Dreams : create, share & play [PS4, PS5]

[Arwin]

I am on the Dreams group on Facebook and that is a pretty good place where people share stuff, and some truly amazing stuff regularly passes by. Including an idea that is a little bit like a Dreams version of a muppet show, which I thought was pretty good.

Of course if you’re doing something that ends up not working because of a bug that’s really annoying, though surprisingly there are often other ways to do things. I am just too short on time but I’ve played around with several things and I’m noticing there is this critical point from where things start clicking and you can start making some amazing progress really quickly.

I also think they should make more templates. Last time I checked there were two and they are a really great starting point.

Everything also depends on your ambition. Something like a 3D platformer is just amazingly easy to make ... make a custom puppet, throw some shapes around, set up some lights and it already looks and plays great.

I also think that the default puppets would be amazing for creating things like instruction videos, say for dealing with Corona etc . I wish there were more hours in the day ... I am also reading from ad makers who create stuff on Dreams now, which I can totally see ...

I hope they make more templates and add a PS5 mode by launch that makes the most of the new controller features and with new memory and graphics limits (although with the 1GB? You have now you can already create some amazing stuff)

 

[chris1515]

Improvement to the wiepout race

 

[Arwin]

Mark Healey from Dreams just dropped this small bit of info into the Facebook Dreams community:

“Vr will be using all the existing gadgets, cameras etc, we’ve added a new head tracking gadget which works as a camera tracker when not in VR, which is basically a container you put stuff into that you want to stick to head/camera.
Also we’ve added a new Imp/hand tracker gadget, which vastly improves what you could do with the old ‘follow imp’ option in a control sensor, making it suited to making hands etc that you can grab things in world with.

We’ve tried to make it easy to make content that works in both VR and non VR, so any existing content will in theory work in VR - but VR content wants to ideally be running at 60FpS, so optimisation becomes more important.

So, if you make content now, and use the imp mechanic for grabbing interacting - in VR that will automatically become 3D tracked in VR (both DualShock and PSMoves), hope that helps!

I’m so looking forward to seeing what gets made for VR!”

Sounds great!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I looked at the feedback portal history. MM do a good job of tagging recognised bugs but their last tag was a month ago. That suggests to me it'll be a month before they may consider my bug, and then who knows how long after that until it's finished.

 

[Arwin]

My hope is a few programmers are working on PSVR and the rest is working on PS5 with a little bit on bug fixing in-between ...

 

[milk]

I agree with the sentiments here. I think the broad flexibility and scope of dreams works against the playful feel of the creation process. Sometimes working with a simpler canvas and finding ways to do the unexpected within a smaller and more deterministic set of tools breeds more creativity than having complete freedom.
I think Mario Maker is a great example of a game that breeds creativity in a universally accessible way much more successfuly than dreams or even LBP.
I'm also sure this probably has been discusses internally within MM multiple times. They made a choice. They created a fantastically robust tool, but they lost a lot of accessibility in exchange for raw potential.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Mincecraft too. I think there's an inversely proportional relationship between complexity and popularity. Hmmm, YouTube really supports that view...

 

[Arwin]

A guy with the Dreams handle Ryan47 blows me always with his lovely and professional 3D cartoon animation style. With everyone really encouraging him I think he’s now started to work with some animators to bring them to life too. Definitely someone to follow if you want to learn or be inspired.

He only has one early one on YouTube right now but I’ve asked him on fb and he’ll upload his others soon.

 

[Arwin]

Mincecraft too. I think there's an inversely proportional relationship between complexity and popularity. Hmmm, YouTube really supports that view...

To some extent ... MineCraft is complex too in some ways but has existed for a long time.

Dreams is just starting.

 

[PSman1700]

@Arwin They should do a Efteling dreamride and/or carnival ride recreation in Dreams. Somehow that video reminds me of it lol, hard to explain

 

[eloic]

To some extent ... MineCraft is complex too in some ways but has existed for a long time.

Dreams is just starting.

Also, Minecraft is available on PC, and most kids have one, while PS4 seems to have a mature audience, mostly. I'm not reducing the phenomenon to kids vs adults, I'm just saying that it seemed that a big part of the Minecraft craze was powered by gamer (and even youtuber) kids. At least that's how I perceived it at the time... What do you think?

 

[Arwin]

I think the vast majority of kids playing Minecraft do so on consoles, or even phones and tablets.

