what exactly is dreams a maker of? 3d games in general? explorable spaces?
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 āgamesā 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 appās 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 theyāre 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 canāt spare the effort or so on
itās interesting from a technical and procedural perspective ā 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 itās widely thought of as a pretty safe revenue source), so thereād have to be some business model attached to this, and Iām not sure that I donāt prefer all the dreams content being free as a rule? I never know how often the goal from āsanction more user contentā 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.
anyway thereās a reason we have both mostly-open and mostly-closed platforms and Iām all for making it easier to surface stuff but Iām not sure any of those solutions are gonna get anyone paid enough to jeopardize access
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 Iām 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 werenāt sure it would make it into the final release).
Itās an extremely robust set of art creation tools. The game doesnāt 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 thatās what they enjoy. Some of the stuff Iāve seen are games But Iāve 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.
Whatās 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 peopleās stuff. And even though anyone can borrow anyoneās 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
I think this is true but there is also a thing where if you want to publish something you make and youāve used someone elseās assets to make it youāll need to get their permission before being able to publish it. This basically amounts to the asset creator checking their inbox and hitting an āOkā 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 ābasicallyā three times in this post. I am feeling pretty ābasicā today I guess.
1 Like
Microsoftās Project Spark team, scattered to the four winds of the Willamette Valley, shed a combined single tear
Kodu looks on from the ancestorsā shrine on Mt. Rainier
3 Likes
oh gosh was that a Microsoft thing? I somehow remembered that entire product as an early preview of dreams hahaha
1 Like
infernal burn
1 Like
I feel like Iāve heard Project Spark wasnāt bad but I rarely ever heard people talk about it. It just never caught peopleās attention like LittleBigPlanet did earlier. The anticipation for Dreams has probably coasted entirely on MMās 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 itās that ambiguity of āwhat exactly is it?ā 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.
yeah, itās a really on the nose example of how Sony genuinely believes in their weird standard of prestige, whereas Microsoftā¦
ā¦
ā¦
Iām sorry, can we use a different word than ābelieveā here? Iām not following.
1 Like
Iām not sure how much this tracks with Sonyās recent output outside of Dreams, but they had said a while back that they liked to support weird or artsy stuff even if they donāt always make much money because it helps diversify the companyās 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
iirc, tokyo jungle was the result of some sony initiative of hiring people with no game development background to be directors
2 Likes
This should be done way more often.
Also where the fuck is Tokyo Jungle 2
3 Likes
forgot how much I missed Media Moleculeās signature āBBC childrenās presenter having a manic episodeā intro narration
between this and astro bot they really are on āwhat if a wii game was goodā lately
5 Likes
OK I have big ideas for my dream
2 Likes
season 3 of look around you
1 Like
Thony
1 Like
Thereās a pretty cool box puzzle game that I canāt remember the name of thatās floating around in Dreams. The throwing physics are a little wonky, but the secrets and alternate paths are way beyond what Iād imagine someone could whip up in a week or two (sorry, dev folks, I know nothing about game dev, I know game jams crank stuff out like this in a pinch!)
The little robot guy you play as has a solid trot to his movement, too.
every time someone mentions this i am going to have abrupt flashbacks to Sonic Dreams Collection, Iāve accepted there is nothing i can do about this
1 Like
So: this is Roblox but not shitty, right?
2 Likes