Unfinished: Dreams: The Tutorial Bits

Great, great stuff. I think this stream sold me on buying into it now.

Going through these myself right now. Looking forward to watching this too.

So I'm searching Spotify for Weird Hontootie. No results?

Hope we get more Purple Pants Parties

The logic stuff scared me when I was following this game during the beta (I didn't get in it) but having the early access now makes me at ease just messing with it. It can be pretty intense thinking about making more complex things, but the Dreams community is very helpful and there are plenty of user-made tutorials. In just a week I've already made some interesting stuff so I'm excited to see my skill grow with more time in Dreams.

Dreams goty calling it now!

@mrcaseyjones: My anxiety really kicked in when Vinny started expanding those logic menus, but by the end of those tutorials I was feeling better, and then the art stuff in the next tutorial really sold me on the whole thing.

This game / engine continues to impress. Like in LittleBigPlanet, the tutorials look informative and the tools, while incredibly complex, are approachable.

I do wonder if we'll ever see bigger, full-fletched games made within Dreams or if it'll remain this Mario Maker style hotchpotch of creations. The designers clearly have collaborative efforts in mind, so you could totally have teams working on bigger projects together.

Man. This is great. Might get a Playstation for this. It really really really makes me miss the logic and visual coding in Microsoft's Project Spark. It gets so much crap on the internet, but it was and still is amazing how much control it gave you over fundamental properties of the world right down to fine bits of logic and behavior. RIP

stream of DREAMS!

No joke, I almost started to tear up a little at the start when Vinny was showing off the stuff he made with his kids. It's just so nice and good.

I will have to look for Vinny and his kid's songs, with the other Psych music on you-tube.

Am I going crazy or is the narrator in the tutorial bits James Corden?

@bbalpert: Same here

Didn't expect to see Jamiroquai in this.

Dreams is GOTY right? It has to be.

jeff

I like that the cone's name is connie

Dreams is really cool. I figured out how to make music play out of the controller speaker the other day.

Still need to learn how to get rumble and motion controls hooked up.

holy shit

Impin ain't easy... I'll see myself out.

Thanks for doing this Vinny :) I love Dreams so god damned much, and I will watch every second of any Dreams coverage you fine folks make.

I'm making a Solar Jetman style game at the moment, and I'm having so much fun! My ship so far is a grey cube... But it flies really well and has cool sounds. Feels like I've accomplished something worthwhile whilst playing a game.

@abrahamlinkedin: Haha no it's just another generic English man.

You'd know if it was Corden because you'd be too busy cringing and vomiting.

Great stream, @vinny. I was also a little worried that there weren't more tutorials available, especially for music creation, but the developers have said that more tutorials will be released, either while it's in early access or when the full game releases.

very happy with the game but they need about 5 more hours of tutorials, i have no idea about camera, lighting, how to create some form of combat or projectile on a functional level....i've done all those things on scratch and stencyl with my son but the 3d editor is intimidating and I dont have the experience.

Hope west coast does more with this, the Unfinished video was a lot of fun.

Nifty. I still question this game's legs as I would imagine that most people willing to put the time in and really go to town with this game already know about Unity/Unreal.

But the tutorial alone is interesting. If only as a primer to visual/art and game design. It kind of reminds me of the Half-Life 2 "Developer's Commentary" that was mostly just interesting for explaining most of the tricks that corridor shooters with a heavy emphasis on set pieces (so every FPS from the early 2000s until the mid 2010s...) use.

Aww, wish Abby was on this too :(

Solo Vinny is second best!

Sooooo, when's his coming to PC? * wishful thinking *

In all seriousness, those are some surprisingly powerful tools. Can't wait to see what people create with them.

While it's obviously quite different, if you found this interesting and have never played with tools like Unreal or Unity, you might consider giving one a download. While they have obviously done a phenomenal job with this toolset, you'd be surprised how easy those actual engines are to pick up and use. Plus, you can use a mouse and keyboard :)

@gundato: I feel like there are probably a lot of people that want to create games but are also “console gamers”. I can see there being a Venn Diagram of creative folks that just do not want to sit in front of a computer to do any of this crap. Also, I’ve never gotten into Unreal/Unity, but isn’t Dreams more guided and WYSIWYG than those tools? I’ve always thought PC-based creation tools like those are far out of my skill & patience level, but I’ve been playing with Dreams for the past two days and I feel like I can actually make a competent thing with this.

@madmatt213: Modern UE4 and Unity have ridiculously WYSIWYG-like tools with a lot of visual scripting (the "logic" system in the video/Dreams) and even more populated asset stores. Doing truly complex and amazing stuff in them is unintuitive (and probably not performant), but you could easily say the same about Dreams.

