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There is a lot A LOT more in the article but watching the video is best.
Dreams started life as a sculpting tool.
Many years later, and on the brink of a full disc release, it's also a self-contained game development kit, an animation studio, a synthesiser, a series of games about a detective who is a bipedal pig, a short film about how good oranges are, a speculative PS5 concept art showcase, and whatever the hell these are.
Dreams' performative toolset is responsible for everything you've just read about, and can make for much, much more besides. Which makes one key question about it pretty hard - how do you even describe Dreams? When I ask developers at Media Molecule who have been working on it for the best part of a decade, even they struggle.
It's something of a cliche, but Dreams really is something you need to get your hands on to begin to comprehend - and it'll likely click for you at a different point to anyone else. For some, it'll be when they realise that this is a free-form creation machine, allowing you to create a sculpture, paint it, animate it, even compose a backing track without leaving a single screen. For others, it'll be when they play a game, enjoy a character design in it, and realise they can use that same character in their own creation.
But for me, it was when I realised the act of searching through the Dreamiverse - dropping down rabbitholes of unexpected art by clicking related tags, searching creators' histories, or seeing how a single piece of music have been used across multiple creations - was most reminiscent of idly clicking through YouTube, riding the algorithm into unexpected creative corners. Except Dreams isn't just for videos. It's a YouTube for visual art, music, games, and things too weird to have a proper name yet. It's a YouTube for, well, everything.
If it wasn't already clear, Media Molecule pays attention to its creators. Everyone I talk to in the office speaks about their own favourites like we're discussing a music collection. There are all-time classics that everyone has to check out, hidden gems, outsider artists. If a staff member hadn't played Haus of Bevis, I can imagine a very Jack-Black-in-High-Fidelity situation taking place. At one point, we sit in a meeting room, and six developers loudly swap favourites around me – "BukkoroChan! SlurmMacKenzie! Awesome_David!" – and we completely forget what we're here for. Again, just like YouTube, surfing Dreams will inevitably lead to you picking favourite channels, to which you'll return again and again. In fact, one creator was so popular among the developers that the team went ahead and hired him.
"When I went [into Dreams], I just sort of expected it to be a game design suite, which it is. And then I just found out that I could do everything else in it." This is Jamie Breeze, a seasoned LittleBigPlanet creator under the moniker of j_plusb, who made the shift into Dreams to see how much more he could do with it. His first creation was The Rake, a comedy high score game in which you play a man who repeatedly hits himself in the face with the titular gardening tool. It got a good response, and he set about making much more.
"I just kept making things every week. I knew there was a community creation stream, they had them on Thursdays, so I just started making things for that. And I saw that my Rake game was showcased. And then they showcased a golf game I made in it. And then it was a llama game, which was really cool. And I saw there was a job opening for a Community Content Creator. I sort of left it to the last minute and then I thought, 'Well, I'm going to apply to that.' I'm so glad that I did it."
There is a lot A LOT more in the article but watching the video is best.
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