Games You Played Today Classic Mini

King of Posters
#3755

I know the physics of LBP was also one of it’s biggest issues, but I’ve seen a couple of videos of levels people have made with what looks like real solid game feel. I was trying to find one really nice and polished one with wall jumping and sliding that I can’t find anymore (maybe it was in the Giant Bomb video?) but I stumbled on this one and dang, I love the look of it.

Like, the argument that always comes up with stuff like this is “why don’t you just learn to make a real game using actual PC software instead of spending so much time on this limited toolset,” but I feel like there’s something to be said about the medium of this being a video game for your PS4 tha eases people’s apprehensions about jumping in and messing around with creation tools. Maybe it lowers your expectations so you get wowed easier by it and feel like you accomplished something, or maybe it’s the familiarity provided by the PS4 controller that “gamifies” the act of creation just due to your control method. But I think stuff like this is really great. And Dreams seems like it does a great job of lowering the friction involved with seeing something, playing it yourself, and then copying it to see how it was made.

8 Likes
#3756

Let’s take it farther: Software like this gets so fully featured, why not let users build standalone applications and sell them or otherwise distribute them outside the software maintaining full rights of whatever they create?

2 Likes
#3757

I was literally just reading a Twitter thread about this, with some input from Media Molecule. I have no idea how to use twitter, but I think it starts with this thread https://twitter.com/CasualEffects/status/1123225870414635008. The response by @mmalex gets cut off so then I had to click their second post there to see the rest of their comment.

Edit: I recall RPG Maker is coming out on Switch. I wonder if that has any exporting options, at least to PC as there seem to be a lot of RPG Maker games on Steam.

1 Like
#3758

It’s almost like an intuitive user interface that makes immediate sense is a really big deal

3 Likes
#3759

From the 3DS version:

#3760

Good project idea: pouring through old PSX RPG maker games uploaded through dexdrive

7 Likes
#3761

That’s still gated though a dedicated “game” you have to download and play though, right? I thought we were looking more for games able to be distributed as individual applications independent from their “game makers”. Maybe that’s nigh impossible for console based game makers though.

1 Like
#3762

I think it depends a lot on what console holders allow, and the software developers feel like implementing. There’s not really any technical reason consoles couldn’t support that, they just don’t.

#3763

i think the most interesting thing about dreams is that, unless i am mistaken, everything anyone creates can be used by anyone else no matter what.

they could still allow asset/code export to some more universal formats, to share and even as a way to outsource archival for the inevitable closure of the service at some point in the future, and give some kind of “you figure out the legal stuff if you do this” kinda disclaimer, i guess though

1 Like
#3764

what exactly is dreams a maker of? 3d games in general? explorable spaces?

#3765

I think a lot of this would be down to presentation more than anything?

like, if Sony wants to create a way to add additional user-created Dreams “games” to the store or to the application launcher or whatever, they could accomplish that by allowing a user to package and ship a script+assets package that would be associated to another app’s runtime executable. that would avoid end users having to go through all the licensing and security overhead of shipping on console, but it would mean that they’re perennially tied to some other app for those purposes, which would likely be unsatisfactory in some other way, even if that app were promoted beyond the level of a regular game to some quasi-SDK status. and then, what, they allow pinning some user content to frozen older versions of the game-bundle-as-SDK until a vulnerability is discovered in those older versions and all of the content frozen to that release has to be migrated and inevitably some developers opt not to do that or can’t spare the effort or so on

it’s interesting from a technical and procedural perspective – not impossible, but not trivial.

also, software licensing is generally very lucrative for console maintainers (it sort of has to be high margin given the work involved but I think it’s widely thought of as a pretty safe revenue source), so there’d have to be some business model attached to this, and I’m not sure that I don’t prefer all the dreams content being free as a rule? I never know how often the goal from “sanction more user content” is like, trying to get some tangible amount of patreon scratch into the hands of people who have no other income and want to make games.