There is definitely a lot to be said about Dreams being accessible. But from experience and how "the modding scene" played out, I think the people who are actually going to make truly amazing stuff have already looked at Unity/UE4 or will realize they should.

In a lot of ways, it is comparable to why "modding" died out in the mid to late 00s. You still had asset makers and light scripting. But the folk who were making total conversions and insanely complex mods realized that it was a very small step to go from "making a mod for unreal tournament" to "making a game with unreal engine" and so forth.

That isn't to say people aren't going to do amazing stuff in this. Trials Fusion had a frigging first person shooter. But I will be surprised if this gets that much farther beyond "nifty tech demo" and a million PT "remakes".

While i like your take and respect it I think your taking it in a realistic yet cynical approach. As a kid I played with the very unintuitive RPG maker and went on to buy the 2nd and 3rd. By the end much like a game I learned the ins and outs of writing scripts for characters in a more simple manner (nothing like a class on Unity which would bore even my curious kid brain at the time.) . By the time rpg maker 2 and 3 came out I had less time and focused on other stuff In my free time. I never thought of doing it just to make a buck. That said I was a kid and just enjoyed sharing it with my pals.

The mod community is full of talented people some who are as good or better than people in the industry who make a living. They fix bugs in fallout, make translations of entire imported phoenix wright games for free, etc cause they enjoy the challenge and helping their community. Some gamers are really just charitable and happy to test out new tools and see where they can push them.

TLDR: People who enjoy tinkering with creation tools love to cause trying out new creation tools is just fun and not everything is done for the goal of money.

This thing is so wild and I love the idea of more people learning how to make games but they would make so much god damn money if this was on PC it's baffling to me. This could become a full fledged video game engine to make amazing things but not being able to use a mouse, type to speed things up, or create your own assets in 3dsmax/maya etc really limits the scope of this product.

VR will be a great way for people to create things and with the possibilities VR creates for movement it will generate some super thoughtful games and ideas.

This game really showcases video games in a super amazing way that will allow anyone to create games when there are so many people out there without access to powerful hardware so I understand why it's on the PS4 and think it's awesome, just wish it was on PC since it would change the landscape to the next level for creators. This is gonna have charm but not having 4k assets created in Photoshop etc is gonna never be what it could.

@topcyclist: For an enthusiast, this stuff is fun. Friends and I did insane shit with VTM Redemption's GM mode and one of my favorite grimdark authors got his "start" by making some really cool Neverwinter Nights modules.

But modding has largely become "fix this game" or "here is a cool tech demo of us breaking this game". You get the very rare Edelrim (or whatever the big Skyrim campaign was), but things tend to be closer to FPSes in Trials or even the old vehicles in the original Unreal Tournament. Things the crazy awesome folk who emulate SMB on a C64 do because they can

Contrast that with entire genres being spawned out of the mods of olde (although auto chess may be a modern example, time will tell) and massive total conversions that turned UT2k4 into one of the better Star Wars games. Operation Flashpoint and ArmA 1 both had pretty amazing Warhammer 40k mods, if memory serves (I know OFP did).

We get one of these "let's all make cool shit" games every few years (often FROM the LBP/Dreams devs). And they always go the same way. Hell, even Nintendo's attempt with Mario Maker largely devolved into auto runners, kaizo hell, and streamer bait (so N++ plus streamer bait, heh).

I could easily see Dreams becoming something comparable to Source Film Maker (probably less porn though) and I hope the embedded credit system gets "ported" to modern game engines as that is just downright cool and has the potential to "revolutionize" "real" indie game dev at the cost of probably a LOT of DRM.

But the folk thinking they'll "get a million games" and whatever are being VERY optimistic and haven't been paying attention to the user content trends in the past decade. Part of it is definitely that games are less mod friendly. But most of it is that actual game engines are a lot more developer friendly to the point that kids in art school can "just" download a bunch of scripts from a free marketplace and bring their term project to life.

I swear the tutorial voice says "eggs" instead of "x".

There's a lot of talk about the move controllers in other Dreams videos, and if you can buy a pair (and PS4 camera) it makes editing so much easier/faster. If you're watching this thinking some of the sculpting looks slow, it's because of the controller. And yes, everything you can do with the moves you can do with the regular controller, it just cuts your time down significantly with them. The main thing is camera movement, you can essentially "pinch to zoom" by pressing a button and moving your arms away/together. Switching between the moves and controller is easy and handing, like doing a sculpture with the moves, then grabbing the controller to playtest it is smooth.

Wow, incredible video Vinny. First off it was super amazing to see/hear what you've made with your kids. That's incredible.

Second, the tutorial does slow down and teach you a lot but still, it's a lot so that makes what I've seen people make even more incredible. Even though the tools are simple, it's still a lot of work so it's amazing to see what's been made with them.

I wish the microchip UI looked like a PCB.

Can we get more Dreams content?