23 ms·

A video game that lets you make video games

218 points by Reedx 7y ago

bigtunacan 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkNnISDtfeFhQRSCjnUplA https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...
    - a_t48 7y ago
      Was wondering if this was going to be SALTI. We must hang out in the same discord. ;)
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    StarCraft's map editor was another big one in the late 90's
    - glouwbug 7y ago
      Don't forget WarCraft 3. It spawned Tower Defense and DOTA
      - wlesieutre 7y ago
        StarCraft 1 had Tower Defense maps as well. Much more cobbled together than what you could do in WC3, but impressive given the limitations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI
  - bigtunacan 7y ago
    Roblox was pretty interesting in that it has this built in game editor that is very accessible, but is also highly extensible through Lua so the players/builders can ramp up their skills over time. Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.
  - paavohtl 7y ago
    Garry's Mod (as a game development "platform") essentially boils down to a Lua interpreter bolted to the Source Engine, with access to assets from Valve's games. If you want to make a new game(mode) in Garry's Mod, you still have to write code, design levels and possibly create models, textures and sounds in separate somewhat hard to use programs. That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.
  - simion314 7y ago
    so this game contains an impressive audio/music tools , nice sculpting tools, logic widgets. like I helped my 13 years old son rotate an object in space by connecting some velocity vectors, sin wave widgets (there is no way to input polynomials or trigonometric functions that we found, so you have a sign wave and you change it's shape to look like what you need ). widgets to record data(aka variables) event like things. Then it has sharing. My son played the other games from this team Little Big Planet, he is not into programming (I tried to teach him basic stuff but code syntax is too abstract and error prone) where this kind of games encourage experimenting ... it is not something for developers to create games so is not a Unity/Unreal competitor
    - ngcc_hk 7y ago
      Wonder whether microbit with weatherbit may help. It is quite interesting to have done physical (even if just barometer but better with the weather station part) to see how things interact. I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well. Not expensive give a try.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- stygiansonic 7y ago
  There was also Adventure Construction Set, released back in 1984 for the C64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set
  - lubujackson 7y ago
    Yup and ZZT was another one. There is quite a history of "games for making games". I think this breathless "everything is different now!" narrative is overblown, but I do think these sorts of games/toolkits give voice to people who might not have otherwise had an easy path for expression. Specifically, I think of this personal account: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/
    - endgame 7y ago
      On that note: ZZT has an active community preserving, reviewing, remixing and creating games, centered around https://museumofzzt.com/ https://museumofzzt.com/
- setr 7y ago
  The game industry in general has a memory of about 10 years, perhaps 15 years tops. They'll praise innovation and radical differentiation despite the core features being the core features in major games just two decades earlier. The favorite example is star control 2 versus Mass effect, the latter being a clear spiritual successor and yet somehow managed to be worse in nearly every aspect except graphics, and perhaps combat (which, in general, is fairly bland and uneccesary in both titles... but ME does admittedly have more depth to it's combat) So yes, this is clearly revolutionary technology.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    A few years ago I was looking for space themed games where you control a ship and are allowed to trade. Think of Escape Velocity, Star Sonata 1/2, Space Rangers, Freelancer, X3, etc. For some reason a lot of forum posts were about Mass Effect when it comes to space games. When I actually played Mass Effect 2 I realized that it was just a generic cover shooter like Mafia 2 or Sleeping Dogs. Oh and it was so glitched I fell off the map multiple times and often got stuck on top of random objects like tables. It was an absolutely awful experience.
    - Narishma 7y ago
      Mass Effect is an action RPG, so I'm not sure why you're even comparing it to those other games. Of course it's nothing like them.
    - simion314 7y ago
      You did not know how to search? Mass Effect is about a beautiful world and lore to explore, cool quests and hard decisions.
    - setr 7y ago
      Hm. Not really what I was getting at -- ME was perfectly functional, just the characters, races, inter-racial relationships (non-romantic), exploration mechanisms (eg ME bounds you by plotline, SC2 bounds you by fuel and danger), and world history -- all of the core components that made ME interesting as a title -- were substantially inferior to its decades-older predecessor. The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be
- corysama 7y ago
  Sometimes things don't have to be absolutely unprecedented to be revolutionary.
- freepor 7y ago
  A fun iOS one was "Amazing Alex," which was The Incredible Machine with user-uploaded levels.
vuldin 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - user982 7y ago
      That link should be a top-level comment to preempt further dumb takes.
    - Animats 7y ago
      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.
      - 7y ago
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jes5199 7y ago
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?
- kdowns 7y ago
  Refactoring I don't know but you can keep all your logic for some task inside a microchip then create input and output handles to hide the inner workings. Then you can publish that microchip as a element for other people to use in their creations.
  - justanothersys 7y ago
    From what I’ve seen it’s similar to the old LOGO Microworlds model which is awesome.
- honkycat 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
      - 7y ago
Zenst 7y ago
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.
mister_hn 7y ago
I recall it was possible also in Second Life to do the same..so, nothing new
- Animats 7y ago
  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.
formalsystem 7y ago
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.
- smaddock 7y ago
  Roblox supports modding and has a "Developer Exchange" program [0] in which, from what I understand, there's an exchange rate for each microtransaction related to modders' content. Steam Workshop [1] is a platform for distributing mods for games which support it on Steam. A few years back it introduced support for paid content [2], but was soon after removed due to community backlash [3]. [0] https://www.roblox.com/developer-exchange/help https://www.roblox.com/developer-exchange/help [1] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop https://steamcommunity.com/workshop [2] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent [3] https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365253244218 https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements...
Kiro 7y ago
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
- nurbl 7y ago
  There's programming involved, but of the graphical connect-the-boxes kind that can be done without text input.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  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.
dharma1 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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...
- jayd16 7y ago
  If your goal is to be a game designer then learnings around map design and storytelling should be robust ones. How well it teaches general programming I have no idea.
nurbl 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
slavik81 7y ago
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_SIGGRAPH-2015-sml.pdf http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...
- leppr 7y ago
  Fascinating, thanks. Here's the video for the presentation which includes animations: https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI
brutal_boi 7y ago
If we effectively are living in a simulation: "A video game that lets you make video games that let's you make video games"
OrgNet 7y ago
Any chance that game runs on a PS4 emulator?
Waterluvian 7y ago
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.
neovive 7y ago
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
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hyperpallium 7y ago
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...
quirkafleeg3 7y ago
my problem with dreams is that someones time would be better spend learning a proper game engine like unreal or unity

