
A video game that lets you make video games - Reedx
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/dreams-the-video-game-that-lets-you-make-video-games
======
nurbl
I've been using Dreams since the beta over a year ago. I'm mostly interested
in 3D sculpting and animation, but I've played around with most of the tools.
Here's my impression.

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.

~~~
ijpsud
Thanks for the explanation!

> 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.

~~~
falcor84
I'd actually be very happy with something like YouTube Premium (formerly known
as Red) whereby you pay a monthly subscription to access all of these Dreams
games, and a majority of that revenue would be redistributed amongst the
creators, e.g. proportional to play time. This would then be quite similar to
the current PS Plus and PS Now subscriptions.

------
slavik81
The SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation for Dreams was amazing[1]. They started by
experimenting with some very outlandish ideas for modelling and rendering
their worlds.

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...](http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRAPH-2015-sml.pdf)

~~~
leppr
Fascinating, thanks.

Here's the video for the presentation which includes animations:
[https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI](https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI)

------
vuldin
Some other comments here make the assumption that Dreams is like Roblox or
Minecraft. But from what I can see it is way more than those games, and a
person should be able to tell that without even playing the game. You can
watch videos of the content people are creating within Dreams and see just how
varied this is in comparison to other tools.

~~~
jere
Yea, just from reading about Dreams it seems basically like a game engine more
than a game, albeit a very accessible one that also highlights user generated
content prominently a la Mario Maker.

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.

~~~
corysama
My career has been making game engines. What I've seen created already by the
pre-release users of Dreams is incredible. Just scroll through
[https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams](https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams)
and keep in mind that everything you see was made by random users completely
on their PlayStations. No Photoshop. No Maya/Blender. No IDE. Just a joystick.

~~~
Animats
_Two_ joysticks. And that makes a difference.

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.

~~~
nurbl
This may actually be the single most innovative thing about it. I think
they've managed to boil down games making to a limited set of functional
pieces that fit together in a huge number of ways, and then spent years honing
an UI that make them usable with a single game controller. Mind you, the
controller does have a dozen buttons (some of them analog), two joysticks, a
touchpad and a gyro, so it's not _that_ simple :)

------
Waterluvian
Their demonstration game, "Art's Dream" is a masterpiece in my opinion. It has
such charm. As Vinesauce Vinny said, it will either inspire people to go out
and make their own wonderful creations or discourage people who will think
they can't ever come close to it.

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.

------
dharma1
This looks really cool for kids. But shame it's PS4 only - looks like the
studio was bought by Sony 10 years ago. I'm not sure how much of what you
learn here using a PS4 game controller is transferrable when a young person
graduates to using "real" desktop tools as they get older.

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.

~~~
nurbl
Hard to say, but the programming parts are fairly general and low level so the
ideas should transfer pretty well. E.g. there are numeric values, mathematical
operations, logic gates, etc. It can perhaps be compared with LabVIEW.

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...

------
formalsystem
Is anyone aware any similar product that also pays back game developers and
modders for how many people download their games or how many times people used
an asset they created?

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.

~~~
mamurphy
Fortnite has the support-a-creator program, where players can enter a
creator's code in the in-game item shop to choose to divert a percentage (5%,
but they have upped it to 20% once for a special event) of all in-game
purchasers to a creator of their choice. The creator can be a map-maker,
streamer, blogger, etc.

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.

[0][https://www.epicgames.com/affiliate/en-
US/overview](https://www.epicgames.com/affiliate/en-US/overview)

~~~
jpindar
For those who haven't tried it - in Fortnite Creative you can create a lot
more than fps levels. I've seen puzzle games, mazes, obstacle courses,
scavenger hunts etc., and there's a wide variety of differently themed assets
available.

------
hyperpallium
Very fertile ground for 2-3 years, due to game-scarcity.

It's not that Dreams is revolutionary (it's not, just a step forward), but
that you can create with only a console.

\---

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)](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_\(software\))

A similar impulse was thinking AI will be easy...

------
neovive
Microsoft also tried this with Project Spark in 2013 [1], but eventually
closed the project at the end of 2016. It was actually pretty fun to build and
play games on box XBox and PC.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark)

------
Zenst
I watched
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh3-7F0SrAQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh3-7F0SrAQ)
a review of this `game` and wow, some amazing stuff can do - kinda feels like
the vibe adobe flash had in the days.

------
Kiro
I really don't understand how people can make all these incredible things with
just a controller and no programming.

[https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams](https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams)

~~~
meheleventyone
It supports the move controllers to give a lot of control over sculpting and
animation. There’s also a fully fledged node based scripting language.

------
bigtunacan
This New Yorker article makes it sound like this is something revolutionary.
How long ago was Roblox created? That's nothing but a giant game creation
sandbox and it lets the creators charge for their content. It's simple and
intuitive enough to use that my 10 year old had been creating her own
minigames for more than a year now.

~~~
CivBase
Wikipedia says 2006, the same year that Garry's Mod was released, another
"video game that lets you make video games". There are plenty of other
examples too. I'm not sure why this author treats it like a new, revolutionary
concept.

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.

~~~
city41
The limited nature can also make them appealing. A lot of the charm in Mario
Maker 2 is the clever things people come up with within the restrictions.

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...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkNnISDtfeFhQRSCjnUplA)

~~~
a_t48
Was wondering if this was going to be SALTI. We must hang out in the same
discord. ;)

------
jes5199
okay, so programmatic behaviors in the game are specified with a graph of
virtual wires between “gadgets”. It seems like this is the always the metaphor
that gets chosen to replace coding in text - but I don’t think it’s exactly
good! How do you refactor? How do you share code?

~~~
honkycat
You can't. But people like to pretend we are all just taking a piss with our
text-based languages and full-time jobs.

~~~
honkycat
I feel that Penny Arcade nailed it when they described the game as:

"Using clumsy tools for days and days to make a worse version of something
that already exists inside of someone else's product"

~~~
bathtub365
If all they can see is people recreating existing things they have a pretty
narrow-minded view of this.

Also, people who use this wouldn’t otherwise be firing up the Unity editor.

~~~
imtringued
I agree with this perspective. It allows people to enter an industry early and
then let them grow their skills over time.

------
brutal_boi
If we effectively are living in a simulation:

"A video game that lets you make video games that let's you make video games"

------
quirkafleeg3
my problem with dreams is that someones time would be better spend learning a
proper game engine like unreal or unity

------
OrgNet
Any chance that game runs on a PS4 emulator?

------
mister_hn
I recall it was possible also in Second Life to do the same..so, nothing new

~~~
Animats
Yes, but the building interface is far worse. SL never cracked their UI
problems.

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.

