'The question should be how did you manage to do it in that time!'
Finally, some seven years after it first broke cover at 2013's PlayStation Meeting as it accompanied the unveiling of the PlayStation 4, Media Molecule's Dreams is here, its long and winding road concluding towards the tail-end of that particular console's life. Except it's not the end of Dreams, of course - it's the beginning of a project that will transform over time according to the community's needs and wants.
So last time I met you was at the PlayStation experience five years ago - and I think we all thought the game was imminent then.
Alex Evans: Yeah, it was. I mean, it was one of those funny things where we had made a thing where you could make beautiful stuff, but it was really painful, not very fun to make stuff with and we could take the pain of using it every day, but it wasn't what we wanted it to be. And, you know, Sony gave us the rope to try again. Basically, I joked that this is Dreams 2. But we've taken the time to make the thing we wanted it to be.
Did you have to go back and start from scratch?
Alex Evans: I mean, not from scratch - I think every game maker will tell you this, you go through a process of searching for what it is that makes your idea work again, same idea, same plan, but then you're like, 'Oh, this is rubbish, this particular path we've gone down'. You do have to backtrack sometimes - we took a big backward step. We looked at what we had, and I'm so glad we did it because I look back at those old videos and I'm like, the content was cool. The levels we were making were beautiful and everything but the process of creation wasn't good enough for the community to flourish.
To my eyes it doesn't look that different to what I saw back in 2015 - I thought it looked great back then!
Alex Evans: A lot of it's about making it easier. We put a lot of effort into stuff like tutorials - which sounds very boring and schooly, but the tools are actually kind of funny. There's a joke that the last 10% takes 90% of the time - and it was that, it was making it good, fun and easy. And that's what we focused on. I'm going to maybe probably butcher this because I'm not exactly sure what he said - I didn't read the original quote - but there was the bloke who made this sort of Wipeout clone, and it went viral and Kotaku picked it up.
And someone asked him why didn't you use Unity? Why don't you just use Unreal? And he said, because I had no idea that I was going to make this game. I didn't have a plan. I'm not a game maker. I didn't even think of myself as someone who's going to go and make this particular game that's going to go viral. I just had fun making a thing. And it sort of blossomed and turned into this. And that's Dreams for me. That was a really nice little parable, and I'm proud Dreams can let someone just be doodling and then for it to flourish rather than someone saying I will be the next Mike Bithell, I'll be the next indie sensation. You can do that too hopefully.
I know you can't talk about other platforms explicitly, but, well, there is one coming out later this year. In theory what would you be able to do on other platforms?
Alex Evans: I've not been asked that question before... I obviously can't say PlayStation 5 is brilliant! Although it's been announced so I can say the word. I mean, obviously, we're going to look at that, we're a PlayStation studio. Dreams actually already runs on PlayStation 5 - there you go, that's the scoop. But that's just us being devs and exploring. I'd be lying to you if I said we weren't going to explore, but there's literally zero plans at the moment. I think I've learned my lesson - we met in 2015 and I said [Dreams] is nearly done! And then here we are, four or five years later, and it *is* done. But my new self, I will admit that we're exploring things but I'm not going to commit to when it comes out.
Full interview here: www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-02-14-why-did-dreams-take-seven-years-to-make
I'm heading out now to pick up my copy.
