Dreams' community is learning game developer tricks

We had a chat with Media Molecule's Pablo López and Abbie Heppe about the game with the endless scope, {Dreams}, at Madrid Games Week just recently. The game has been the source of some incredible creations and we asked how one, as an animator, works on a game that essentially gives the player full control over what they want to create.

"We do have a default puppet, that people can drag into the scenes and that puppet has a procedural animation for walking, running, jumping", Pablo López said before continuing; "the animation team makes sure that the parameters feel natural as a default. From there on it's up to the players to do whatever they want".

The possibilities within {Dreams} are endless, but there is a limit for how much one can fit into one creation. We talked to Abbie Heppe about how the size limits can be worked around.

"We have a thermometer tool that helps people understand how close they are to reaching the create limits, but then they can always start a new level and tie those two together in the same way that game developers would. It's actually really interesting to see a community learn a bit about the experience of being a game developer and learning the ways that developers work around limitations".

She continued explaining what Media Molecule has seen its community do with limited resources:

"For example, our community understands that if you have a sculpt, having one sculpt in a level and cloning it a bunch of times it's actually a more efficient way to use it than to create lots of unique sculpts. You see people do incredible things with one sculpt where they turn it into a massive space ship or something like that, so really learning how to optimise the tools that we give them".