Touch touch Gunman reminds me a lot of arcade light gun games like Point Blank. The camera takes you through a western saloon and you’re trying to shoot as many things as you can to score points. Most everything is destroyable, and as the camera moves around you lose sight of things and gain sight of new things, so you’re frantically trying to shoot as much as you can before the camera moves on. You’ve got a six bullets and have to reload between clips so you can’t just mash shoot.
It has this nice whimsical feel that feels like a carnival game. The saloon is a bit of a mess after some sort of bar fight but there’s a guy cleaning glasses at the bar whose hat you can shoot off and there’s a group playing jolly saloon music in a corner. Mice are roaming the scene and there’s surreptitiously placed leather boots littered everywhere in a very gamey fashion. It was nostalgic.
I think, unfortunately, animations are tied to specific models. With the skeleton structure it would theoretically be possible for them to implement, but it would probably turn out pretty goofy given you can drastically change the scale of pieces.
The built-in puppet has a lot of settings to tweak to get something usable immediately, but animations aren’t really distinct from the models in this engine.
Dang that sucks. Considering how specialized a skill animation is but also how fundamental it is to the experience, having a way to separate that work from the other disciplines represented in the game would be incredibly valuable. I finished some of the character creation tutorials last night so I have a better understanding of how animating works. How much of the options presented in Dreams is present in regular computer software and how many additional functions have been added to smooth the workflow for casual users? A lot of Dreams animating looks like it will be setting keyframes, which is normal enough, but then there are tons of other options that adjust the procedural animation and extra effects (like the “springiness” slider). Overall it actually doesn’t seem to be that hard to do- you’ll just get better quality by taking your time and working on fine details, naturally.
I found this video this morning that touches on what my idea of how sharing animations would work, before I had any actual experience. It sounds like you can indeed create animations on a base body and then build on top of it separately in a separate creation (and in this case he’s actually discussing how both the animations and model can be worked on simultaneously by different people) but I guess the problems come in when the sculpting on the final body can interfere with the procedural animation and body physics (the video does go over a solution). For whatever reason I’ve been in the mood to really try animating movements first and then try creating a character out of it later, but I wonder how much trouble I’d run into down the line if I did even a baseline of how I want the animations to look before working on the actual body.
The creator has another dream called Babatunde. I found the character work in this one impressive. The main combo needs tweaking, but I thought the animation work and overall feel was good. I don’t know why so many games on Dreams gives enemies so much health though.
I finally played this the other day for a while. It’s fun! I hope you keep refining it, or at least make a couple more stages.
I haven’t made anything yet. I’m still going through the tutorials and randomly checking out all the weird 5 minute long things people are publishing, like the proof of concept demos or the remakes of already existing games. There is so much here it is overwhelming! I want to do everything all at once but I can’t because I have to take the time to learn the tools, which are thankfully incredibly easy to learn but there is so much there to learn like a never ending rabbit hole you can just keep going down forever.
I played Art’s Dream and during the ending song where it goes all high contrast black and white for a minute I was like oooh I should make like an interactive Sin City-esque comic thing. So that’s another idea in the bucket of ideas of things I want to try.
Anyone know how to reverse a run cycle? I’ve created a handful of keyframes and have them blending to animate one foot forward and then return to center. Is it possible to just flip the puppet horizontally to mirror this movement but with the other hand coming forward? I’ve tried finagling with selecting body parts and using the flip command under the Move tool (R2+ L3 or R3) but I’m not getting good results. I assume something with the way the puppets are designs to maintain some sort of sensible posture results in the puppet sometimes getting imperfect posture. Ever wanted to see the bottom of a puppet’s shoe?
Edit: I should probably post an example of the actual animation I’m trying to reverse:
Art’s Dream is really tonally bizarre even taking into account how it’s basically supposed to be the equivalent of a siggraph sizzle reel, but even so it’s incredibly accomplished, especially as an example of the dev tools
I played up through the train station and yeah, it’s a bit of an odd thing. It has a narrative but it’s too transparently a showpiece for people to see what’s possible with the toolset. And it works great with that; seeing what other people do is a great motivator because the tools are approachable enough that nothing ever feels out of reach. So by MM making this big polished showcase of different types of games, I’m sure it’s helped inspire different kinds of people to pursue different types of things.
