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".