A video game that lets you make video games
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It basically attempts to boil down video game behaviors to a fairly small number of simple "gadgets" ("mover", "rotator", various sensors, connectors, cameras, etc, plus the usual logic and programming pieces) that fit together into a pretty general engine. There are also higher level features you can use, such as a flexible human "puppet" with algorithmic movements.
It all runs in a graphics engine that is itself pretty inventive. It does not use polygons, but instead models consist of basic positive or negative 3D shapes blended together, and their surfaces consist of particles that can be configured in various ways.
I can't really compare it with other game engines since I haven't used them, but I think it's much closer to something like Unity than to Minecraft. It's obviously simplified a bit, but fundamentally I think it's all there. You can (in principle) make games in any genre, but really any kind of interactive or non interactive stuff. And then there's the sculpting and animating bit. Oh, and there's a sound and music production environment in there. So it actually contains something like Blender and a DAW too. Plus it's a collaborative platform where people can share, use and remix each others stuff.
I'm very impressed with Dreams. Media Molecule have managed to compress an entire creative suite into a PS4 and made it actually nice to use with a single game controller. All the tools are way deeper than they have any right to be. The presentation is obviously aimed at a younger audience, but if you can stand that it's a lot of fun even to just explore the functionality.
It's not a great programming environment though, at least when you're used to working with normal tooling. You can make reusable components but it's fairly clumsy. The thing I can most compare it to would be LabVIEW.
In the end, to me it's not really about making AAA games or "being productive", but just a general outlet for creativity. I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.
> I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.
I tend to agree, but I also really like what YouTube has created with the ability to monetise videos: Many thousands of people who are now full-time independent publishers. From the demos that I've seen of this game, it could give aspiring game makers a pathway in the game industry which doesn't require joining a big studio, or learning (relatively speaking) complex tools. But that only works if they're able to sell their creations.
Perhaps if they have strong content moderation (to prevent spammy stuff which tends to occur when money starts getting involved), then they might be able to maintain a great community while creating more independent developers.
After all, Roblox has shown that monetisation in the game-creation space isn't necessarily a disaster.
It was a very ambitious project. Hopefully Dreams finds success, because I would love to see more of it.
[1]: (slides) http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...
Here's the video for the presentation which includes animations: https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI
Game creation tools have never been very accessible and surfacing UGC without the player having to dig for it feels like a relatively new phenomenon.
As soon as I read that article I started watching "How to build in Dreams" videos. The user interface is very unusual yet seems to work. This may be a UI breakthrough. The UI is as complex as the ones in most 3D design programs, but it's much more accessible to the casual user.
Honestly, after trying Dreams I wouldn't be surprised if DualShock integration became a feature of serious 3D modelers and game engines.
I agree. A good example of this is the fantastic keyframe timeline that moves through 3D space as a series of dimensional slices.
I absolutely love the asset sharing and reuse works. I love making little games for fun but my problem has always been that I'm no visual or audio artist.
Roblox (the current 8+ kids favourite) also has some elements of this, but it is quite a trashy addiction fueling virtual currency money making ecosystem - good for the company that owns Roblox but not something that I think is great for kids.
My main worry with Dreams is that it is a closed ecosystem, which is always a minus in my book. So far it does not feel exploitative at all, and Dreams does have some cool "under the hood" features such as OSC support. I don't think the studio itself is likely go evil, but in the end they are owned by Sony...
Modding on PC isn't the best experience since it requires a lot of work on the developer side to create an API for you AND you need to go ahead and learn how this API works by staring at a small number of samples.
If the game doesn't have an API you need to disassemble the game and figure out how to actually integrate your changes but you can't distribute it since you're violating the developer's intellectual property.
However, modding is amazing, it's the best part about PC gaming. Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota, all mods. Modding increases the potential play time of a game in an unbounded way. Why isn't it commonplace for me to be able to command alt click and then just add a new character to the game with 3 basic abilities and then share that to my friends. You can't mod a movie, there is no underlying code you can change freely to add whatever dialog you want or change the position of a camera.
