Dreams (Media Molecule) - RIP to one of the most addictive ways to build your own games.

 

Right back from the very start of Media Molecule's interesting forays into game development, I fell completely in love with their ethos and the fact that they were doing something that very few development studios ever bother with any more. Even as far back as Little Big Planet, MM gave the gamer many unique ways to customise stuff. Little Big Planet might have looked on paper like a standard platformer, but the ability to build your own stuff in the creative suite - and the fact that people took that as a nod to try and do things with Little Big Planet that the developers probably never anticipated just sold it to me on so many levels. 

LBP went through two more 'big console' versions, and even fetched up on the two Sony portables (the PSP and the PS Vita versions of LBP were excellent too). 

Then many years later they started sharing mysterious images of something new they were working on. Something that sounded too good to be true. A development tool that allowed you to build your own games, scenes, artwork - you name it, the promise was that "Dreams" on PS4 would allow you to do it. And boy did MediaMolecule ever deliver. 

I first encountered Dreams as a public preview. At its heart it used an innovative particle-based system to build objects, characters and scenes using clumps and clusters of 'pixels' using a set of very easy to use and easy to understand tools. Based on the sort of 3D geometry that most 3D artists understand by default, it put that power into the hands of ordinary folk like me - and that's something that a ragged old gamer like me had been waiting for since the dawn of the home computing age. 

Way way back in the day, tools like HURG (High Resolution User Friendly Realtime Game development system) promised to let you build your own games without knowing a line of code. Other game development tools followed but until Dreams none of that stuff bore fruit. Dreams, however, built on the superb tutorials in Little Big Planet with simple methods to build all the elements you need in game design. Modelling is one thing, but how on earth do you make a creation move, make noises, explode satisfyingly when hit or destroyed? Dreams made it easy but Dreams also put enough of a challenge in there to make it all interesting. 

I built a lot of stuff in Dreams. I set out to build the old ZX Spectrum Game Manic Miner from scratch, meticulously developing each level to mimic the originals and fighting with Dreams' slightly weird platform and jumping mechanics to make it as close as possible to the original. Sounds easy? It wasn't, and took a lot of time before I was anywhere near satisfied with the results (and one of the things I hadn't anticipated was just how complicated it was to turn the ZX Spectrum's native screen resolutions into a series of levels without blowing Dreams' all encompassing 'thermometer' (the method of reining in more complex creations by limiting how much you can create) to hell and back. 

"Eugene's Lair" from Manic Miner, recreated by me in Dreams

It took me about 2 weeks to build all the levels, play test them and release them to the community. Like a lot of low profile "Dreams" they didn't really ever gain much traction but people out there played them and liked them (the other aspect of Dreams - as with LPB was that you could produce AND release your levels for others to play - which was a piece of particular genius). 

I really enjoyed my time with Dreams, and I'm wondering what Media Molecule will be working on next. Whatever it is, I'll be there on day one.