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Hello all! I hope you're well.
I am Matt, the Creative Director for Dreams Central, a social entertainment hub being built in Dreams on PS4 & 5.
Dreams Central is a vision I've had for a long time and for the past 3~ years I've dedicated my life to building a virtual world (with inspirations from PlayStation Home, Ready Player One's Oasis and Snow Crash's Metaverse) that caters to all types of gamers and gives people a virtual space to relax, play games, socialise and more.
Feel free to check out our announcement trailer from earlier this year. Since then, our team has been busy reinventing the project with new graphics and lighting, updated environments and more. Check out a preview of that here.
A promise I made to myself was to make this experience completely free to play with no microtransactions, subscriptions or premium currency. This is for the people with no catch and always will be.
After 3~ years of development, me and my small team have decided to take the crowdfunding route on Kickstarter to help us achieve the complete vision for our resort and theme park. We have so many exciting ideas and not enough hours in the day to see them come to life. With our campaign, if we're successful we'll be able to focus all our time on the game and hopefully expand our small creative team into something more.
Joining me on this AMA will be our community manager, Sam.
With that said, ask us anything!
EDIT: We're gonna wrap things up! Thank you all for joining us!! - Sam & Matt
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What's the best part about making a game in Dreams?
ID: hla8sr2 -
Do you plan to implement VR?
ID: hlagtozWe have a bunch of ideas!
We're still in the process of working with VR, but we do plan to implement it for things like theme park rides, games, animations/shows, etc.-Sam
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What is the single player campaign looking like?
Also love what you guys are doing keep up the great work.
ID: hla9mhwThanks a lot!!
Our single player is story-driven and has some similarities to the Pokémon franchise. For example, you'll be exploring the island, talking with NPCs and doing challenges to unlock new areas in the resort.
As well as this there will be 'BattleBall Masters' which are comparable to Gym Leaders and you'll be able to challenge these to a 1v1 in our BattleBall minigame to earn rewards. They have their own theme, challenge rooms and special abilities that I think is a really interesting experience.-Matt
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This is more related to the monetization of Dreams... but do you have to create every asset yourself if you want to monetize a game made in Dreams?
ID: hlabnf3The Dreams library is full of creations that are there for other people to use, so as far as I know it's up to the creator of the monetised project to choose to support the people that helped with public assets.
However, everything in Dreams Central is made by the team and members that have since moved on since we like to use original assets! -Matt
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How can it be a social hub when Dreams doesn’t support multiplayer?
ID: hlafbsmAs of now the base game is single/local multiplayer with social aspects ready for the online update.
The way we made Dreams Central will make it easy for us to implement the online multiplayer when that update gets released.
We are also hoping that when we are close to releasing Dreams Central, the online multiplayer will be released soon as well.
-Sam
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Do you have a plan on how the kickstarter funds will be distributed?
ID: hladkulYes, of course!
So we have Kickstarter fees and outgoing fees (10%) and we have allocated another 10% of the budget to provide our backers with their rewards. Outside of this, the rest of funds will be distributed to every aspect of the project's development based on how much is required! -Matt -
Do you believe you're able to innovate in the current market?
ID: hla77yeThere's a lot of innovation happening right now in terms of metaverse projects, but we believe that our project is unique in its genre and has many experiences that aren't found too often in the gaming industry these days.
I believe the concept we have for Dreams Central is hugely ambitious and I'm sure we can provide some experiences that gamers haven't seen before! -Matt
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What Dreams features (besides multiplayer) do you hope will be added in order to fully realise your vision?
ID: hlacrjgRight now we are limited to the amount of furniture and clothing we can add within the game, so ideally we would like more graphics/gameplay memory so we can add a bigger collection.
However, we have optimized quite a bit and we are happy with the size of the current collection considering the limits of Dreams.
-Sam
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The fact the community is bringing back Playstation Home before Sony does is crazy, thank you seriously!
Once multiplayer comes out do you guys plan to support it and how does the game right now leave itself open to working with Multiplayer? Or will you guys have to re work everything?
ID: hlaj3lzThank you! Although we'd love to make Dreams Central an MMO with many players simultaneously in one world, bare in mind this is not currently available in Dreams!
We plan to support Dreams Central well beyond the multiplayer update and aim to expand the world with many official and community games, rides/attractions, public and personal spaces, extended storylines, etc.
We have a foundation for multiplayer but due to unknowns we can't be completely ready for the update so we'll probably have to change & update the game in some cases! -Matt
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I'm rather curious about this project, not necessarily for the project itself (no offence) but rather for what it might represent.