218 points by Reedx 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkNnISDtfeFhQRSCjnUplA https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...
  - a_t48 7y ago
    Was wondering if this was going to be SALTI. We must hang out in the same discord. ;)
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  StarCraft's map editor was another big one in the late 90's
  - glouwbug 7y ago
    Don't forget WarCraft 3. It spawned Tower Defense and DOTA
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      StarCraft 1 had Tower Defense maps as well. Much more cobbled together than what you could do in WC3, but impressive given the limitations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI
- bigtunacan 7y ago
  Roblox was pretty interesting in that it has this built in game editor that is very accessible, but is also highly extensible through Lua so the players/builders can ramp up their skills over time. Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.
- paavohtl 7y ago
  Garry's Mod (as a game development "platform") essentially boils down to a Lua interpreter bolted to the Source Engine, with access to assets from Valve's games. If you want to make a new game(mode) in Garry's Mod, you still have to write code, design levels and possibly create models, textures and sounds in separate somewhat hard to use programs. That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.
- simion314 7y ago
  so this game contains an impressive audio/music tools , nice sculpting tools, logic widgets. like I helped my 13 years old son rotate an object in space by connecting some velocity vectors, sin wave widgets (there is no way to input polynomials or trigonometric functions that we found, so you have a sign wave and you change it's shape to look like what you need ). widgets to record data(aka variables) event like things. Then it has sharing. My son played the other games from this team Little Big Planet, he is not into programming (I tried to teach him basic stuff but code syntax is too abstract and error prone) where this kind of games encourage experimenting ... it is not something for developers to create games so is not a Unity/Unreal competitor
  - ngcc_hk 7y ago
    Wonder whether microbit with weatherbit may help. It is quite interesting to have done physical (even if just barometer but better with the weather station part) to see how things interact. I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well. Not expensive give a try.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stygiansonic 7y ago
There was also Adventure Construction Set, released back in 1984 for the C64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set
- lubujackson 7y ago
  Yup and ZZT was another one. There is quite a history of "games for making games". I think this breathless "everything is different now!" narrative is overblown, but I do think these sorts of games/toolkits give voice to people who might not have otherwise had an easy path for expression. Specifically, I think of this personal account: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/
  - endgame 7y ago
    On that note: ZZT has an active community preserving, reviewing, remixing and creating games, centered around https://museumofzzt.com/ https://museumofzzt.com/
setr 7y ago
The game industry in general has a memory of about 10 years, perhaps 15 years tops. They'll praise innovation and radical differentiation despite the core features being the core features in major games just two decades earlier. The favorite example is star control 2 versus Mass effect, the latter being a clear spiritual successor and yet somehow managed to be worse in nearly every aspect except graphics, and perhaps combat (which, in general, is fairly bland and uneccesary in both titles... but ME does admittedly have more depth to it's combat) So yes, this is clearly revolutionary technology.
- imtringued 7y ago
  A few years ago I was looking for space themed games where you control a ship and are allowed to trade. Think of Escape Velocity, Star Sonata 1/2, Space Rangers, Freelancer, X3, etc. For some reason a lot of forum posts were about Mass Effect when it comes to space games. When I actually played Mass Effect 2 I realized that it was just a generic cover shooter like Mafia 2 or Sleeping Dogs. Oh and it was so glitched I fell off the map multiple times and often got stuck on top of random objects like tables. It was an absolutely awful experience.
  - Narishma 7y ago
    Mass Effect is an action RPG, so I'm not sure why you're even comparing it to those other games. Of course it's nothing like them.
  - simion314 7y ago
    You did not know how to search? Mass Effect is about a beautiful world and lore to explore, cool quests and hard decisions.
  - setr 7y ago
    Hm. Not really what I was getting at -- ME was perfectly functional, just the characters, races, inter-racial relationships (non-romantic), exploration mechanisms (eg ME bounds you by plotline, SC2 bounds you by fuel and danger), and world history -- all of the core components that made ME interesting as a title -- were substantially inferior to its decades-older predecessor. The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be
corysama 7y ago
Sometimes things don't have to be absolutely unprecedented to be revolutionary.
freepor 7y ago
A fun iOS one was "Amazing Alex," which was The Incredible Machine with user-uploaded levels.

