Dreams, a video game designing platform that failed.

[Eren Eeager]

Media Molecule, the company that made little big planets, released this incredible platform called dreams a year ago. It was supposed to revolutionize game development process. Giving people an opportunity to channel their creative potential without worrying about learning and doing all the programming hassle. Imagine being able to directly be involved in designing your game without writing any code! You can use a whole library of objects and items, bunch of different trees, bunch of different textures for soil, grass, and other things. You can just focus on your creativity in Dreams. But what happened? Dreams failed and virtually nobody talks about it in youtube. Why is that? Because we as a society didn't develop a sense of collectice purpose and still work in a very competitive manner. Dreams should have been a project shared by tens of game developers but looks like nobody is advanced enough to think in these ways. Dreams would never succeed in an orange society. And that's an example why advanced technology is not the solution for many of mankind's problems. The ego is still there.

All of the games below are designed in dreams!! Thousands of different games with totally different styles and graphics could be designed using dreams. But it is just a wast for our society.

 

[Leo Gura]

Developing a single high quality game requires so much manual, creative, and complex labor that there is no way anyone is going to dumb that process down to make it accessible to normies. The complexity of even a small game is staggering and they take 10s to 100s of man-years to create.

Game creation will never be easy, fast, cheap, or accessible. That's why it failed. It was an impossible dream.

[Eren Eeager]

@Leo Gura

@Leo Gura you sure know a lot about video game industry. But what about if video gamea corps made a collaboration to make the perfect games engine that cuts all the coding bullshit and focus only on expressing your artistic creativity? That would be cool but it is a stage yellow project I think.

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Eren Eeager said:

But what about if video gamea corps made a collaboration to make the perfect games engine that cuts all the coding bullshit and focus only on expressing your artistic creativity?

What's what Unreal and Unity are up to. But it still requires a ton of coding, animation, art, design, etc.

You just can't eliminate those aspects of game development.

There is a serious limit to how much you can simplify this. The more you simplify it, the less creative power you get. There already exist game engines which require no coding (GameMaker). The problem is, the games you can build with such engines are so limited that no one wants to play them. You cannot build a good game that way. Games requires massive customization because uniqueness is a key selling point for games.

Even with something as crazy complex as the Unreal Engine, you can tell that Unreal-built games all have a samey quality, look, and feel to them -- and it's not good. Ideally your game would have a custom engine to give it total uniqueness.

Even if you could eliminate all coding from game development, you'd still be left with decades of man-years of art, sound, and design labor. Just to fine-tune the loot tables on a AAA games is a full-time job. You need a guy working full time for 4 years in Excel just so the loot in your game isn't shit. And that doesn't even take into account all the artists needed to create the loot models, textures, animations, shaders, etc.

People seriously do not fathom how much labor games require. Way more than film.

[Thought Art]

 

[erik8lrl]

I think it failed more so because of the lack of publishing options. The tools themselves are amazing, probably the most accessible and intuitive content creation tool ever created. But when you can't export anything you make to share it more broadly and monetize from it, it doesn't really make sense for you to spend hundreds of hours learning the tools and create with them. If they had released this on PC and added options to export different creations (Game, Music, Art, Films), it would have a much larger community and success. It might even compete with Unity, Unreal, or even other content creation tools like Blender or Ableton for all the different aspects of creation. But because you can only publish on their platform and only on PlayStation, it limits the possibility to gain influence and get compensated for your creation.   

Yes, game development requires a lot of skills in many different fields, but the collaboration system in dreams really makes up for that. You can work with other people who are good at different things to create together very easily. Your profile actually has a leveling system based on how much time you spend in each field and what work they have done.  Some excellent projects were made this way in Dreams, but it's hard for them to keep developing into something big because of the lack of publishing options. 

Even though the tools are the most intuitive they can be, it is still difficult for most people to learn. For example, programming in its nature is really a system of thinking. What Dreams and other game engines have are just visual scripting systems that allow you to create logic without writing the syntax of the code. But the syntax is really the easy part. Your skill in programming really comes from your ability to think in its system of abstraction and create architectures/structures to solve your problems. This skill is still required even in Dreams, so just making the tools initiative is not enough for most people to become good at programming. The same idea could be said for all the different aspects of game development.

Edited June 25, 2021 by erik8lrl

[Extreme Z7]

1 hour ago, Eren Eeager said:

But what about if video gamea corps made a collaboration to make the perfect games engine that cuts all the coding bullshit and focus only on expressing your artistic creativity?

Speaking as someone who has made games in the past, programming is a part of the creative process.

The ability to write a game from the ground up allows to really tweak the game world the way you want it to be. There are nuances when it comes to the frame-by-frame processing of a game system that you can have utter control over to make a game a lot deeper than it initially seems.

You just can't really make games seriously with stuff like Dreams or Nintendo's Game Builder Garage which works off pre-built templates that you have no say in how they're designed. Not to mention optimizing games with complex systems is just out the window.