But Dreams needs more templates. They have a few now and those have a huge potential for bringing in kids.

I could also imagine a kind of UI that starts with a much more limited feature set that has a lot of things setup by default to bring in novices more gradually. Or maybe just one UI submenu that is placed first that brings up a limited set that exposes the things a newcomer would need.

E.g. what I would do is something like:

- grid on by default
- nice default lighting setup, perhaps with day night cycle as option
- instead of primitives, select from a default group of assets (as you have several of already) with just building blocks, with a quick swap favorite selection like Minecraft
- default character that you can change and pick from a list
- option to ‘generate’ a basic world from the chosen template set
- option to choose to bring any creature or object etc into the game that are available online from others.

You get the idea.

Then from here newcomers can start looking at other features, animating things, creating their own objects, etc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

To some extent ... MineCraft is complex too in some ways but has existed for a long time.

Yes, people evolved into it. It was super simple and accessible, and now people are used to it, they are happy to learn new features. If it was everything it is now at launch, perhaps it wouldn't be anything like as people were intimidated? Or, they'd still enjoy it because at the basic level, it's a very accessible game with social elements?

 

[Globalisateur]

What makes Mario maker compelling is that people can quickly do Mario games with it. Without Mario and game design of Mario, the game would not work, at all. I expect one day Nintendo will do a Zelda Maker and it's going to be another hit.

Now dreams lack that and the main characters and stories invented by MM are charming but boring and uninteresting. It's a great tool for content creators, for people aspiring to be game developers or developers that want to make quick demos during their free time. But for the general public it's not interesting because it's too "general software tool" and not "Mario game maker" etc.

Now the thing is, Sony has tons of recognizeable characters with game designs they could use with Dreams. People could do a whole level of God of War with already the templates ready (Kratos, dragons, environnement etc). People could do Patapon levels if they had the templates ready, or they could re-invent TLOU story if they had all the characters and levels (at least the draft of them) ready to modify and use.

If Sony really want Dreams to work, they need to incorporate their own IPs into the templates, one way or another.

 

[PSman1700]

Minecraft is also on just about all platforms, including mobile where many play.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yes, people evolved into it. It was super simple and accessible, and now people are used to it, they are happy to learn new features.

Back in alpha and beta, and even the original release, Minecraft was far from simple or accessible. There was zero tutorial or guide, no hints to recipes or how different materials react under different conditions or why some possess different properties. It was literally, bang you're now in this world - not even a guide that punching stuff could deteriorate it. You needed to figure out literally everything super quick with zero help. They have added a bunch of stuff, but they've also streamlined gameplay in places and added an actual tutorial to get you on the right path.

My first 2 or 3 games I didn't even survive the first night, which was terrifying. It was great!

 

[BRiT]

I hope at least one "create your own game" style software title would see success.

For the most part it hasn't happened previously.

It hasn't happened for Disney's Infinity, but that was just a minor aspect of it.
It hasn't happened with Lego Worlds, but you dont have any solid way of controlling AI or changing other game aspects.
It hasn't happened for simple research project Kodu.
It certainly hasn't happened for Project Spark, despite it being fairly flexible.
I dont think it happened with previous iterations of Little Big Planet.
​

Is it just the fate of all games that are in this genre?

 

[Arwin]

No. From what I am seeing, Dreams will be a succes, and maybe already is. Just what it is now and with the audience it is reaching it is already incredibly valuable. And it is in nothing like the other projects as none of them gave you total freedom to create almost literally anything.

I am willing to bet serious money Dreams is here to stay - it is truly an amazing creative tool. If I could buy stock in it I would already have done so.

But we’ll need the templates and maybe even user profiles: focused experiences on musician, landscape artist, character artist, animator, object modeler etc and in different levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced etc.

The more I am seeing people make with it the more I am amazed by it.

 

[PSman1700]

I think it would help if it was available on more platforms. MC is so huge thanks to it being everywhere. Now i dont know if dreams could run on a phone/tablet though, maybe the latest ones?

 

[Globalisateur]

Also what it sorely lacks is multiplayer. Without multiplayer Minecraft wouldn't be the Minecraft we know today. I know my nephew would have never spent so many hours in Minecraft without his buddies playing with him in the same maps doing...stuff. Whatever they were doing, the most important is that they were doing it together.