I absolutely adore Dreams but am admittedly a bit frustrated with a few key aspects of how Dreams works, at least as it currently exists. One of the fundamental issues baked into Dreams is that, despite what an absolutely revolutionary tool it is, there are no direct pathways that creators can take to break out of the confines of Dreams itself. In other words: while Dreams is an unbelievably powerful tool for aspiring artists, independent game creators, game dev teams, animators, etc., there is little incentive for anyone serious about content creation to use Dreams. You can't monetize your work within Dreams, can't export your work to use in other programs, can't sell games you create within Dreams, you can't even link to social media accounts to at least gain followers. For as powerful as Dreams is as a creation tool, it insists on simultaneously being a game itself.
This brings me to my question(s) for you:
Why did you decide to create an entertainment hub in Dreams? You mention that you wanted to make this completely free to play with no strings attached, which is a noble goal, but that's pretty much a given statement considering you can't monetize the project within Dreams anyway. Furthermore, you also have now drastically limited your core audience to only people who have purchased Dreams. How do yo team plan on realistically supporting this project in either the short-term or the long-term when Dreams itself completely locks you out of any kind of monetization opportunities? I can see that you have a KS page created for the project and I can guess that this might be your solution to at least short-term monetization. Finally, you mention that you've been in development of this project for about 3 years but Dreams was only just released last Feb. Are you implying here that you actually began development before Dreams was released, with the original intention of publishing your project as a stand-alone "game", but then completely restarted development within Dreams once it was released?ID: hlan7kwHey there, thanks for the questions!
1- We absolutely love the Dreams engine and think there's so many pros to it (although it does have it's cons). I believe Media Molecule will do their best to support the engine and expand the platform overtime and we love to be here with them on the journey! Maybe we can help bring more people to Dreams that may not have heard of it.If in the future monetisation options are possible within Dreams we'd like to stay away from that, but we do have a Ko-fi page which if people would like to support us after the Kickstarter campaign they can donate there!
2- If we're unable to reach our crowdfunding goal, we'll be supporting the project through donations and go back to working on the project in our spare time (which unfortunately results in slower development, less updates, etc.).
3- Dreams actually released a beta around December 2018 which allowed us to get started on the project! Also before that we were working on pre-production with concept art and such. -Matt
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I'm sorry but why?(crowd funding campaign)
ID: hlaaqriJust like other ambitious dream projects that have taken the crowdfunding path, we want to pave the way for dreams creators to be able to get an income for all the hard work they put into their projects.
We've been working on this project for 3 years without an income and we wanted to support our growing dev team as well as expand our project in ways we otherwise wouldn't be able to. We have lots of ideas and are very ambitious, so we thought crowdfunding might be a helpful way to achieve our goal!
-Sam
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Why do you think Kickstarter and Dreams are a good match?
ID: hlaghdjWe are new to crowdfunding and this is our first campaign. However, after seeing Dreams projects like Noguchi's Bell and Splatty's Adventure taking a shot at it and one being very successful, it showed us it was possible!
Dreams projects are new to Kickstarter but I think they definitely have a shot of being successful, regardless if the projects could be currently limited to console. -Matt
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Do you have any plans for a PS5 version for dreams?
ID: hlahsp9The game we'll be releasing will be accessible for both PS4 and PS5 since we are working with both consoles to make sure the game is optimized for everyone.
Maybe in the future we will choose to make separate versions within Dreams.
-Sam
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What's the advantage of this over just using the current interface now? I don't quite understand what a social hub is.
ID: hlajmwvOur idea of a social hub is a world where players can meet up, chat with friends, play a wide variety of games, watch shows together, design personal spaces, etc.
Could you expand on this question please? What do you mean by the current interface? -Matt
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Did you try other game engines before finalising on Dreams? If so, what made Dreams stand out? Love that you're not going down the greedy MTX path btw! Wish we had more devs like you guys.
ID: hlao2dfWe played around with other engines but felt like it wasn't for us. The reason we chose Dreams for the project is the fact that you can make everything within the same software, the workflow doesn't compare to any other engine out there.
Thank you very much for the kind words! Dreams Central is a big passion for us and we have a very clear vision on how we want to present it.
-Sam
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Not a question but can you pleeeeeeeease make something that transcends PS Home? I would drop thousands for another experience like that
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Interesting, I'll keep my eyes open
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How does source control work for this? If you're working with other people how do you all work on the same project?
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Will dreams ever be free to play?
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Nice ad with all the questions pre-planned. Be a little more subtle next time.
引用元:https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/qxll4c/ama_im_matt_the_creative_director_for_an_upcoming/
Dreams is an engine that allows you to make anything within the same creative environment. This allows for a workflow unlike any other engine as far as I'm aware and is super helpful for productivity.
Also, the user interface is really user friendly and helps make the creative process much more enjoyable.
It has never been this easy to make music tracks, model, design and animate all within the same software!
-Sam