Is there no way to align the economic incentives of players and creators when it comes to modding? How would you split up the pie between modders, original creators and consumers especially considering that modders can increase the size of the pie. What creator wouldn't want to increase the longevity and relevance of their game?
I'm optimistic that more games will be more moddable more easily. Giving modders and creators the tools to distribute their work AND make money off of it, will create a platform that will dethrone Steam and produce memes for ages to come.
If anybody wants to talk more about this, please feel free to email me.
Steam Workshop [1] is a platform for distributing mods for games which support it on Steam. A few years back it introduced support for paid content [2], but was soon after removed due to community backlash [3].
[0] https://www.roblox.com/developer-exchange/help
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop
[2] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent
[3] https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements...
The program incentivizes continued content creation by creators, and dis-incentivizes moving on to another game, as the creator's SAC revenue would dry up over time.
How are you thinking of paying people? If I make a really popular mod of a game do I get a % of that games sales or just some fixed per download amount. How do you deal with popular plagiarism, I minimally change a mod and figure out how to be featured prominently in ranker.
Would you say a significant part of your player base consists of game developer?
What does the easy modding workflow look like right now? I'm looking forward to checking out https://github.com/modio/UnityPlugin
It's called a video game engine. You make and market a game, then people buy it, and depending on how many people buy it you get paid.
It's not that Dreams is revolutionary (it's not, just a step forward), but that you can create with only a console.
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Game makers are a very cool and exciting product category, but also very old, and never seem to really take off.
Making games is hard, even with teams of experts, the best tools money can buy, and inhouse tooling.
Programming - a subset - is also hard. There was once a fad of programs that generate programs, like The Last One https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
A similar impulse was thinking AI will be easy...
The problem with these games is they just end up being a weird middle ground between development tools and games. The "gameplay" is driven purely by the player's creative drive, which results in a somewhat niche audience. The toolset also usually ends up being more accessable than normal development tools, but also much more limiting.
The article doesn't make it clear what is actually special about this game. It just reads like a fluff piece.
The really enthusiastic creators _really_ learn how the editor and game engine works, for example this document goes into detail about how to take advantage of a quirk of the engine to pull off elaborate constructs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...
Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.
That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.
I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well.
Not expensive give a try.
Specifically, I think of this personal account: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/
The favorite example is star control 2 versus Mass effect, the latter being a clear spiritual successor and yet somehow managed to be worse in nearly every aspect except graphics, and perhaps combat (which, in general, is fairly bland and uneccesary in both titles... but ME does admittedly have more depth to it's combat)
So yes, this is clearly revolutionary technology.
The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be
"Using clumsy tools for days and days to make a worse version of something that already exists inside of someone else's product"
Also, people who use this wouldn’t otherwise be firing up the Unity editor.
I hope software continues to empower creative expression in new ways like this and the barrier to entry keeps being lowered.
I don't understand this motivation. Did they get the computer science degree only because they thought they needed credentials to be allowed to program? I mean, most of the clearly started programming during their college time but before they received their degree. Node based programming is done by beginners because learning a text based language just isn't a very strong barrier for anyone who is actually willing to invest the time. How long does it take to learn 50% of the most commonly used programming language syntax constructs? Maybe a month? Maybe less? Before you say that it's impossible to build a mental model that is useful for programming in one month, I am strictly talking about the interface to the computer (syntax/nodes). You still need the same mental model with a node based language.
I personally read a C book when I was a teenager and I basically grokked the syntax in the book in 7 days (not the entire language). The difficult parts were actually obtaining a mental model of things like pointers and how the heap and stack works, not which words or symbols to type to satisfy the compiler.
LabVIEW is pretty popular in some circles, and many DSP/FPGA tools also use a component+wire model. Verilog is text, but uses a similar model; there’s even a wire keyword.
Overall I'd say that collaboration patterns could work if you had a group that knew how they work and supported them.
"A video game that lets you make video games that let's you make video games"
Sinespace, which uses the Archimatrix parametric CSG system, is the closest I've seen to this. Stretch a couch, get more cushions but not wider arms. Stretch a wall, get more windows but not wider ones. That lets you create parametric objects with constraints.