Maybe watch some videos dissecting how seemingly simplistic games like Doom or Baldi's Basics work.
As sort of a Classic Doom expert player myself, I know of just how deep and intricate the game can be in a way that most people who play shooters don't realize. How much more for modern-style shooters?

 

Edited June 25, 2021 by Extreme Z7

[Leo Gura]

They expect you to create a serious game using a PS4 controller?

Lolz. Truly a pipe dream.

There should be no surprise that they failed.

You aren't making a serious game unless you got at least 2 monitors.

[erik8lrl]

@Leo Gura LOL, so true.

[Michael569]

28 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Just to fine-tune the loot tables on a AAA games is a full-time job. You need a guy working full time for 4 years in Excel just so the loot in your game isn't shit. And that doesn't even take into account all the artists needed to create the loot models, textures, animations, shaders, etc.

I always thought when playing Skyrim or Fallout, somebody actually had to go in and organise all this shit in every single room to make it look organised (or chaotic), cosy or really scary. Just decorating a single house in Skyrim with items would probably take 3 hours just so that you can come in and fus-ro-dah the shit out of it. 

In was specifically looking at abandoned toilet mirrors in Fallout 6 and just for this I identified at least 6 different types of cracked mirrors. And then when you shoot the mirror it makes different sound to when you shoot the sink. And even sink has like 5 different types of mold. It's insane 

[Leo Gura]

37 minutes ago, Michael569 said:

I always thought when playing Skyrim or Fallout, somebody actually had to go in and organise all this shit in every single room to make it look organised (or chaotic), cosy or really scary. Just decorating a single house in Skyrim with items would probably take 3 hours

My Oblivion mod took 8 months of full-time work to create.

And most of that time was spent working outside the editor, in Photoshop and 3dsmax.

Even learning something like The Elderscrolls Construction Kit will take you months of frustrating trail and error. And you will feel ridiculously limited in what it allows you to create.

[Extreme Z7]

Why Dreams failed in two funny videos:

 

 

[Leo Gura]

The problem with user-generated content is that 99% of it is crap.

It takes a genius artist to make a game that's worth playing or a film that's worth watching.

That's true of all art. It must be done at a world class level in order to be worth your time.

Even most professional games, with 100 man-years of work, are not worth playing.

[Leo Gura]

I must say, it does make for a pretty cool toy. I am amazed at how diverse Dream's creations are:

If you don't take it as a serious game development tool, but rather a toy to tinker around with, then I think it's successful at that. Of course it's a niche product. So obviously it won't sell well. But if you're into quirky stuff, it might be a good toy to explore.

It reminds me of psychedelics. They don't produce a livable reality, but they are fun to explore the fringes of consciousness.

[Michael569]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

My Oblivion mod took 8 months of full-time work to create.

available on Steam? 

[Leo Gura]

9 minutes ago, Michael569 said:

available on Steam? 

At one point it was one of the most downloaded mods for Oblivion.

- - - - -

 

[Michael569]

16 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

At one point it was one of the most downloaded mods for Oblivion.

The Lost Spires mod? Holy shit that looks massive. They said it was being made for Skyrim as well 

[Extreme Z7]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

There already exist game engines which require no coding (GameMaker).

GameMaker allows you to code as an option. It uses its own programming language which is fairly basic but it's enough to make fairly complex stuff with it to a degree. Admittedly, you could probably still build more complex games with Flash, rip.

Rather, Stencyl is a game workstation where you really can't code even if you wanted. Using it to make a game sorta felt like the equivalent of using Fisher Price tools when I tried it out.

I'd rather make a game with friggin' RPG Maker, a very popular goto for newbies and amateurs.

[Leo Gura]

6 minutes ago, Extreme Z7 said:

GameMaker allows you to code as an option.

That's because it's actually faster to code than to use silly GUI buttons for logic.

When you are making a game, the efficiency of your tools and processes is crucial. You need to be as efficient as possible because the workload is crazy enough as it is.

[DocWatts]

Game Developer/Artist here.

We live in a time where it's easier than it's ever been for one person (or a few people) to create a game.

Game engines like Unity use a streamlined drag and drop interface, along with a simplified scripting language that's much easier for non Coders to pick up and learn than Programming Languages of olde (such as C or C++, which are quite a bit more difficult for newcomers).

Other engines like GameMaker Studio or RPG Maker allow someone to make a game with limited or even no coding.

That said, there's a lot more to making a game than knowing how to Code; game design is a Skill, every bit as much as learning how to play an Instrument is a skill. Furthermore, it's a skill that involves many hats such as Digital Art, Graphic Design, and UI Design just to name a few. But these are things you can learn if you have the motivation to. And things that aren't your strong suite (such as sound design or digital painting) are things that you can bring another person in for.

That said, will one or two people working on a game in thier spare time create the next Skyrim or Fallout? Of course not.

But there are plenty of highly successful and innovate games that were made by either one or just a few people.

Something like Undertale is one of the most highly rated games ln Steam, and was made by one dude who learned game design by working on ROM Hacks (ie mods) of old Snes games.