Beech: The difference, certainly, between Dreams and Spark — the assets in there had to be made by the developer and brought in. Then it was about their community assembling to make unique experiences. Whereas in Dreams, they’re not reliant on us at Media Molecule to produce assets. They get to produce their own assets, their own music, their own sound effects.
Everything you see in Dreams is made in Dreams. There’s nothing that has to come in from outside. The community in Dreams can become self-perpetuating, because they’re not reliant on any outside source. That’s the lesson we learned from that. Give them the tools and they’ll
stay around.
Heppe: We’re in the early days. It’s been very promising. People have been doing things with the tools in the game that are just not what we expected. It’s fascinating. It’s been a great learning experience for us. Somebody made a game entirely with the text gadget in Dreams, and it’s brilliant. Seeing that kind of stuff is so inspiring. I can’t imagine, in six months, some of the stuff we’ll be seeing that we haven’t even thought of yet.
Beech: You can see how easy it is to put together an experience like this.
Heppe: John is setting its release as public and remixable, so now anyone who comes in–you saw the warning we skipped through. We give people an idea of what that means. That means anyone can go in there and play with what you made and make their own changes. Some people in our community are happy for that to be the case and some of them would rather keep it their own game, their own thing. We get both. We try to give people as many options as possible.
John’s in our tutorial section now. What I love about our tutorial team is they’ve done their best to make this fun, to make it funny, to make it not feel like work. I know people hear “tutorial” and think they’ll be so bored, but that’s not our goal at all. I’ve been amazed with what they’ve done.
Above: Dream’s building works because it makes sense.
GamesBeat: Have you seen teachers in classes start using this?
Heppe: We just had Girls Make Games come in to the studio, and the girls all made levels in Dreams. What was really cool, this is the first time Girls Make Games has been able to have music creation. This puts everything all in one package, so you don’t have to hop between programs. The girls were able to make music. I listened to all the tracks, and they were fabulous. It was really funny. They were all different. There were metal tracks and house tracks. It was so much fun.
Our outreach manager works with a bunch of educational groups. We’ve been talking to quite a few schools about doing things with Dreams. We have a lot of people even now — John was saying earlier, some of our community members have used it for class projects. The skills you’re learning and what you’re doing can be quite complex. It’s really cool to see people using it for education. That’s an important thing for us.
Beech: You can see here on the profile, it’s given me a persona. It knows we like to play, so it’s given us a play persona. That changes over time as you change your outlook on Dreams. We can see what our current passion is. Our current passion here is art. Play is still fairly high.
GamesBeat: It’s like a scoreboard.
Heppe: You can add scoreboards to levels, too. Our community has been squaring off in a whole bunch of competitive games, which has been pretty funny to see. There are some really silly games that have very competitive communities around them now.
People have done some things that are so clever. One of my favorite games, you play as a sort of bird that’s a realtor. Not only do you have to fight all the monsters in the basement, but you have to mark everything that needs to be fixed by the landlord. It’s very cute.
Beech: This is one of the first scoreboards we saw published. You walk up and step on a rake and it hits you in the face. It lasts forever. There’s no limit to how much you can do it. And then you go here when you’re done and walk through the door. It’s fun to see the scoreboard. I’ve just done five. You go through the exit and it bashes you away. But when you look at the scoreboard on it, you can see that someone stayed here and walked on that rake 3,005 times. [Laughs] Unbelievable.
Heppe: People are amazing. It’s been such a journey, getting the chance to look in people’s heads and see all the awesome creative things they think of. It’s been fun.
Beech: And there’s nowhere else you’re going to find this. Where else will you find someone who’s made a curated museum of their art pieces?
Heppe: You can walk through and have a narrative experience. Or just hit yourself in the head with a rake 100 times. Or 3,005 times.
Beech: Dreams will be the only place you can come and find these kinds of interactive experiences. You just can’t get this anywhere else.
Above: A wall may not seem all that creative, but Dreams gives you the tools to take it in many directions.
GamesBeat: How long do you think early access will go for?
Heppe: We’re not quite sure. Our goal is not to spend a ton of time in early access. We want to get Dreams out. But it’s allowing us to polish some things like the social systems and add a bunch more things that we want for the people who aren’t our core creative community. The tools are really polished. Our community gives us feedback on very specific things that they’d like to see. But we’re happy with where these are at.
We want to make sure that when we launch to the wider community, we have the full breadth of tutorials, of templates, of collections of assets and things for people to use to get started, so they can have the best possible experience, especially if they’re going to be new to creation.
There’s a huge play experience. You can go in and spend hours and hours playing right now. We do that all the time. But we would love to bring some of those people into creation, because the goal of this is to make it accessible, make it easy for people to do. Part of early access, for us, is working on that.
We have a list of things we want to add and support that’s a million miles long. Online multiplayer is one of those. We’ll get to all of those things eventually. Maybe not necessarily during early access, but in the lifetime of Dreams, in the updates we do when the game is in full release. We just want to make sure that when we put this out there to everyone, it’s a great experience for more than just our people who are already, “Let’s create!”
GamesBeat: Something like Twitch has, what, 3 million creators and 100 million viewers?
Heppe: Exactly. It’s like YouTube. Most people who use YouTube aren’t content creators. God, though, the Twitch applications for this — it’s so cool, in that performative aspect, to be able to make a game with your community. You can challenge them to make something and then you can use that in a game, or you can use their choices to inform what you create. You can make something together. That kind of stuff–that’s just scratching the surface of what you can do. I think it’ll be really fun to see the the community that develops around teaching and sharing and creating with other people. That really excites me.
We’ll also be adding more Media Molecule playable content. We have this thing called the MM Arcade. We’ve been putting out games made by individuals at the studio, or sometimes larger groups at the studio. We let the community remix some of them so they can see how we build things, how we make logic. John made this. This is an example of one of those things. It has full AI. It’s super relaxing.
GamesBeat: Did you think of doing your own single-player story?
Heppe: We’re doing one, yes. We’re working on a slightly longer piece than these little arcade games that tells more of a narrative, so we can show the community more about cutscenes and what a fully realized game looks like. That’s one of the things we’re targeting in the full release. But even between now and then, we can’t stop making games in Dreams. We keep adding more stuff. It’s been a lot of fun.