vuldin 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - user982 7y ago
    That link should be a top-level comment to preempt further dumb takes.
  - Animats 7y ago
    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.
    - 7y ago

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jes5199 7y ago

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?

kdowns 7y ago
Refactoring I don't know but you can keep all your logic for some task inside a microchip then create input and output handles to hide the inner workings. Then you can publish that microchip as a element for other people to use in their creations.
- justanothersys 7y ago
  From what I’ve seen it’s similar to the old LOGO Microworlds model which is awesome.
honkycat 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - 7y ago

Zenst 7y ago

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.

mister_hn 7y ago

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

Animats 7y ago
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.

formalsystem 7y ago

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.

smaddock 7y ago
Roblox supports modding and has a "Developer Exchange" program [0] in which, from what I understand, there's an exchange rate for each microtransaction related to modders' content. Steam Workshop [1] is a platform for distributing mods for games which support it on Steam. A few years back it introduced support for paid content [2], but was soon after removed due to community backlash [3]. [0] https://www.roblox.com/developer-exchange/help https://www.roblox.com/developer-exchange/help [1] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop https://steamcommunity.com/workshop [2] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent [3] https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365253244218 https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements...

Kiro 7y ago

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

nurbl 7y ago
There's programming involved, but of the graphical connect-the-boxes kind that can be done without text input.
meheleventyone 7y ago
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.

dharma1 7y ago

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 7y ago
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...
jayd16 7y ago
If your goal is to be a game designer then learnings around map design and storytelling should be robust ones. How well it teaches general programming I have no idea.

nurbl 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

slavik81 7y ago

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_SIGGRAPH-2015-sml.pdf http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...

leppr 7y ago
Fascinating, thanks. Here's the video for the presentation which includes animations: https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI

brutal_boi 7y ago

If we effectively are living in a simulation: "A video game that lets you make video games that let's you make video games"

OrgNet 7y ago

Any chance that game runs on a PS4 emulator?

Waterluvian 7y ago

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.

neovive 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago

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hyperpallium 7y ago

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...

quirkafleeg3 7y ago

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