I'm
really struggling with this game.
I've said all along that I doubt it'll gain traction, and I think that's the case now with some months out. There are no reports of millions of sales. There doesn't appear to be a huge community around it with YouTube content having lowish viewing figures. Some incredible creations out there and people just don't care to witness them. And this is with Lockdown everywhere and people having loads of time on their hands, they aren't wanting to grab Dreams and create stuff. I put all that down to the creativity being so inaccessible versus LBP which was so simple.
I've been trying to create something really simple, requiring me to go to forums to ask for support, only to discover the game is bugged and what I want is presently impossible. Along the way, I used the DS4 instead of the Move controllers for a spell, and the navigation is really awkward. There's a jittery imp thanks to motion controls, despite having a camera to help stabilise things, and MM have removed the Z-axis movement. I was fighting the interface a lot with that, and still do with the Move controllers where I've many more hours sunk in.
My idea is dirt simple, based on the MM realtime puppeteering showcase at one of the game shows - create a 'sock puppet' mapped to the Move controller where you can move it around in 3D space and open/close a mouth based on the trigger.
There's a video tutorial showing how to create an open/close mouth using keyframes. This was easily adapted to map to a button press by attaching a Controller Sensor to the bottom half of the head and running a button wire to the circuitry. I could possess the puppet and animate the head. Great. Simple and predictable. I then changed the Possession style to 'follow imp', and now I can move the head around, but the animation is distorted with the head collapsed in on itself.
That begins my querying and R&D, trying all sorts of things. Until finally I can prove it's bugged and joints fail on objects with Follow Imp behaviour. Slap a Controller Sensor on an object with Follow Imp behaviour. Add another object and link them with a String connector. Move the first object and the second swings around correctly. Add any amount of elasticity and it breaks, the second object collapsing onto the first. Similarly with keyframed joints, where my idea fails.
So I've spent some notable time creating a reproduction case and submitting a bug report. At some point it'll likely be fixed. However, my concern here is that's a pretty fundamental fault and not an obscure bug, and I expect, due to the complexity of the engine, there are going to be plenty of these issues. Furthermore, I expect changes in the game to introduce bugs because of this complexity. There are a couple of upset creators on the official feedback forum mentioning their creations getting broken on updates. That's incredibly frustrating, when you work so hard on a project only for a tools update to break it, and you don't know whether you should spend time trying to find a workaround, or wait until a fix happens, which might not even happen. If there's not even much audience for your creation, reasons to persist in creating are even fewer.
It feels like a productivity tool, not a game, and that's going to hamper adoption no end. My friend bought it to tinker, but ended up finding it too much like hard work at the end of the day and now spends his time play Apex Legends to relax. There's a lot I want to make with this, but I can't even get started.