Above: Dreams are connected by doors.
Heppe: You can see all the different notes, all the different things that are playing in the track. These are all different instruments, and I can just mess with this. Maybe I didn’t like the sound of that, or I want there to be one more beat, and I can start to play and remix someone else’s track. But we’ll make one from scratch. It won’t be as complex, but it’s going to sound awesome.
GamesBeat: Can you set it up so someone can’t mess up what you’ve already made?
Beech: It’s up to you. You can publish things to be completely remixable, and then people can change them, but the original copy will still be there. They can’t go into your level unless you give them creative access. You might be working as a team with someone.
Heppe: If I go into drums–everything that’s in this collection is all meant to work together. They’re all quantized and they’re all in the same musical signature. Hypothetically, anything you choose here should sound pretty decent together. I play with this all the time by just choosing random things. I’ve never used this one before, so we’ll try this.
Beech: “Popsicle Breakbeat.” The names are always “Popsicle” [because] makes sense, because it’s cold.
Heppe: And then we’ll choose some bass. Let’s see if there’s a wintry-themed bass. Here’s one. Let’s see how it sounds together. I like it. We could keep adding to that, adding more clips. The nice thing about Dreams is that everything you learn to do–John was cloning stuff in the level. I can do that here as well. We can expand this timeline and I can clone these to my heart’s content. Everything you learn teaches you about something else, which has helped me figure out how to do everything in Dreams.
We also have this collection of instruments. We have everything — keyboards, bass, synth, drums. I like synth because I’m not super musical, so it’s easy for me to get in and — maybe Spooky Presence? Let’s try it. This is an instrument. All I’m doing to play it is using the keypad on the PS4 controller mapped to different notes on the scale. If I want a higher octave I tilt to the right, and if I want a lower octave I tilt to the left. I’m just playing. If we start a track, I can record.
These things that light up are effects pedals, effects fields. I can make my own or use existing ones. Some of the instruments come with them because it makes them sound cool. If we play back what I just played, you can see the notes going through the instrument, playing back what I just did in real time. Or if we hop into piano roll, you can see the notes I played on a scale. This is what I mean about how everything is easy, medium, or hard. If I wanted to dive in a bit more, I can edit on this and change my notes. I can shorten and lengthen them. I can make chords. I can do whatever I want to. Or if you’re really hardcore you can get into editing individual slices. It goes very deep.
Beech: It starts very simply, but it goes as deep as you want it. You can travel down further and further if you want to. We don’t want to force anyone to go deep, but it’s there if you want to.
Heppe: Even here, if I wanted that to be a bit louder, I could just up the volume here. We make this loop. You can chart to change everything like pitch and reverb. We have lots of options. You can start to learn more and more about making music. It’s super playful. You can choose chords, change what key you’re in–it’s such a rabbit hole. But it’s one of my favorite places to play around in Dreams. It’s super fun.
Beech: We’ll go into play mode and see what it looks like there. Frederick is on a mission now.
GamesBeat: If you wanted to learn something like mixing, can you do that?
Beech: That’s the nice thing about all different areas of Dreams. John will quickly show animation. That’s another one where — the simplest form of animating in Dreams is basically puppetry. You just move something with the controller, like John is doing right now, where he puts that gadget down. The next thing he touches, the game records it. John’s just made a platform, and all he’s done is lift that piece of rock up and down.
Beech: Now it’s rudimentary gameplay. We have a moving platform that I have to try to get onto and go up to the next bit.
Heppe: But you can go really deep. You can go into character animations and do keyframe animations. You can learn how to do a skill. There’s a lot of potential for education and people building their portfolios.
Beech: I’ll show a very small bit of logic combined.
Heppe: We have a totally visual logic system.
Beech: In this case I’ve put down a trigger, just an area. If something goes into this area, you can trigger something else. In this case I’ll use the keyframe that we mentioned earlier. When I place one down, I go into record mode, and whatever I do now will be recorded. In this case I’ll tell this rock to become movable. What will happen when I wire that up–the fox enters this area and this rock should hopefully fall down. We can attach a sound effect to it or some visual effects, but in this case we’ll keep it simple.
Above: Dreams has beautiful user-generated art.
GamesBeat: Have you gotten to a point where somebody’s said, “Hey, I created something cool. I want to publish this and sell it”?
Heppe: Outside of Dreams? Right now we allow people to publish inside Dreams. People can create and publish and other people can play it and remix it. That’s all available in Dreams.
Whether we allow people to do that outside of Dreams has been, actually, a big goal for the studio. It’s something we would love to do. But we need to figure out the best way to support that. Obviously if it’s published in the PlayStation store, we want it to be QA’d. We want trophies. There are all of these other elements. We’d love to do that kind of thing, but we don’t currently have a way to do it.
GamesBeat: What about a way of rewarding people? Can people get paid for this?
Heppe: It’s something we’ve thought about. We haven’t made any public announcements about any further monetization in Dreams, or that kind of system where people are getting tipped or getting paid for their content. We do want to encourage people to share. We’re a platform for amateur creation and hobbyist creators. I’m sure there will be people who are more professional in it. But these are all things we’re considering and thinking about.
The nice thing about early access is it allows us to develop the game alongside an active community. There are lots of things we can only learn from them, having the game be out. For us it’s a period of learning and thinking about what’s next.
GamesBeat: That’s a rare move, to do early access with a game like this.
Beech: It’s Sony’s first ever.
Heppe: Yeah, the first Sony game in early access. But Dreams is so unique that it requires a unique approach to so many different things. It’s one of the things that’s most challenging about it, but also one of the most rewarding. Sony has been great about letting us be a bit more experimental — being the first game in early access, being a creation game for everyone. We’re excited to see where it leads. If the stuff we’ve been seeing in two weeks is any indication, there’s a lot of potential.
GamesBeat: Do you see any kind of lesson in some of the things that haven’t lasted, like — Project Spark seemed like it was a good idea, but it didn’t stick around that long.
Heppe: What’s interesting about Dreams, and what’s so different about it — even compared to LittleBigPlanet — is that you can make things that look like your own style, your own art, your own thing. It really is a game development engine. Everything you made in LittleBigPlanet looks like LittleBigPlanet. Even if you make something that isn’t a 2D platformer, it looks like LittleBigPlanet. Dreams is made to let people’s imagination, their art style, their personality, their creativity shine. That’s one of the things that makes it unique.
