GamesBeat: Do you run into a size limit at some point?
Heppe: We have a thermometer in the game. We can turn it on quickly to see it. You can see John’s barely used any of it yet. Each of those three thermometers will go up depending on what’s eating it up, whether it’s graphics or gameplay. Once you fill the thermometer, that’s when it would start impacting framerate and that sort of thing.
If you’re doing this level and you want to make another big part for it, you could create a doorway to that next piece of content, and then the thermometer resets. You’re in a new create space. You can link together spaces and create an open world game. But the limits are pretty
solid. There are lots of tricks for optimizing content. We also have a tool where you can brush over what you’ve made and reduce the impact on the thermometers. It’s helpful if you’re trying to optimize your level. We try to make it as easy as possible.
This is our grade and effects gadget. John can play with the brightness, the contrast, the saturation. We have some fun ones. If he wants to turn the level 8-bit, he can just do that globally. We have a bunch of others. This is useful if you’re making cutscenes and camera shots and things, making it look like film. There are tons of options. In order to put a light in that hole there, John just puts a light in the level, and you can see where it’s shining. Then he has options to change the color or the global filter. Everything is meant to be easy.
One of the goals for Dreams is for it to be very performative. You never think of doing game development as performance, but Dreams allows you to. John and I do live create demos. Or not even demos. We do live game creation all the time now. Our team has been doing musical
performance with it as well. I’d love to see the community do that too. It’ll be fun to see what people end up doing. I can see people using it to prototype things.
GamesBeat: A bit like a Bob Ross show.
Heppe: Oh, yeah. Our art director totally does the Bob Ross streams. “If you go over here and use the soft blend–” [laughs] It’s a lot of fun. At any time, you can hop into play mode and test your levels to see if everything works together. You’re a character and you can run around.
Everything works like it should. That’s a community-made character, Frederick the Fox, and it’s been used everywhere. People have made buff versions of it and knight versions of it. It’s very cool.
Maybe you can show setting up a camera? We haven’t even gotten into the real gameplay tools yet. This is still scene-setting and creation. Just like with the light, you put in a camera and line it up to where you want the camera to look. If you’re creating a cutscene, it’s there. You can set up your shot the way you want to. It looks so good already.
Above: You can make happy or creepy art in Dreams, as you wish.
Beech: I’ll put the snow back in, make some fresh show.
Heppe: He’s using the paint tool to make some snow. The paint tool is one of my favorites, because not only can you use this to paint in 3D space like a traditional artist would, but we also use it to make special effects and weather. John’s going to draw a line and add some animation effects that will make it look like snow.
Beech: I can just tweak this. Everything in the game has tweaks that you can wire logic into. In this case I’ll make this line I’ve just drawn into snowflakes. If I let time run, you can see them trickling down here like this. Then, if I adjust them enough, I can make them glow a bit so you can see them. Then I duplicate it around the camera so we get loads of them. We can increase the size and spread, change the jitter. After just a bit of playing around you can get some convincing snow in your level. Then we jump into play mode.
GamesBeat: How will people learn how to do that?
Heppe: We have tutorials for all the different areas, but for really specific stuff like that, some of the stuff we do for video content on the Media Molecule channels–we do streams each week. Sometimes we show community creations, or we’ll jam together and create together. Our community is also super helpful, showing people how to do things. Some of it is just play and figuring it out as you go. But we try to meet people where they go, sharing how to do stuff and teaching as much as possible. We have lots more on the way. We’re still working on more tutorials for specific things. We’re working on video content that will show people quick tips.
Beech: You can jump into edit mode at any point while you’re playing and change things from the player’s point of view. It’s good if you’re blocking out a level and you want to do something. Maybe I’ll make some platforming. I’ll add some stairs that circle up around like this. Then you can carry on playing at that point to test out your creation, see if it’s working. It’s a great way of integrating scenes. What’s amazing is, I can then tweak this character and adjust the jump height. Maybe this character can jump quite a bit higher. It’s totally cheating, but–the speed with which you can make gameplay in Dreams is very fast and very un-precious. You can do things without having to think about it too much.
This is one of the most coherent levels we’ve made yet. Usually we end up with a mashup of four animals or something like that in a disco. But this one’s taken a more serious approach. I’m quite into that. I think I’ll put a fence around the top. At any point I can just say, “I want a fence,” and build the fence.
Heppe: Every area in Dreams, whether it’s sculpture, painting, animation, sound, they all have easy, intermediate, and advanced bits. Everything we’re doing in this demo is pretty beginner-mode, taking objects from the dreamiverse and stamping them down. We’re just placing things like you would with a dollhouse. But on the advanced level, you can make everything from scratch. You can put as much time and effort into doing things as you want to. The goal is to make this so accessible that anybody who has an idea of what something should look like or be can go in there and do it.
Like I said, this is my first 3D creation platform. It’s been an incredibly journey. I know I work in games, but I’ve been able to work on game jam games and things that people are playing in Dreams now. I worked on the music or the characters. That’s a really cool feeling, coming from a job that has nothing to do with that in game development. It’s been liberating.
Let’s do some music. The sound tools are a good example of the easy, medium, hard part. This is a timeline. If you use video editing software, time moves from start to finish and this represents time in the level. We can put that camera on the timeline and build–I could put that there, and that’s how long that shot would last when we go into this scene. But we’ll leave it off for now and keep it over there. You can go forward and back with the edits you’ve done quickly, so if you feel like you messed something up, you just step back. It’s very simple.
We have these collections of assets, as I said, to help you build with assets, and the same is true for audio. In sound effects, John looked for some ambients. We have lots of sound effects. If you have a river, you can find the sounds of water and streams. These just continue to grow. They can also be made by the community. But on the music side, we have all these music clips. We have music tracks too if you want to use them.
I’ll show you what a professional music track looks like in Dreams. This was made by one of our audio people. It has a mastering channel where they’ve done the audio mastering, but it’s a pretty–
Beech: They made this in a game jam, actually. They made this for the Global Game Jam.
