko, this is one I would recommend to you if you ever get a chance to try Dreams. Especially if they keep adding to it.)
And then there’s this:
A model of a power plant, with narration by the creator. Straightforward with no horror elements at all. (It looks like I was the 18th person to experience this.)
Exploring Dreams creations reminds me of being part of a little game development community again, with all kinds of promising but unfinished projects that don’t entirely work or make sense, or that just end abruptly. It’s refreshing.
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I’m almost done with my grappling hook game! Just need to add more pickups and a highscore system (and probably some music or ambient sound).
The momentum you get is super fun!
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As far as making an area that big – it’s actually all made by copying the same sculpture a bunch of times. You flip and rotate and scale and intersect the same piece to make a bunch of interesting shapes. For it to work, you want your initial sculpture to kind of have cool details on all sides. You also want to scale at powers of 2 so that everything stays grid aligned.
I got the technique from the video below, and I think they’re better at it than me, but I’m pretty happy with how mine turned out anyway. The constraints made it really fun and flowy and easy to create.
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Alright, released it!
It’s mostly fun to make stuff in this, but damn if some of it isn’t extremely fiddly. Was sort of just hacking features in by the end, and it got a little messy.
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Can’t overstate how good and nice and creator-friendly the upgrade system is here compared to Mario Maker. Had a few bugs and added some music, and the game let me upgrade it in place. It even called out how many changes were made in the upgrade, and let me preview it from that screen. You can add version numbers and release notes and it saves all that stuff for you so you can revert if you need to.
Meanwhile in Mario Maker, I have to unpublish a level to even update it at all, and then I lose all the comments, likes, metadata, everything. Night and day!
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It’s also really satisfying to see it track how much time has been spent playing it – 18 hours combined across everyone at this point, which is probably (slightly) longer than the total time I worked on it, so that’s cool!
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Similarly, I have been surprised to get a bunch of comments on my modified version of a tutorial game that even still has the same name as the tutorial game it’s based on. (I only “released” it because that was the next step in the tutorial.) I have been gradually adding things to it, though, in an attempt to make it at least a little more interesting.
I really need to go through the rest of the tutorials. I still get lost in some of the logic and timeline stuff.
Also, I played your game last night, @Gate88. Nice work. I was too impatient to try to get a high score, though. I just messed around with the grappling line.
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Yeah, I tried to design it to satisfy both types of players. I’m into technical stuff in games, but I wanted it to be fun to screw around in too. I think that’s where a lot of my other projects fail, so I’m trying to make my stuff more friendly while still containing the elements that interest me the most.
Glad you had fun!
Another thing I played last night is simply titled “Bloodborne.” It’s a pretty faithful re-creation of the first town area in Bloodborne that gives no indication that you will be playing as the current president of the United States. There’s nothing to fight but each button other than X (jump) plays a quote. At one point, you come across a clone who follows you around.
I don’t recommend it, exactly, but I’m glad that this is a platform where people create whatever nonsense they feel like creating. And apparently any screenshot taken and “released” by anyone is available through the Dreams Web site.
As an attempt to make up for mentioning the above creation I will also mention another one that I discovered last night that impressed me with its atmosphere and subtle details.
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I think you’re underselling it – it’s actually rather cute and the subversion is operating on a level of awareness that a lot of other tutorial creations I’ve played don’t have.
Also the skeleton puppet is adorable so I think you’re getting a lot of points on that choice alone.
I liked this one. Nice sound design, esp with headphones.
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This was great too; I think it’s from one of the creators in your collection @wourme so you may have already seen it.
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I’m finding this game to be an amazing vehicle for surrealism and also horror.
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