Dreams on PS4

[Cagliostro]

So I just jumped on board something I've been watching for a bit. It's called Dreams, and made by the folks who made Little Big Planet, which was a game series, but also a very good series of game creation tools. They just released it to buy for early access, with mainly the creation tools and little else. It's to jumpstart the community before they wide release. It might still be available.

Here's the page, and it will lead to a rabbit hole of interesting videos.

So Dreams kinda takes what Little Big Planet did, to a degree, but explodes it. Yes, it is certainly an amazingly robust video game creation tool, much more so than what Little Big Planet was, but it is pretty much a creativity tool. You can be as involved or not as you choose to be. You could just play the pre-created games (once it releases, although you can certainly play the stuff other people have done now), or you can be a creator of games, or simply a creator of characters within the games (which seems like it uses a kind of marionette-type of approach to some of it, as well as designing the logic for characters and such). You can also create music which the early reviews have said is also amazingly robust and easy to use and can release albums, which I suspect is just though the game, but I don't know for sure. You could also be a voiceover artist, a foley artist (sound effects for Dreams), just make little movie shorts, animation, art, sculptures (something I checked out briefly yesterday and was fascinated with), and so on. Or you could be a curator of a collection of the coolest stuff you find that other people have put together from scratch and have your own "museum" that others can come and check out and use whatever elements they want. Because you can use whatever you find in your own creations. So you can borrow someone's character they created, tweak the logic, take someone's background, someone else's flooring, someone's background music, and design the logic of the game or movie and there you go.

I'm blown away by it, and watched a bit of a stream that was live on early release day where they created a few elements from scratch. It was fascinating. I bought it on opening day, and space is limited but I think it is still open. And you can post suggestions and such with the creators of this tool. It's $30, and you get the full release when it releases, which will include a story mode that they don't have now.

The tutorials are long, and I'm not through much at all yet. But I'm blown away at the complexity as well as the simplification of this. The more I learn about this, the more interested in it I get. It looks like it takes a heap of work to do it from scratch, and someone who is determined could really create something stellar. So far, a lot of the examples are interesting and hilarious, but short. As the community grows, I've very interested to see what happens. I was drawn to the music initially, but I've always thought sound effects and such would be such much fun to delve into. And voiceover. Now I might get my chance without a huge investment.

I can't wait to see what happens with this.