I have the basis of my run mostly done. I didn’t notice until today that I had the arms and legs on the same side moving together rather than the opposite diagonals like an actual run! There’s a lot of tweaking needed on the timing and speed, and I need to pull more of the body into it, however using the procedural generation is very handy because it’s taken care of a lot of details I don’t have to think about. But it’s finnicky in its own ways and it’ll take time for me to understand how to work alongside it when I want to use it.
I had to modify my “neutral-ish position” keyframe because it felt like the run cycle kept pausing in the center. I didn’t really know what was causing it but I just made a random adjustment to the arms and the procedural generation somehow took it and melded it in and the final animation somehow ended up looking more natural. And one of the feet keeps dipping into the floor (or it’s dragging on the ground, not sure which), which is probably due to how it’s blending my keyframes and some of the sliders they have on the puppet settings that modify the procedural generation, so I’ll have to play with that later. But at least a basic look is down.
Going to work on the basic combo string next. Even if I don’t actually turn this is an actual model to be used in an actual game, just using the tools and working on animation has been fun. I imagine Dreams will give many people the creative bug and get them into actual toolsets (if animating on a PC is as easy as it is here then I might be one of those people).
After having used the DS4 for the last week I decided to give the Move controllers a try and wow, what a difference it is. These feel like magic in comparison. It really does feel like you’re reaching into the toybox and playing in it, grabbing and twisting all of the objects naturally. Moving and rotating objects feels a bit more clinical with the DS4, as you careful tweak the left and right sticks for movement and rotation. But with the move it’s literally you grab anything with a finger (right trigger) and then move and twist it like something you’re holding in real life. You can very quickly move and orient the screen, although I think mentally I’m approaching the perspective from the opposite axis from the way it controls so I’m working on adapting to it. But the swiftness, dexterity, naturalness, and just general pleasure of the creation process feels so much more enjoyable with the Move controllers (at least for now at the beginning).
Also- just like I did with VR, I thought the move controllers would make project creation much easier. But it never occurred to me that people would be making move controller games.
(There’s what seems to be a fairly polished game called Tower of Monsters designed for Move controllers that I wasn’t able to get loading properly, but it’s out there if anyone wants to try it. It also has a DS4 mode although it says Move is recommended.)
A lot of these should probably work with the DS4 as well since it has motion controls, but you can design things for the orientation and speed of the move controllers in mind. Man, Dreams lets you make regular games, PS Move games, and VR games? This game way more expansive in scope that I ever expected.
Yeah I’ve switched over exclusively to the move controllers the past few evenings as I slowly teach myself how to sculpt. Everything just goes quicker and is more intuitive. Dreams single handedly justifies the move controllers for me. I’d even go as far as to say they’re a must if you’re planning on spending any significant amount of time making things with the game.
this is such a huge step up for media molecule in terms of everything they wanted to do ten years ago and speaks to how much trust Sony is willing to put into their prestige studios
I wonder whether Dreams could have survived under any other leadership. I cannot imagine just any game being given the amount of time and space Media Molecule was without being lucky enough to have a leadership that truly believed in the project and valued the vision it was trying to achieve. I recall reading in an interview with some head in Sony- might have been Shuhei Yoshida- where they mentioned that they felt it was good to grow some projects even if they think they’re niche or won’t sell well because it’s good to allow space for creativity to foster and it helps broaden your content library’s personality. But at this point a lot of faces of Playstation’s past couple of generations have left for other pastures or moved to other positions so Dreams may have just managed to reach the finish line in time.
Somehow I feel like I heard about Kodu more than I ever heard about Project Spark but neither one seemed to become big hits. Did anything cool come out of those?
Is this something people are actually doing in professional settings? Or is it something people are trying to bring to professional settings?
Some are, some aren’t. It’s a transition period right now where there’s a huge push across all technical industries to streamline and integrate workflows using VR and other new technologies. There’s a lot of resistance though because changing up how you’re used to doing something is difficult for most people.
From personal experience doing CAD work in the civil engineering world there are people in both the public and private sectors trying to get everyone to move over to using new tech like BIM where design and plan production are all integrated into the same tech platforms so that firms who do the design and plan production, the clients they contract with and the construction companies that do the construction are all looking at the exact same design models in the same program during the entire process.
Which you might think is how it already works but right now everyone is using different programs and relying on emailing and calling each other during the life cycle of a project (which can often last for years at a time because America lol). It’s very difficult to convince someone that you can either move forward or move backward but you can’t stay in place. In the business world you’re either growing or shrinking, no in between.