#3766

anyway there’s a reason we have both mostly-open and mostly-closed platforms and I’m all for making it easier to surface stuff but I’m not sure any of those solutions are gonna get anyone paid enough to jeopardize access

#3767

I think the easiest analogue might really be a Flash editor. Just like people have used flash for everything from movies to games to music players, in Dreams you can make art with a 3d model sculptor, animate the art and models using an animator, add interactivity to those models to turn them I’m into interactive art or games, and make sounds and music using a built in digital audio workstation with microphone support (they said they had midi support working but weren’t sure it would make it into the final release).

It’s an extremely robust set of art creation tools. The game doesn’t sound like it encourages one form of media over another and you can instead categorize and tag your work as whatever you deem it to be. So they anticipate there will be people just make models, people who just make make environments, or people who just make effects because that’s what they enjoy. Some of the stuff I’ve seen are games But I’ve also seen a lot of environments that are just made to run around in and look at. Lots of 3d models to admire the craft work of. And lots of pictures.

What’s cool is what victor mentioned, where you can add anything anyone else had made to your library to use in your own work, free to edit and manipulate. So you might suck at modeling and music but you can just borrow other people’s stuff. And even though anyone can borrow anyone’s creations for their own work, the game tracks attribution and usage, so you can always see who originally created what and all the instances of their usage within Dreams.

My understanding is almost all content Media Molecule includes in the game was made within Dreams itself (levels, story scenes, music), so that probably helped develop the feature set and usability of the tools.

1 Like
#3768

I think this is true but there is also a thing where if you want to publish something you make and you’ve used someone else’s assets to make it you’ll need to get their permission before being able to publish it. This basically amounts to the asset creator checking their inbox and hitting an “Ok” button, I believe.

Any type of game, basically. So far it seems like if you can imagine it there is a way to make it in Dreams or there are people working on making it possible to make it. You can make sounds, images, animations and logics (maybe?) and put those up for other people to download and use basically.

I think eventually it will reach a point where you can just download templates for different types of games and fill in the blanks as you go with your own stuff if you prefer. But right now everything kind of has to be made from the ground up.

Damn I wrote “basically” three times in this post. I am feeling pretty “basic” today I guess.

1 Like
#3769

Microsoft’s Project Spark team, scattered to the four winds of the Willamette Valley, shed a combined single tear

Kodu looks on from the ancestors’ shrine on Mt. Rainier

3 Likes
#3770

oh gosh was that a Microsoft thing? I somehow remembered that entire product as an early preview of dreams hahaha

1 Like
#3771

infernal burn

1 Like
#3772

I feel like I’ve heard Project Spark wasn’t bad but I rarely ever heard people talk about it. It just never caught people’s attention like LittleBigPlanet did earlier. The anticipation for Dreams has probably coasted entirely on MM’s reputation from LBP, which was good enough for Sony to have the leniency to permit MM to reboot the game from scratch 5 or 6 times (I believe this was stated in an interview).

Meanwhile, Project Spark was a grander vision than LBP from a different studio. Maybe it’s that ambiguity of “what exactly is it?” without a track record to fall back on? Maybe the visual style played into it to. LBP had Sackboys and the entire playset aesthetic. Looking back at Project Spark all of the screens look like a blander Fables guest starring Conker. Maybe you can change that visual style but none of this promotional material communicate that well.

Maybe MS can reboot Project Spark with the Power of the Cloud tm.

#3773

yeah, it’s a really on the nose example of how Sony genuinely believes in their weird standard of prestige, whereas Microsoft…

…

…

I’m sorry, can we use a different word than “believe” here? I’m not following.

1 Like
#3774

I’m not sure how much this tracks with Sony’s recent output outside of Dreams, but they had said a while back that they liked to support weird or artsy stuff even if they don’t always make much money because it helps diversify the company’s portfolio and personality. Someone had to have believed in that enough to keep grabbing company resources away from big name stuff during the PS3 era. There is no other reason someone would go through the effort of convincing Sony to greenlight The Last Guy.

2 Likes